When the State Meets the Street probes the complex moral lives of street-level bureaucrats: the frontline social and welfare workers, police officers, and educators who represent government’s human face to ordinary citizens. Too often dismissed as soulless operators, these workers wield a significant margin of discretion and make decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives. Combining insights from political theory with his own ethnographic fieldwork as a receptionist in an urban antipoverty agency, Bernardo Zacka shows us firsthand the predicament in which these public servants are entangled.

Public policy consists of rules and regulations, but its implementation depends on how street-level bureaucrats interpret them and exercise discretionary judgment. These workers are expected to act as sensible moral agents in a working environment that is notoriously challenging and that conspires against them. Confronted by the pressures of everyday work, they often and unknowingly settle for one of several reductive conceptions of their responsibilities, each by itself pathological in the face of a complex, messy reality. Zacka examines the factors that contribute to this erosion of moral sensibility and what it takes to remain a balanced moral agent in such difficult conditions.

Zacka’s revisionary portrait reveals bureaucratic life as more fluid and ethically fraught than most citizens realize. It invites us to approach the political theory of the democratic state from the bottom-up, thinking not just about what policies the state should adopt but also about how it ought to interact with citizens when implementing these policies.

Patronage systems in the public service are universally reviled as undemocratic and corrupt. Yet patronage was the prevailing method of staffing government for centuries, and in some countries it still is. In Jobs for the Boys, Merilee Grindle considers why patronage has been so ubiquitous in history and explores the political processes through which it is replaced by merit-based civil service systems. Such reforms are consistently resisted, she finds, because patronage systems, though capricious, offer political executives flexibility to achieve a wide variety of objectives.

Grindle looks at the histories of public sector reform in six developed countries and compares them with contemporary struggles for reform in four Latin American countries. A historical, case-based approach allows her to take into account contextual differences between countries as well as to identify cycles that govern reform across the board. As a rule, she finds, transition to merit-based systems involves years and sometimes decades of conflict and compromise with supporters of patronage, as new systems of public service are politically constructed. Becoming aware of the limitations of public sector reform, Grindle hopes, will temper expectations for institutional change now being undertaken.

In this book, John Roemer presents a unified and rigorous theory of political competition between parties. He models the theory under many specifications, including whether parties are policy oriented or oriented toward winning, whether they are certain or uncertain about voter preferences, and whether the policy space is uni- or multidimensional. He examines all eight possible combinations of these choice assumptions, and characterizes their equilibria.

He fleshes out a model in which each party is composed of three different factions concerned with winning, with policy, and with publicity. Parties compete with one another. When internal bargaining is combined with external competition, a natural equilibrium emerges, which Roemer calls party-unanimity Nash equilibrium.

Assuming only the distribution of voter preferences and the endowments of the population, he deduces the nature of the parties that will form. He then applies the theory to several empirical puzzles, including income distribution, patterns of electoral success, and why there is no labor party in the United States.

The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since World War II.

Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies.

The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between voters’ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump.

Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.

Whether the goal is building a local park or developing disaster response models, collaborative governance is changing the way public agencies at the local, regional, and national levels are working with each other and with key partners in the nonprofit and private sectors. While the academic literature has spawned numerous case studies and context- or policy-specific models for collaboration, the growth of these innovative collaborative governance systems has outpaced the scholarship needed to define it.

Collaborative Governance Regimes breaks new conceptual and practical ground by presenting an integrative framework for working across boundaries to solve shared problems, a typology for understanding variations among collaborative governance regimes, and an approach for assessing both process and productivity performance. This book draws on diverse literatures and uses rich case illustrations to inform scholars and practitioners about collaborative governance regimes and to provide guidance for designing, managing, and studying such endeavors in the future.

Collaborative Governance Regimes will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in public administration, public policy, and political science who want a framework for theory building, yet the book is also accessible enough for students and practitioners.

“The solution for the modern GOP . . . This book provides plenty of intellectual ammunition for the modern conservative movement.” —SENATOR RAND PAUL

How can America recover from economic stagnation, moral exhaustion, and looming bankruptcy? Donald J. Devine shows the way.

