"An astute analysis of today's political chaos showing that the current period of disruptive change is part of a recurring pattern in American politics"--

Paul M. Sniderman is the Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr., Professor of Public Policy at Stanford University and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Edward H. Stiglitz holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University and is completing a JD at Stanford Law School. The Reputational Premium presents a new theory of party identification, the central concept in the study of voting. Challenging the traditional idea that voters identify...

"Winner of the 2011 Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award, Political Organizations and Parties Section of the American Political Science Association" David R. Mayhew is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His books include Congress and Electoral Realignments. How partisan balance between the U.S. presidency and Congress is essential to successful government With three independent branches, a legislature divided into two...

Pertinent to America, Britain, and other Western democracies, this book explains that what people believe happens in national assemblies and parliaments is radically different from the reality. Instead of being places where debate is intense, passionate, and aimed at the national interest, the fact is most members of these institutions act on behalf of powerful, unelected interests. They know, implicitly, who really runs the country-and their only...

"When a party achieves control of Congress, as the Republicans did from 2014 to 2018, to what extent is it able to bend legislative outcomes toward its policy preferences? Are parties in Congress capable of following through on their vision for public policy? Can they leverage their enhanced cohesion, as we have seen in the last decade or so and procedural power as the majority party in the House and the Senate, to enact their partisan programs? The...

An NYRB Classics Original A brilliant woman who was a study in fiercely maintained contradictions, a star student who went to work on a factory line, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who insisted on refusing baptism, Simone Weil is one of the most intransigent and taxing of spiritual masters, always willing to push her thinking'and us'one step beyond the apparently reasonable in pursuit of the one truth, the one good. She asks hard questions and avoids...

"A history of the Democratic Party from Andrew Jackson to Joe Biden"-- "A leading historian tells the story of the United States' most enduring political party and its long, imperfect and newly invigorated quest for 'moral capitalism,' from Andrew Jackson to Joseph Biden. The Democratic Party is the world's oldest mass political organization. Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, it has played a central role in defining American society,...

"Even in this precarious moment for American democracy, the institutions of American federalism-that is, state governments-remain almost universally lauded. For many, the present era of national partisan polarization makes local politics even more appealing. The truth about federalism in this polarized age, however, is a bit more concerning, as Grumbach details. As the state level has become an increasingly important site of public policies that affect...

The election of 2016 prompted journalists and political scientists to write obituaries for the Republican Party-or prophecies of a new dominance. But it was all rather familiar. Whenever one of our two great parties has a setback, we've heard: 'This is the end of the Democratic Party,' or, 'The Republican Party is going out of existence.' Yet both survive, and thrive. We have the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world-the Democratic...

A timely analysis of the power and limits of political parties-and the lessons of the Civil War and the New Deal in the Age of Trump. American voters have long been familiar with the phenomenon of the presidential frontrunner. In 2008, it was Hillary Clinton. In 1844, it was Martin Van Buren. And in neither election did the prominent Democrat win the party's nomination. Insurgent candidates went on to win the nomination and the presidency, plunging...