Governing America

Governing America PDF Author: Julian E. Zelizer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691150737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
This book examines the study of American political history.

Governing America

Governing America PDF Author: Julian E. Zelizer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691150737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
This book examines the study of American political history.

The Unelected

The Unelected PDF Author: James R. Copland
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1641771216
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
America is highly polarized around elections, but unelected actors make many of the decisions that affect our lives. In this lucid history, James R. Copland explains how unaccountable agents have taken over much of the U.S. government apparatus. Congress has largely abdicated its authority. “Independent” administrative agencies churn out thousands of new regulations every year. Courts have enabled these rulemakers to expand their powers beyond those authorized by law—and have constrained executive efforts to rein in the bureaucratic behemoth. No ordinary citizen can know what is legal and what is not. There are some 300,000 federal crimes, 98 percent of which were created by administrative action. The proliferation of rules gives enormous discretion to unelected enforcers, and the severity of sanctions can be ruinous to citizens who unwittingly violate a regulation. Outside the bureaucracy, private attorneys regulate our conduct through lawsuits. Most of the legal theories underlying these suits were never voted upon by our elected representatives. A combination of historical accident, decisions by judges and law professors, and self-interested advocacy by litigators has built an onerous and expensive legal regime. Finally, state and local officials may be accountable to their own voters, but some reach further afield, pursuing agendas to dictate the terms of national commerce. These new antifederalists are subjecting the citizens of Wyoming and Mississippi to the whims of the electorates of New York and San Francisco—contrary to the constitutional design. In these ways, the unelected have assumed substantial control of the American republic, upended the rule of law, given the United States the world’s costliest legal system, and inverted the Constitution’s federalism. Copland caps off his account with ideas for charting a corrective course back to democratic accountability.

Governing with Words

Governing with Words PDF Author: Daniel Q. Gillion
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107127548
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book demonstrates that politicians' discussions of race increase policy success and public awareness, improving racial inequality.

Can America Govern Itself?

Can America Govern Itself? PDF Author: Frances E. Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108754260
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
Can America Govern Itself? brings together a diverse group of distinguished scholars to analyze how rising party polarization and economic inequality have affected the performance of American governing institutions. It is organized around two themes: the changing nature of representation in the United States; and how changes in the political environment have affected the internal processes of institutions, overall government performance, and policy outcomes. The chapters in this volume analyze concerns about power, influence and representation in American politics, the quality of deliberation and political communications, the management and implementation of public policy, and the performance of an eighteenth century constitution in today's polarized political environment. These renowned scholars provide a deeper and more systematic grasp of what is new, and what is perennial in challenges to democracy at a fraught moment.

Governing Security

Governing Security PDF Author: Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804784345
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Governing Security investigates the surprising history of two major federal agencies that touch the lives of Americans every day: the Roosevelt-era Federal Security Agency––which eventually became today's Department of Health and Human Services––and the more recently created Department of Homeland Security. By describing the legal, political, and institutional history of both organizations, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar offers a compelling account of crucial developments affecting the basic architecture of our nation. He shows how Americans end up choosing security goals not through an elaborate technical process, but in lively and overlapping settings involving conflict over statutory programs, agency autonomy, presidential power, and priorities for domestic and international risk regulation. Ultimately, as Cuéllar shows, ongoing fights about the scope of national security reshape the very structure of government and the intricate process through which statutes and regulations are implemented, particularly during––or in anticipation of––a national crisis.

Governing States and Localities

Governing States and Localities PDF Author: Kevin B. Smith
Publisher: CQ Press
ISBN: 1544325444
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
The trusted and proven Governing States and Localities guides you through the contentious environment of state and local politics and focuses on the role that economic and budget pressures play on issues facing state and local governments. With their engaging journalistic writing and crisp storytelling, Kevin B. Smith and Alan Greenblatt employ a comparative approach to explain how and why states and localities are both similar and different. The Seventh Edition is thoroughly updated to account for such major developments as state vs. federal conflicts over immigration reform, school shootings, and gun control; the impact of the Donald Trump presidency on intergovernmental relations and issues of central interest to states and localities; and the lingering effects of the Great Recession.

Governing America

Governing America PDF Author: Robert Singh
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199250493
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
Aimed at undergraduate students of US government and politics, this volume offers an accessible and comprehensive examination of American politics both before and after September 11.

Governing Bodies

Governing Bodies PDF Author: Rachel Louise Moran
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Americans are generally apprehensive about what they perceive as big government—especially when it comes to measures that target their bodies. Soda taxes, trans fat bans, and calorie counts on menus have all proven deeply controversial. Such interventions, Rachel Louise Moran argues, are merely the latest in a long, albeit often quiet, history of policy motivated by economic, military, and familial concerns. In Governing Bodies, Moran traces the tension between the intimate terrain of the individual citizen's body and the public ways in which the federal government has sought to shape the American physique over the course of the twentieth century. Distinguishing her subject from more explicit and aggressive government intrusion into the areas of sexuality and reproduction, Moran offers the concept of the "advisory state"—the use of government research, publicity, and advocacy aimed at achieving citizen support and voluntary participation to realize social goals. Instituted through outside agencies and glossy pamphlets as well as legislation, the advisory state is government out of sight yet intimately present in the lives of citizens. The activities of such groups as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Children's Bureau, the President's Council on Physical Fitness, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) implement federal body projects in subtle ways that serve to mask governmental interference in personal decisions about diet and exercise. From advice-giving to height-weight standards to mandatory nutrition education, these tactics not only empower and conceal the advisory state but also maintain the illusion of public and private boundaries, even as they become blurred in practice. Weaving together histories of the body, public policy, and social welfare, Moran analyzes a series of discrete episodes to chronicle the federal government's efforts to shape the physique of its citizenry. Governing Bodies sheds light on our present anxieties over the proper boundaries of state power.

Politics and Communication in America

Politics and Communication in America PDF Author: Robert E. Denton, Jr.
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478608528
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Communication provides the basis of social cohesion, issue discussion, and legislative enactmentcore features of political activity and governing in the United States. Denton and Kuypers, experts in the field of political communication, synthesize materials and sources from political science, communication, history, journalism, and sociology to demonstrate how communication intersects with these fields to formulate political beliefs, attitudes, and values. Conventional categories of political activitycampaigns, activity in Congress, the courts, the mass media, and the presidencystructure the discussions. Theoretical and applied concepts drawn from firsthand sources and classic historical works, plus extensive use of contemporary examples, enrich understanding. Written in an engaging, accessible style that is geared to an undergraduate audience, the text ignites readers awareness that the essence of politics is talk or human interaction. Such interaction is formal and informal, verbal and nonverbal, public and privatebut always persuasive in nature, causing audiences to interpret, to evaluate, and to act.

Governing Through Crime

Governing Through Crime PDF Author: Jonathan Simon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195181085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime.This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.