New Books in Public Policy

Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trapped in America’s Safety Net sheds light on the reality of means-tested programs in the United States. Following an accident that left her sister-in-law paralyzed, Campbell sees the vast array of federal and California state assistance programs up close. The book highlights the peculiar aspects of these programs, including the burden of asset tests that compel disabled Americans – and others receiving benefits – to liquidate assets and prevents them from saving for the future. The book is at once deeply personal, but also a great overview of how social policy actually works and often fails. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in many instances, preserved and protected trade.  In his superbly written and thoughtful book Making the Modern American Fiscal State (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Ajay K. Mehrotra argues that “the rise of direct and graduated taxation in the early twentieth century signaled the start of a more complex and sophisticated system of fiscal governance.” Indeed, the introduction of a federal income did not merely create a completely new and soon dominate stream of revenue for the federal government, but created new institutions for the collection, accounting and distribution of revenue, and, most importantly, changed the way Americans viewed and related to each other. Drawing fascinating portraits of economists and legal scholars and pulling together intellectual threads from economics, institutional and political histories, Mehrotra has produced a work at the leading edge of new U.S. intellectual history. Ajay K. Mehrotra is Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow Adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He is the co-editor (with Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad) of The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). His writings have also appeared in student-edited law reviews and interdisciplinary journals including Law & Social Inquiry, Law & History Review, and Law & Society Review. His scholarship and teaching have been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies, has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (New Society Publishers, 2014), Menzies outlines her discovery of a vanished way of life and argues that restoring it would help North Americans recover a deeper sense of self as well as more satisfying social relations with the people around them. It could also help them gain more control over political decisions that affect them in their communities, states and provinces and at the national level. “Commoning–cultivating community and livelihood together on the common land of the Earth,” Menzies writes, “was a way of life for my ancestors and for many other newcomers to North America too. It was a way of understanding and pursuing economics as embedded in life and the labor, human and non-human, that is necessary to sustain it.” She maintains that reclaiming the commons could also help us to heal an overheating planet and reconcile with the native peoples displaced by European settlers. Heather Menzies is an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of 10 books and has been awarded the Order of Canada for her contributions to public discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven Rathgeb Smith, and Yutaka Tsujinaka are the authors of Nonprofits and Advocacy: Engaging Community and Government in an Era of Retrenchment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Pekkanen is professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. Smith is executive director of the APSA and affiliate professor in the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, and Tsujinaka is the president-elect of the Japanese Political Science Association and a professor of political science in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba. This edited volume asks a simple question: Does nonprofit mean nonpolitical? The editors assemble a group of all-stars on the subject to answer that question, including: Jeffery Berry, Elizabeth Boris, and Kristin Goss. In doing so, the authors confront what they call the “double definitional dilemma” that has hampered research on the political dimensions of nonprofits in the past. The answers in this volume reflect the newest research and thinking on nonprofits and should be read by political scientists, generally, and those interested in organizations, civic participation, and representation, more specifically. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Philip Kretsedemas is the author of Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside (Routledge, 2014). Kretsedemas is associate professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts-Boston. This is the second time he has been featured on New Books in Political Science podcast. In Migrants and Race in the US, Kretsedemas explains how migrants can be viewed as racial others, not just because they are viewed as nonwhite, but because they are racially “alien.” This way of seeing makes it possible to distinguish migrants from a set of racial categories that are presumed to be indigenous to the nation. In the US, these indigenous racial categories are usually defined in terms of white and black. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