Devine, a longtime adviser to Ronald Reagan, lays out a powerful case for the philosophical synthesis of freedom and tradition that Reagan said was the essence of modern conservatism. The secret of America’s success, he shows, has been the Constitution’s capacity to harmonize the twin ideals of freedom and tradition. But today, progressivism has so corrupted modern political thinking—in both parties—that leaders keep calling for the same failed tactics: more money poured into more big-government programs.

In America’s Way Back, Devine not only reveals where things went wrong, and why, but also points the way to reclaiming America’s freedom, prosperity, and creativity. The solution lies in a new “fusion” of traditional and libertarian thought.

Devine debunks the common view that marrying the two is nothing more than political calculation. He shows that without a deep philosophical commitment to harmonizing freedom and tradition, neither of these ideals can long survive.

In making the case for twenty-first-century fusionism, America’s Way Back updates the insights of Frank Meyer, the theorist Reagan specifically credited with “fashioning a vigorous synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought.“ Devine shows that, just as the fusionism of Meyer and William F. Buckley Jr. led to the conservative revival in the 1960s, a new harmony between freedom and tradition will revive America today.

“Prepare for enlightenment. . . . The [story] that Mr. Devine narrates aptly, informatively, is engaging as a summons to look around, look back, ask the vital question: Are conservatives doing the very, very best they can?” —Washington Times

“Intellectual yet highly readable . . . Devine has plenty of such instructive analysis and anecdotes to bolster his points. . . . You will learn about concepts your university should have introduced to you, only now via Devine’s graceful writing, incisive analysis, instructive anecdotes, and a plan to restore America’s greatness.” —Human Events

“The timing is right for [Devine’s] new book America’s Way Back. It lays out the course for a conservative intellectual renewal, to renew the nation by renewing her best traditions. . . . Reagan had a heckuva lieutenant in Don Devine. It is good to see him now mentoring the next generation of conservative leaders.” —L. Brent Bozell III, syndicated columnist, president of the Media Research Center

“A tour-de-force critique . . . We need to listen to people like Devine who are calling us back to a simpler, less complicated system of governance that allows decisions to be made at the local and state levels. If we don’t listen, if we just doggedly insist that the solution is to re-order, reform and re-imagine our failed programs, then we’ll end up going the way of the Titanic.” —Floyd Brown, Capitol Hill Daily

“A brilliant analysis of the major factors that have contributed to our nation’s decline. A very timely effort on perhaps the most critical issue of our time.” —George W. Carey, professor of government, Georgetown University

“A marvelous book. Read America’s Way Back if you fear ignorance and celebrate righteous, moral, intellectual knowledge.” —Craig Shirley, author of Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America

Honest, objective, and informed political debates are all too rare in today’s polarized and partisan climate. Public policy is increasingly driven by ideology while political spin, distortions, and even demonizing opponents by disseminating outright lies are routine practice from Washington to the local city council. Super-heated and hyper-partisan rhetoric, increasingly homogeneous political and ideological communities, and the public’s spotty knowledge about our political system all undermine informed and considered responses to policy debates.

This book identifies common areas of confusion or misunderstanding about our political system—clarifying many distortions of accepted history, constitutional law, economics, and science—to help readers distinguish documented facts from the different conclusions and interpretations that may be drawn from those facts. Sheila Suess Kennedy aims to create a more informed electorate and to better ground debates in fact, from Capitol Hill to the family dinner table. Talking Politics? What You Need to Know before Opening Your Mouth provides a solid starting point from which Americans can build more persuasive arguments for their preferred policies, whatever they may be, and will interest students of political science, civics, and history, from high school to undergraduates, and the general public interested in politics and informed discussion.

As pundits and politicians remind us at every election cycle or turn of the television dial, the United States sees itself as the world’s greatest democracy. But what citizens might also hear, if they knew how to listen, is the grinding of two tectonic plates on which this democracy was established. In the venerable tradition of keen foreign observers of American politics, Anthony King exposes the political paradoxes in our system that we may well be too close to see—founding principles of our great democracy that are distinctly undemocratic.

