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  • Postcript: Calibrating the Outrage-Democratic Erosion, Legality, and Politics

    Postcript: Calibrating the Outrage-Democratic Erosion, Legality, and Politics
    2025/05/20
    We’ve been focusing on the dynamics of democratic backsliding in the United States and beyond. In this episode of Postscript: Conversations on Politics and Political Science, Susan talks the co-founder and co-director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium, Dr. Robert Blair about how the Consortium offers FREE resources to teachers, students, journalists, policy makers, and any interested person – including shared syllabus, readings, assignments, YouTube virtual roundtables, and policy briefs. Rob defines democratic erosion and offers critical insights on the importance of interdisciplinarity, calibrating outrage, and distinguishing between policy disputes and the erosion of democracy. He offers a clear-headed analysis of what is legal v. what breaks down democracy that is not to be missed. We conclude with thoughts on what everyone can do protect democracy. Dr. Robert Blair is Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University and co-founder and co-director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium. He studies the consolidation of state authority after civil war, with an emphasis on rule of law and security institutions, as well as the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding. His book, Peacekeeping, Policing, and the Rule of Law after Civil War, was published in 2020 with Cambridge University Press and his articles appear in political science outlets such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and International Organization but also science journals such as Science, Nature Human Behaviour, or Current Opinion in Psychology. Mentioned: Inside Higher Ed piece on grants terminated by the Trump administration, including one that funded the Democratic Erosion Consortium “An Events-Based Approach to Understanding Democratic Erosion,” P/S Political Science & Politics by Rob, Hannah Baron, Jessica Gottlieb, and Laura Paler summarizes their data collection efforts on democratic backsliding A special issue of P/S Political Science & Politics on the study of democratic backsliding An academic article on combatting misinformation from Current Opinion in Psychology by Rob, Jessica Gottlieb, Brendan Nyhan, Laura Paler, Pablo Argote, and Charlene J. Stainfield Democratic Erosion Project website and data set Chris Geidner, Law Dork: Supreme Court, Law, Politics, and More Substack Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity Project coding authority characteristics of states in the world system University of Notre Dame’s V-Dem Project measuring democracy Rob mentioned Brazil as a fruitful comparison for the US. He is particularly focused on how the courts can defend democratic institutions and processes – and how hard it can be to know where to draw the line between courts protecting vs. assailing democracy, and to know when the line has been crossed. Two gift articles from The New York Times here and here. Contact info for Rob: robert_blair@brown.edu Follow Rob and Democratic Erosion Consortium on social media: @robert_a_blair on X, @DemErosionDEC on X, @robertblair.bsky.social on BlueSky, @demerosiondec.bsky.social on BlueSky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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    44 分
  • Tamara Lea Spira, "Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times" (U California Press, 2025)

    Tamara Lea Spira, "Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times" (U California Press, 2025)
    2025/05/19
    Envisioning queer futures where we lovingly wager everything for the world's children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly precarious times. Tamara Lea Spira's Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times (U California Press, 2025) traces the shifting dominant meanings of queer family from the late twentieth century to today. With this book, Spira highlights the growing embrace of normative family structures by LGBTQ+ movements--calling into question how many queers, once deemed unfit to parent, have become contradictory agents within the US empire's racial and colonial agendas. Simultaneously, Queering Families celebrates the rich history of queer reproductive justice, from the radical movements of the 1970s through the present, led by Black, decolonial, and queer of color feminist activists. Ultimately, Spira argues that queering reproductive justice impels us to build communities of care to cherish and uphold the lives of those who, defying normativity's violent stranglehold, are deemed to be unworthy of life. She issues the call to lovingly wager a future for the world's children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly perilous times. Shui-yin Sharon Yam is Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship and more recently, Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin and Care (co-authored withe Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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    1 時間 6 分
  • Dionne Koller, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" (U California Press, 2025)

    Dionne Koller, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" (U California Press, 2025)
    2025/05/18
    Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most children who enter youth sport are driven to quit by the time they enter adolescence, and many more are sidelined by its high financial burdens. Until now, there has been little legal scholarly attention paid to youth sport or its reform. In More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport (University of California Press, 2025) Dr. Dionne Koller sets the stage for a different approach by illuminating the law and policy assumptions supporting a model that puts children's bodies to work in an activity that generates significant surplus value. In doing so, she identifies the wide array of beneficiaries who have a stake in a system that is much more than just play—and the political choices that protect these parties' interests at children's expense. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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    33 分
  • Jon Shelton, "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy" (Cornell UP, 2023)

    Jon Shelton, "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy" (Cornell UP, 2023)
    2025/05/17
    The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy. Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system. Jon Shelton is professor and chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. In addition to The Education Myth he is the author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, which was the winner of the International Standing Conference of the History of Education’s First Book Award in 2018. Shelton has also published work in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other publications. He served as the Vice-Chair of the city of Green Bay’s first ever Equal Rights Commission and sits on the Board of Directors for the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He also serves as President for Higher Education of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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    1 時間 12 分
  • False Dawn: A Conversation with George Selgin on Recovering from the Great Depression

