New Books in Political Science

This episode explores what China’s subnational climate experiments tell us about the possibilities and limits of climate leadership in an era of intensified geopolitics. We discuss how China’s domestic governance dynamics matter for international climate cooperation and competition, especially as Chinese actors become central in the global low-carbon transition. Thus, we turn our attention away from headline-grabbing climate summits and national pledges to examine the less visible, but often decisive, actors shaping China’s low-carbon transition. Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities (Oxford University Press, 2025), a new book by Weila Gong, opens the black box of subnational climate governance in China and asks: who actually makes low-carbon policy work on the ground? Our guest, Weila Gong, is a visiting scholar at UC Davis’s Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior and a nonresident scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center. She has held fellowships at Georgetown, Harvard, and UC Berkeley School of Law, and brings more than a decade of experience studying the politics and policies of low-carbon energy transitions in China. Her work is timely. Despite being the world’s largest carbon emitter, China has pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, commitments that place it at the center of global climate cooperation and competition. We’re recording this episode in November 2025 as COP30 unfolds in Brazil, and at a moment when China is stepping into a more assertive role as a climate-technology power. Chinese officials and firms increasingly frame the country’s dominance in renewables, electric vehicles, and clean-energy supply chains as central to the global transition. Yet, as Gong’s book shows, climate leadership is not only forged through clean technologies or in international negotiating rooms and national policy announcements. It is also built, often unevenly, across hundreds of cities and counties within China. At the heart of this variation, Gong identifies a pivotal group of actors: mid-level local bureaucrats. These officials function as “bridge leaders,” translating national directives into locally workable policies, mediating between political leadership changes, and sustaining experimentation over time. In doing so, they challenge top-down views of China’s climate governance and reveal how bottom-up dynamics shape both domestic outcomes and China’s role as a global climate leader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a "modern-day Copernicus." The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom--positions this liberation at the center of a "movement of global Blackness," with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), at its head.That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is "typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa's enormous role in the birth of the modern world." Determined to re-create Nkrumah's life as "an epic twentieth-century story," The Second Emancipation begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana's Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French's consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah's early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu--including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him "one of the greatest political leaders of our century"--and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana's first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah's radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history. Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City. Ayisha Osori is a lawyer and Director at Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

American conservatism as we know it today is a West Texas export, argues College of Wooster professor Jeff Roche in The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right (U Texas Press, 2025). Tracing the roots of the state's conservative movement back to the giant cattle ranches and tycoons of the nineteenth century, Roche argues that you cannot separate the local and historical conditions in the West (and in West Texas specifically) from the "cowboy conservatism" of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Full of fascinating characters and the kind of tall tales you only find in the Lone Star State, The Conservative Frontier makes a compelling case for Texas politics eventually becoming national politics by the mid to late 20th century. No matter where you are in the United States today, the political weight of Texas creates a gravity that has proven impossible for American politics to emerge from. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Celina Su, the Inaugural Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies at CUNY and an expert on democratic governance, dives into her book, Budget Justice. She artfully argues that government budgets are moral documents that must involve grassroots input to truly serve the public. Su highlights the transformative potential of participatory budgeting via global examples from Porto Alegre and challenges its limited application in New York City. She also discusses innovative community projects and how poetry can serve as a tool for political exploration.

Dr. Mirya Holman, a professor of public policy and author, dives into the intricate dynamics of appointed boards in local governance. She reveals how cities strategically create strong boards to consolidate power, while weak boards offer a false illusion of inclusivity. Notably, she discusses the disproportionate representation of marginalized groups on weak boards compared to the influence of wealthy donors on strong ones. Holman also proposes reforms to empower weak boards, aiming to reshape local democracy and address systemic inequalities.