In an extended essay eloquent in its plainspoken good sense, King begins, on the one hand, with the founding fathers who emphasized moderation, deliberation, checks and balances, and the separation of powers—a system in which “the people” were allowed to play only a limited role. On the other hand were radical democrats who insisted that the people, and only the people, should rule. The result was a political system tangled up in conflicts that persist to this day: unelected and unaccountable Supreme Court justices who exercise enormous personal power; severe restrictions on the kind of person the people can elect as president; popular referendums at the state and local level but none at the federal level, not even to ratify amendments to the Constitution.

In King’s provocative analysis, we see how these puzzles play out in the turmoil of our nation’s public life and political culture—and we glimpse, perhaps, a new way to address them.

The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America.

In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following.

William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated people’s rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power.

Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

This stunningly persuasive book examines the persistent, radical gap between the promise of American ideals and the performance of American politics. Samuel P. Huntington shows how Americans, throughout their history as a nation, have been united by the democratic creed of liberty, equality, and hostility to authority. At the same time he reveals how, inevitably, these ideals have been perennially frustrated through the institutions and hierarchies required to carry on the essential functions of governing a democratic society.

From this antagonism between the ideals of democracy and the realities of power have risen four great political upheavals in American history. Every third generation, Huntington argues, Americans have tried to reconstruct their institutions to make them more truly reflect deeply rooted national ideals. Moving from the clenched fists and mass demonstrations of the 1960s, to the moral outrage of the Progressive and Jacksonian Eras, back to the creative ideological fervor of the American Revolution, he incisively analyzes the dissenters’ objectives. All, he pungently writes, sought to remove the fundamental disharmony between the reality of government in America and the ideals on which the American nation was founded.

Huntington predicts that the tension between ideals and institutions is likely to increase in this country in the future. And he reminds us that the fate of liberty and democracy abroad is intrinsically linked to the strength of our power in world affairs. This brilliant and controversial analysis deserves to rank alongside the works of Tocqueville, Bryce, and Hofstadter and will become a classic commentary on the meaning of America.

What made the United States what it is began long before a shot was fired at a redcoat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. It began quietly in homes and schoolrooms across the colonies in the reading lessons women gave to children. Just as the Protestant revolt originated in a practice of individual reading of the Bible, so the theories of reading developed by John Locke were the means by which a revolutionary attitude toward authority was disseminated throughout the British colonies in North America that would come to form in the United States. Gillian Brown takes us back to the basics to understand why Americans value the right to individual self-determination above all other values. It all begins with children.

Locke crucially linked consent with childhood, and it is his formulation of the child's natural right to consent that eighteenth-century Americans learned as they learned to read through Lockean-style pedagogies and textbooks. Tracing the Lockean legacy through the New England Primer and popular readers, fables, and fairy tales, Brown demonstrates how Locke's emphasis on the liberty--and difficulty--of individual judgment became a received notion in the American colonies.

After the revolution, American consent discourse features a different prototype of individuality; instead of wronged children, images of seduced or misguided women predominate postrevolutionary culture. The plights of these women display the difficulties of consent that Locke from the start realized. Individuals continually confront standards and prejudices at odds with their own experiences and judgments. Thus, the Lockean legacy to the United States is the reminder of the continual work to be done to endow every individual with consent and to make consent matter.

What emerged in America was a new and different attitude toward authority in which authority does not belong to the elders but to the upcoming generations and groups. To effect this dramatic a change in the values of humankind took a grassroots revolution. That's what this book is about.

The recovery of the ideas and experiences of William Manning is a major event in the history of the American Revolutionary era. A farmer, foot soldier, and political philosopher, Manning was a powerful democratic voice of the common American in a turbulent age. The public crises of the infant republic—beginning with the Battle of Concord—shaped his thinking, and his writings reveal a sinewy mind grappling with some of the weightiest issues of the nation’s founding. His most notable contribution was the first known plan for a national political association of laboring men. That plan, and Manning’s broader conclusions, open up a new vista on the popular origins of American democracy and the invention of American politics.