    False Dawn: A Conversation with George Selgin on Recovering from the Great Depression
    2025/05/16
    Join us on Madison's Notes as we sit down with George Selgin, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia. In this insightful conversation, Selgin unpacks the myths and realities of FDR’s New Deal through the lens of his book, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 (University of Chicago Press, 2025). While the New Deal is often celebrated as a bold and successful response to the Great Depression, Selgin argues that many of its policies actually prolonged economic suffering—with unemployment remaining staggeringly high years later. Drawing on extensive historical and economic analysis, he separates the New Deal’s successes from its failures, examines the distinct roles of fiscal and monetary policy, and reveals the overlooked factor that truly ended the Great Depression (hint: it wasn’t just WWII). This episode challenges conventional narratives and offers crucial lessons for navigating future economic crises. Tune in for a nuanced discussion on why we must assess policy decisions carefully—learning from the past to build a more resilient future. Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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    1 時間
  • Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)

    Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)
    2025/05/15
    How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil liberties, democratic principles, and the foundation of the public interest over the past century. Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024) is a policy history that chronicles how the past century of regulating media infrastructure in the United States has eroded global civil liberties as well as democratic principles and the foundation of the public interest. Jennifer Holt explores the long arc of regulating broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and the data centers that serve as the cloud's storage facilities—an evolution that is connected to the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media and networks, including railroads, highways, telephony, radio, and television. In the process, Cloud Policy unearths the lasting inscriptions of policy written for an analog era and markets that no longer exist on the contemporary governance of digital cloud infrastructure.Cloud Policy brings together numerous perspectives that have thus far remained largely siloed in their respective fields of law, policy, economics, and media studies. The resulting interdisciplinary argument reveals a properly scaled view of the massive challenge facing policymakers today. Holt also addresses the evolving role of the state in the regulation of global cloud infrastructure and the growing influence of corporate gatekeepers and private sector self-governance. Cloud policy's trajectory, as Holt explains, has enacted a transformation in the cultural valuation of infrastructure as civic good, turning it into a tool of commercial profit generation. Despite these current predicaments, the book's historical lens ultimately helps the reader to envision restorative interventions and new forms of activism to create a more equitable future for infrastructure policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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    1 時間 8 分
  • Michael Buser, "Ecologies of Care in Times of Climate Change: Water Security in the Global Context" (Policy Press, 2024)

    Michael Buser, "Ecologies of Care in Times of Climate Change: Water Security in the Global Context" (Policy Press, 2024)
    2025/05/14
    Ecologies of Care in Times of Climate Change: Water Security in the Global Context (Policy Press, 2024) investigates and analyses places in Europe, North America and Asia that are facing the immense challenges associated with climate change adaptation. Presenting real-world cases in the contexts of coastal change, drinking water and the cryosphere, Michael Buser shows how the concept of care can be applied to water security and climate adaptation. Exploring the everyday and often hidden ways in which water security is accomplished, the book demonstrates the pervasiveness and power of care to contribute to flourishing lives and communities in times of climate change. Michael Buser is an Associate Professor of Community Collaborative Practice at the University of the West of England, based in Bristol. Before that, he earned degrees in the Fine arts and Urban and Regional Planning. Michael has explored through his research, both developing an understanding, and subsequently addressing, the challenges that people and communities face while living in fragile and precarious environments. Of such, many of his applied research projects have been in South Asia and the UK, ranging from mental health and wellbeing to water security and climate adaptation. Based on this work, he was twice the winner of the Researcher of the Year within his University’s Dept. of Architecture and Built Environment. Professor Michael Simpson has been the Director of the Resource Management and Administration graduate program at Antioch University New England, in Keene, NH. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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    37 分
  • Jeanne Sheehan, "American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

    Jeanne Sheehan, "American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
    2025/05/13
    American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) analyzes the roots of widespread disenchantment with American government. While blame often falls on the individuals in office, they are not operating in isolation. Rather they are working within a system designed by the Framers with one goal in mind, protectionism. Although the Framers got much right, their commitment to protection of liberty led them to design a system replete with divisions of power. Whatever its merits at the founding, the government today is frequently described as dysfunctional and far too often unresponsive to the majority, unaccountable, and unable to deliver for its people. For those disillusioned with the current state of government and committed to effectuating meaningful change, this book advocates in favor of a fundamental reassessment of the system's primary objectives, followed by deliberation as to how it should be restructured accordingly. It not only presents specific reform proposals, but it ends with a stark warning: until and unless we embrace reasoned structural reform, we cannot be surprised if at some point the people become so frustrated that they either disengage, fight back, or seek solace in autocratic alternatives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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    35 分