“All classes are sorta boring” (p. 19). This statement is one that college students might believe, along with many of their professors, but not Dr. Mark Carnes, author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard University Press, 2014). In Carnes’ book, he describes a new type of learning and classroom pedagogy called “Reacting”, where students take control of the class by being immersed into various roles in a certain event in history and given a competitive goal to complete by the end of the exercise, sometimes over a month long. For instance, students could be assigned as Jacobins in the French Revolution or Gandhi during the partitioning of British India. Each role is different and each student is tasked with various objectives to complete. The method, which can be used in disciplines beyond history, is akin to Model UN or mock trials, but on overdrive. Carnes, professor of history at Barnard College, asserts that through these immersion activities students will gain a better sense of morality, foster greater leadership and community-building skills, and learn more on a particular subject overall than a traditional class setting, as students are tasked with knowing their characters and historical background information much more intently than their typical class workload. The reacting method taps into the “subversive play” that has been present on college campuses for centuries–from fraternities, mixers, and football, to beer pong, Facebook, and World of Warcraft. The role immersion method gets students excited about going to class and even raises the stakes for how much students care, which can result in crying sessions after a tough loss in the imagined world, as Carnes witnessed on several occasions. Despite countering teachings from Plato, Rousseau, Dewey, and other educational thinkers, Minds on Fire provides a compelling case on how to rethink the modern classroom experience in higher education. Dr. Carnes joins New Books in Education for an interesting discussion on his book and urges anyone interested in implementing this new pedagogical tool to visit the Reacting to the Past website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The new book, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows how political elites in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada successfully introduced radically new economic policies in the 1980s. While opinion polls have consistently showed that neoliberal policies are not popular, governments in all four countries have continued implementing an agenda that includes government spending cuts, the privatization of state-owned enterprises and free trade. The book’s author, Jonathan Swarts, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University North Central in northwestern Indiana, says he finds it fascinating how governments of all political stripes in the four Anglo-American democracies have adopted neoliberalism, which he calls a new “political-economic imaginary.” In this interview with the New Books Network, Professor Swarts discusses how political leaders in the four Anglo-American democracies brought about the neoliberal economic transformation using a combination of persuasion and coercion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Shaazka Beyerle is the author of the new book, Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice (Lynne Rienner 2014). Beyerle is senior adviser at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and a visiting scholar at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University. Beyerle brings a scholar’s approach and a practitioner’s eye for detail to the book. She argues that corruption undermines development, but is more than just the conventional government corruption and state-sponsored graft. She includes in her book the corruption of other non-state actors, businesses and private institutions, to broaden how to of this issue. Her focus is on the role of people power to restrain many forms of corruption. The book shows the specific non-violent actions that civil society has used in a variety of national settings to curtail corruption. In the podcast, she describes what has happened in Brazil and Italy, but the book contains other interesting cases from India, Korea, and Uganda. The book should be read by scholars, but also by activists and civil society leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Teachers have recently become a target in the educational reform debate. Most would agree that great teachers are crucial for education. However, there is no singular formula for a great teacher. So then, what makes a great teacher? Do those characteristics transcend culture? These questions and more are explored in a new book titled West Meets East:  Best Practices from Expert Teachers in the United States and China (ASCD, 2014). The book is a collaboration from several American and Chinese academics: Leslie Grant, James Stronge, Xianxuan Xu, Patricia Popp, Yaling Sun, and Catherine Little. Dr. Grant, Assistant Professor of Education at The College of William and Mary, joins New Books in Education to discuss West Meets East. In the interview, Dr. Grant provides an overview of her coauthored book, including how the project began with collaboration between The College of William and Mary and Yunnan Normal University, in Yunnan Province, China. Grant and her coauthors interviewed teachers across the US and China whom had all been honored with teaching awards by their respective countries. The authors explored four characteristics of these teachers: personal qualities, planning and assessment, instructional practices, and classroom management. While their comparative educational study showed distinct differences amongst the two groups, the researchers also found that some characteristics that cross over to both cultural groups of great teachers, like a shared sense of purpose and responsibility. This cross-cultural comparative book is ideal for teachers, policymakers, and anyone interested in education or comparative studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

“We are not half a dozen provinces. We are one great Dominion,” Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald proudly declared. More than a century later, Canada has 10 provinces and three northern territories making it one of the biggest and richest countries on Earth. In the spirit of optimism that prevailed in the year after the country celebrated its 100th anniversary, then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called for the founding of a just society in which every Canadian would enjoy fundamental rights.. But according to a recently published book, the country is retreating from Macdonald’s vision of one great country and from Trudeau’s call for a just society. In Equal As Citizens: The Tumultuous and Troubled History of a Great Canadian Idea (Formac, 2014), authorRichard Starr argues that Canada is losing its commitment to equal opportunity and sharing the country’s wealth. He traces the long history of Canada’s slow evolution toward a more equal society and its gradual retreat from that ideal. He shows that Canadians in richer provinces including Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia, now enjoy higher levels of government services, such as better health care and education, than those who live in poorer provinces such as Manitoba, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. More than 30 years ago, Canada’s politicians enshrined their commitment to equal opportunity and public services in the Canadian constitution, but Starr writes that those commitments have been forgotten. As a result, citizens in poorer provinces are paying higher taxes for lower levels of public services. In this interview with the New Books Network, Richard Starr says he hopes his book will spark more discussion and debate about inequality in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy