Power, Conflict, and Democracy: American Politics Into the 21st Century

Convenient, entertaining, and provocative, talk radio today is unapologetically ideological. Focusing on Rush Limbaugh—the medium's most influential talk show—Rushed to Judgment systematically examines the politics of persuasion at play on our nation's radio airwaves and asks a series of important questions. Does listening to talk radio change the way people think about politics, or are listeners' attitudes a function of the self-selecting nature of the audience? Does talk radio enhance understanding of public issues or serve as a breeding ground for misunderstanding? Can talk radio serve as an agent of deliberative democracy, spurring Americans to open, public debate? Or will talk radio only aggravate the divisive partisanship many Americans decry in poll after poll? The time is ripe to evaluate the effects of a medium whose influence has yet to be fully reckoned with.

The closely contested presidential election of 2000, which many analysts felt was decided by voters for the Green Party, cast a spotlight on a structural contradiction of American politics. Critics charged that Green Party voters inadvertently contributed to the election of a conservative Republican president because they chose to "vote their conscience" rather than "choose between two evils." But why this choice of two? Is the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans an immutable and indispensable aspect of our democracy? Lisa Disch maintains that it is not. There is no constitutional warrant for two parties, and winner-take-all elections need not set third parties up to fail. She argues that the two-party system as we know it dates only to the twentieth century and that it thwarts democracy by wasting the votes and silencing the voices of dissenters.

The Tyranny of the Two-Party System reexamines a once popular nineteenth-century strategy called fusion, in which a dominant-party candidate ran on the ballots of both the established party and a third party. In the nineteenth century fusion made possible something that many citizens wish were possible today: to register a protest vote that counts and that will not throw the election to the establishment candidate they least prefer. The book concludes by analyzing the 2000 presidential election as an object lesson in the tyranny of the two-party system and with suggestions for voting experiments to stimulate participation and make American democracy responsive to a broader range of citizens.

Why has child care legislation developed along its present course? How did the political players influence lawmakers? What do the politics of child care legislation over the past thirty years indicate for the future? Based on more than one hundred interviews with legislators and executive branch officials, archival research, and secondary sources, this book looks at the politics behind child care legislation, rather than analyzing child care as a work and family issue.

Identifying key junctures at which major child care bills were introduced and debated (1971, 1990, and 1996), Sally Cohen examines the politics surrounding each of these events and identifies the political structures and negotiations that evolved in the intervening years. In addition, Cohen looks at the impact the election of President Clinton has had on child care policymaking, and how child care legislation became part of other issues, including welfare reform, crime prevention, school readiness, and tax policy revisions.

Has black inclusion in the political process changed political institutions and led to more black influence in the governmental process? How do African American legislators balance racial interests with broader issues of government? And how is their effectiveness subjectively perceived and objectively evaluated?

In one of the first book-length studies to analyze the behavior of African American state legislators in multiple legislative sessions across five states, Kerry Haynie has compiled a wealth of valuable data that reveals the dynamics and effectiveness of black participation in the legislative process. Owing to the increasing role of state government in administering what he defines as key "black issues"— education, healthcare, poverty/social welfare, civil rights, and children's issues—Haynie focuses on bills introduced in these categories in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and North Carolina.

The book reveals how responsive political institutions have been to the nation's largest minority group. It explores the question of how legislators deal with the "duality dilemma"—which requires them to be both responsible legislators and race representatives—and whether agendas should be "deracialized" in order to appeal to a broader constituency. Along with numerous statistical charts illustrating everything from representation on house standing committees to a ranking of the fifteen legislative sessions by quartiles of African American political incorporation, a useful and revealing portrait emerges—one that will fuel debate and inform future discussions of the role of African Americans in the political process.

Few would argue that presidential policies and performance would have been the same whether John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon became president in 1960, or if Jimmy Carter instead of Ronald Reagan had won the White House in 1980. Indeed, in recent elections, the character, prior policy experience, or personalities of candidates have played an increasing role in our assessments of their "fit" for the Oval Office. Further, these same characteristics are often used to explain an administration's success or failure in policy making. Obviously, who the president is—and what he is like—matters.

This book, a new approach to the study of the personal presidency, links the characteristics of six modern American presidents—their personalities and their prior policy-making experience—to their leadership styles, advisory arrangements, and decision making in the White House. Thomas Preston uses M. G. Hermann's Personality Assessment-at-a-Distance (PAD) profiling technique, as well as exhaustive archival research and interviews with former advisors, to develop a leadership style typology. He then compares his model's expectations against the actual policy record of six past presidents, using foreign policy episodes: Korea (1950) for Truman, Dien Bien Phu (1954) for Eisenhower, Cuba (1962) for Kennedy, Vietnam (1967-68) for Johnson, the Gulf War (1990-91) for Bush, and North Korea/Haiti/Bosnia (1994-95) for Clinton.

"Every once in a while somebody has to get the bureaucracy by the neck and shake it loose and say, 'Stop doing what you're doing.'" —Ronald Reagan

How did senior career civil servants react to Ronald Reagan's attempt to redirect policy and increase presidential control over the bureaucracy? What issues molded their reactions? What motivates civil servants in general? How should they be managed and how do they affect federal policies? To answer these questions, Marissa Martino Golden offers us a glimpse into the world of our federal agencies.

What Motivates Bureaucrats? tells the story of a group of upper-level career civil servants in the Reagan administration at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the Food and Nutrition Service, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The book reveals that most career civil servants were usually responsive to executive direction—even with a president attempting to turn agency policy 180 degrees from its past orientation.

By delving deeply into the particular details of Reagan's intervention into the affairs of upper-level career civil servants, Golden also fulfills her broader mission of improving our understanding of bureaucratic behavior in general, explaining why the bureaucracy is controllable and highlighting the limits of that control.

Richard Neustadt's seminal work Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership has endured for nearly four decades as the core of academic study of the American presidency. Now, building on and challenging many of the arguments in Neustadt's work, Presidential Power: Forging the Presidency for the Twenty-first Century offers reflections and implications from what we have learned about presidential power as the new century dawns.

These essays—including a new contribution by Neustadt himself—forge a solid reexamination of Neustadt's Presidential Power that address questions raised but not resolved by his work. A notable aspect of this volume's analysis is the transformed institution of the presidency in the wake of the impeachment hearings of the country's last twentieth-century president, Bill Clinton. From the portrayal of presidents as persuaders to the politics of presidential transitions, each of the constituent essays in this volume provides an engaging look at the state of the American presidency.