Until now, only a few specialists have referred to any of Manning’s writings—though always with some wonderment at his sophistication—and his place as a pioneering and exemplary American democrat has been largely unacknowledged. In this new and complete presentation of his works, the often arid debates over “republicanism” and “liberalism” in early America come to life in vivid human detail. The early growth of democratic impulses among quite ordinary people—impulses that defy orthodox categories, yet come closer to describing the ferment that led to the repeated political conflicts of the late eighteenth century—is here visible and felt. The Key of Liberty allows us a fuller understanding of the popular responses to the major political battles of the early republic, from Shays’ Rebellion through the election of Thomas Jefferson. It offers, better than any book yet published, a grassroots view of the rise of democratic opposition in the new nation. It sheds considerable light on the popular culture—literary, religious, and profane—of the epoch, with more exactness than previous histories, presenting a new interpretation of early American democracy that is bound to be controversial and much discussed.

The editors have written a lengthy and detailed introduction placing Manning and his writings in broad context. They have also modernized the text for easy use and have included full annotation, making this volume an authoritative contribution to the American Revolution and its aftermath.

This volume provides the most economical and textually accurate version of Calhoun’s Disquisition available today. As a treatise, the Disquisition is one of the greatest and most enduring works of American politial thought, and a text of seminal importance to all students of American politics, history, philosophy, and law. In the Disquisition, Calhoun believed he had laid a “solid foundation for political science” through revitalizing popular rule. To complete his theoretical and practical mission, Calhoun attempts to explain the best example of the diffusion of authority and cultivation of liberty: the American Constitution. The fundamental law of the American republic provided, after all, the “interior structure” for regulating the shape and scope of government. As a guide for the states and the general government, the Constitution was also part of the “organism” that limited the centralization of authority and allowed for genuine popular rule; and it was Calhoun’s exposition of the connection between the moral demands of a properly constituted concept of popular rule and the need for practical ordering principles that is articulated in this book.

Calhoun presents a theory of politics that is both original and in accord with the mainstream of the American political tradition. More than any other thinker of his period, Calhoun sought to explain the enduring qualities of American political thought in light of the troubled world of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike other theorists who had preceded and would follow Calhoun, both American and European, he did not seek to invent a new mode of philosophical speculation or a “grand theory” for the human sciences. Instead, he attempted to offer a refinement of classical, medieval, and modern notions regarding the relationship between government and the social order. As an effort in philosophical retrenchment, the Disquisition strengthened many pre-existing conceptions regarding political liberty and popular rule within the American regime, while offering such insight with a view toward the future that awaited America. Calhoun’s attempt in the Disquisition to reconcile the good of popular rule with ethical requirements have singular relevance to the many nations in the twenty-first century now engaged, despite the ethnic animosities threatening their destruction, in building post-ideological, civilized political and social orders, especially the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Africa.

William Nelson reinterprets nineteenth-century American history as a struggle between majority rule and minority rights. From this fresh point of view, he traces the roots of American bureaucracy.

Nelson analyzes the majority–minority tension form the Jacksonian revolution of strong party rule and majoritarian decisionmaking through the abolitionist crisis, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rise of industrialism. He shows that ultimately political and legal pluralism emerged to protect minority and individual rights. The instrument of a professional bureaucracy with neutral political standards was fashioned. Personalities as seemingly disparate as Henry Adams, John W. Burgess, Charles W. Eliot, Christopher Columbus Langdell, and Theodore Roosevelt all contributed in an effort to stop the centralizing impact of democracy.

Nelson’s new way of thinking about the period puts into different perspective the actions of the three branches of federal government, its courts and administrative agencies, and even the states. All shifted toward bureaucratic or neutral standards, reliance on experts, and professionalization. Legal thought changed from an instrumental to a formal reasoning style, civil service tamped down partisan politics, and in Congress, seniority and the committee system check democratic tendencies.