Liberalism may feel as though it has been around forever - as the "dominant ideology of the modern west" - but not even its advocates and detractors can agree what it is. Political sophisticates ask whether it is classical-, social-, ordo- or neo-liberal while American main street associates it with socialism. Yet a new generation of "post-liberal" thinkers know liberalism well enough to want to give it upi or, in most cases, go back to a time - real or imagined - before it took hold.In the US, these political philosophers are mostly Catholic conservatives. In the UK, with one prominent exception, they are largely left-wing Anglicans. In both countries, they tend to be religious and yearn for pre-globalisation communitarian, familial and patriotic certainties.  "Where liberals believe political authority is derived from individuals consenting to be ruled, for post-liberals it comes from serving the common good," writes Matt Sleat in Post-Liberalism (Polity, 2025). His book explores the ideas of the likes of Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari and post-liberalism's two standout thinkers: Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen.Matt Sleat is Reader in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield.*The author's book recommendations were Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty First Century by Edward Hall (OUP Oxford, 2025) and Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022). Click here to see the full reading list.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who writes and podcasts at 242.news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (U Chicago Press, 2025) is a complex and important analysis of the American constitutional system, of the U.S. Constitution itself, and the way that pressures on that system have pushed and pulled on the institutions of government, federalism, and ultimately democracy. Stephen Skowronek, the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University, continues his work and exploration of the viability of the constitutional system in the United States in this new book, following on the 2022 book: Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic (with John Dearborn and Desmond King, Oxford University Press, 2022). Skowronek traces the shifts and adaptations of the constitutional system as it contended with waves of democratization, with the anti-bellum expansion of voting rights for all white men, to the post-Civil War period and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, through the advocacy at the turn of the 19th century for labor and gender reforms, and then the advent of the Administrative state in the middle of the 20th century, and finally through the Civil Rights/Women’s Rights/Sexual Revolution/Disability Rights period of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the argument is that the system itself adapted, becoming more democratic and inclusive with regard to particular groups while at the same time loosening up the constitutional system as a whole. Even with these democratic advances over the course of 250 years, each iterative cycle also tended to exclude other groups of citizens. This tension—with the extension of rights to groups who had been excluded, only to have other groups excluded to keep this ballast of the system—goes to the heart of the promise of democracy within this constitutional system. And we find ourselves with the Constitution under significant stress, with the growth and implementation of substantial presidentialism and an undue dependence on judicial supremacy, leaving the structures of the system potentially unmoored from the very document and ideas that created the system itself. This also gets at the apparent loss of consensus around the idea of the United States, the lack of a common vision of a great commercial republic, which was at the heart of the American Founding. Skowronek also notes that the U.S. Constitution is particularly inept at pursuing social justice, especially within the context of the common vision of a great commercial republic. The Adaptability Paradox is a vitally important book examining the current constitutional dismay in which we find ourselves and provides the historical and political paths that brought us here. We learn a great deal about the tensions between democracy and the American constitutional system—which have been at the heart of the U.S. system since the early days of the republic, but have become much more attenuated of late, with a general lack of consensus around the purpose of constitutional system itself. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In this engaging discussion, Peace A. Medie, an associate professor in politics and author, shares her groundbreaking research on gender-based violence in Africa. She contrasts Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, revealing how international and domestic pressures shape responses to violence against women. Medie emphasizes the critical roles of women's movements and specialized policing in implementing anti-violence norms. With insights from over 300 interviews, she advocates for holistic approaches that prioritize survivors' needs and community involvement.

Susan C. Stokes, a leading political scientist at the University of Chicago, delves into the surprising reasons why elected leaders undermine their democratic foundations. She identifies global patterns of backsliding, discussing tactics used by leaders across various countries. Stokes emphasizes the importance of public resistance and voting as crucial strategies to counteract erosion. She also offers practical advice for U.S. democracy defenders, highlighting the need for reforms and rebuilding trust in institutions. This engaging conversation is a must-listen for understanding today's democratic challenges.

Mark Griffiths, a Reader in political geography, explores the complexities of Checkpoint 300 in his latest book. He highlights how this site symbolizes Israeli colonialism and impacts Palestinian daily life through spatial control. Griffiths discusses the intersection of gender and mobility, revealing how permit systems reshape family dynamics. He also touches on global complicity, emphasizing the role of security technologies and international solidarity. Ultimately, he showcases the resilience and resistance of Palestinians amidst oppressive conditions.