WOOYEAL PAIK and RICHARD BAUM argue that a growing number of Chinese feel frustrated by and alienated from local government agencies. They argue that clientelist alliances constitute a growing threat to the stability of the Chinese Communist party. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19317#sthash.m3LZzRfU.dpuf
C. ANTHONY BROH reviews Suzanne Mettler's Degrees of Inequality and discusses the participation of private, for-profit institutions in higher education. He finds that several admissions and financial aid practices in all sectors of higher education stratify family choices while perpetuating economic inequality. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19318#sthash.PGD2SuBc.dpuf
The U.S. Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times. Twenty-five of those amendments were designed in one way or another to improve the text of the Constitution. Only two of those amendments were designed to override what the nation deemed an erroneous interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. The Eleventh Amendment, adopted in 1798, overrode the Court's decision in Chisolm v. Georgia (1793), which had held that a citizen of South Carolina could sue the State of Georgia. The Sixteenth Amendment, adopted in 1913, overrode the Court's decision in Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Co. (1895), which had held unconstitutional the federal income tax. On average, then, the nation has amended the Constitution in order to override Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution roughly once every 112 years. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19319#sthash.6zb3UPfi.dpuf
Why are there so few women in legislative office in the United States? Recog¬nizing that electoral politics in the United States is “far from gender-neutral territory” (p. 61), Susan J. Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu engage this question by considering major changes in women's election to state legislative office, where women's representation continues to be low, and is declining in the new millennium, with women's legislative numbers driven primarily by the success of Democratic women. At the state legislative level, Republican women are being closed out of office, even where the Republican Party has been increasingly successful overall. Why are men so over-represented in state legislatures? Why is women's representation declining? Why have Republican women been increasingly less successful in winning election to state legislative office than have their Democratic sisters? - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19320#sthash.nhWH74y2.dpuf
In a well-written and insightful volume, Shanna Rose has joined a growing number of scholars in assessing the remarkable rise of Medicaid in the American health care system. Thought to be subject to erosion because of the forces of interstate economic competition and because a “program for the poor is a poor program,” Medicaid has instead expanded. The program now insures more than 70 million people and costs federal and state governments well over $400 billion annually. Viewed by many in 1965 as a down-at-the-heels second cousin to Medicare that would fade away with the coming of national health insurance, Medicaid instead became a key plank in Obamacare in 2010. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19321#sthash.ALrrwILZ.dpuf
America prides itself on being a nation of immigrants, and part of what attracts them to its shores is a tolerance for phenotype diversity and ethnic pluralism. Immigrants are allowed to keep their religion, language, dress, and cultural traditions. Yet many immigrants work hard to assimilate into their host communities. When a group refuses to assimilate, they attract notice. This is especially true for African American immigrants, who seem to be flirting with remaining outsiders. Why would these new Americans who share an African phenotype set themselves apart socially and politically? - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19322#sthash.qxXeIDiA.dpuf
Books about improving U.S. foreign policy are a dime a dozen. But in The Pathologies of Power, Christopher Fettweis offers an unusual take on what he sees as the subpar foreign policy performance of the planet's sole superpower. Fettweis claims that U.S. foreign policy is driven by four pathological beliefs—fear, honor, glory, and hubris—that lead to poor policymaking. The book devotes a chapter to each of the beliefs that Fettweis contends account for foreign policy disasters like the Iraq war and the Vietnam war. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19323#sthash.zyK7HBZX.dpuf
Daniel S. Markey's recent book constitutes an impassioned plea for sustaining a strategic relationship with Afghanistan even as the United States seeks to disengage itself from that country. Markey makes a plausible argument for maintaining this relationship, given the significant stakes that are involved. He contends that the United States needs to work with Pakistan because of at least three compelling reasons. In his view, in the absence of American vigilance toward and engagement with the country, al Qaeda and its associates could reconstitute themselves, that nuclear weapons or materials within Pakistan might end up in hostile hands and instability within Pakistan, given its geostrategic location could adversely affect the future of American interests in Asia. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19324#sthash.lvz1vTZ5.dpuf
How do American citizens deal with an often frightening world where terrorism may come ashore again at any moment? Does the threat of terrorism bind Americans together more tightly or does threat expose underlying weaknesses in the American community? In a tour of post-September 11 American public opinion, Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza depict an American public willing to forego the rights and liberties of citizens, particularly groups traditionally considered outsiders. This dark side of public opinion is deeply rooted in American history, as the authors show in a chapter outlining key moments of both expansion and retrenchment of rights. What Brooks and Manza demonstrate through a series of survey experiments is that this retrenchment of rights may be enduring when the targets of surveillance and detention are seen as non-citizens, Middle-Easterners, or Muslims. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19325#sthash.1kfYugAb.dpuf
This book engages in an admirable attempt to understand an impressive range of important American historical trends and events through the lens of an idea. Joseph F, Kett begins by describing the uneasy existence of widely acknowledged “Men of Merit” within a revolutionary era inspired by ideas of equal rights and popular sovereignty/consent. These revolutionary leaders and American Founders understood merit as an inherent personal quality evidenced externally by public achievements and recognition, which Kett terms “essential merit.” - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19326#sthash.u0OKVk21.dpuf