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Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in the understanding of political behavior, this book provides a comprehensive overview of current research on emotion in politics and where it is likely to lead. In sixteen chapters, thirty scholars approach this topic from an array of angles that address four major themes. The first section outlines the philosophical and neuroscientific foundations of emotion in politics, while the second focuses on how emotions function within and among individuals. The final two sections branch out to explore how politics work at the societal level and suggest the next steps in modeling, research, and political activity itself.

The United States boasts scores of organizations that offer crucial representation for groups that are marginalized in national politics, from women to racial minorities to the poor. This systematic study of these organizations explores the challenges and opportunities they face in the new millennium, as waning legal discrimination coincides with increasing political and economic inequalities within the populations they represent. Drawing on data from a survey of 286 organizations and interviews with forty officials, the author finds that groups too often prioritize the interests of their most advantaged members: male rather than female racial minorities, for example, or affluent rather than poor women. But she also finds that many organizations try to remedy this inequity, and concludes by distilling their best practices into a set of principles that she calls affirmative advocacy—a form of representation that aims to overcome the entrenched but often subtle biases against people at the intersection of more than one marginalized group.

This book argues that the congressional agenda includes many issues about which liberals and conservatives generally agree. Even over these matters, though, senators from the Democratic Party and Republican Party tend to fight with each other. What explains this discord? This book contends that many partisan battles are rooted in competition for power rather than disagreement over the rightful role of government. This is the first book to systematically distinguish Senate disputes centering on ideological questions from the large proportion of them that do not, and it foregrounds the role of power struggle in partisan conflict. Presidential leadership, for example, inherently polarizes legislators who can influence public opinion of the president and his party by how they handle his agenda. Senators also exploit good government measures and floor debate to embarrass opponents and burnish their own party's image — even when the issues involved are broadly supported or low-stakes. Moreover, the book suggests that the congressional agenda itself amplifies conflict by increasingly focusing on issues that reliably differentiate the parties. With the new president pledging to stem the tide of partisan polarization, this book provides a timely taxonomy of exactly what stands in his way.

When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine activities such as voting, letter writing, and paying attention to the news spring to mind. But this book argues that these activities are only a small part of democratic citizenship—a standard of citizenship that requires creative thinking, talking, and acting. For it, the author met with labor, church, business, and sports organizations and proposed to them four fictive scenarios: what if your senator is involved in a scandal, or your police department is engaged in racial profiling, or a local factory violates pollution laws, or your nearby airport is slated for expansion? The conversations these challenges inspire, he shows, require imagination. And what people can imagine doing in response to those scenarios depends on what's possible, what's important, what's right, and what's feasible. By talking with one another, an engaged citizenry draws from a repertoire of personal and institutional resources to understand and reimagine responses to situations as they arise. Building on such political discussions, the book shows how a rich culture of association and democratic discourse provides the infrastructure for a healthy democracy.

In bicameral legislatures like Congress, the two chambers must reach agreement before a bill is enacted into law, a process that is often chaotic and contentious. In The Congressional End Game: Interchamber Bargaining and Compromise in Congress, Josh Ryan offers a coherent theory of how this process works and the types of policy outcomes produced. He shows that both conference committees and an alternative resolution venue, amendment trading, create policy that approximates the preferences of the more moderate chamber, though neither chamber receives exactly what it wants. Using comprehensive data on recent congressional legislation and an array of empirical tests, The Congressional Endgame explains how the chambers seek agreement, why failure at the resolution stage is so rare, and what types of legislation are likely to emerge from negotiations. The book finds that the characteristics of the winning coalition are critically important to which chamber "wins" after bargaining, with more moderate chambers receiving more of what they want. The results are especially relevant in the current age of party polarization and strong leadership, where divided party control of the House and Senate is common. These factors contribute to the public perception that the House and Senate are unable to compromise, and call into question the relevance and effectiveness of the bicameral system as designed by the Framers. Instead, The Congressional Endgame demonstrates interchamber negotiations serve their intended purpose well: they increase the odds of compromise while at the same time offering a powerful constraint on dramatic policy changes.

Why have conservatives fared so much better than progressives in recent decades, even though polls show no significant move to the right in public opinion? This book highlights one reason: that progressives often adopt impoverished modes of discourse, ceding the moral high ground to their conservative rivals. The book also shows that some progressive groups are pioneering more robust ways of talking about their issues and values, providing examples other progressives could emulate. Through case studies of grassroots movements—particularly the economic justice work carried on by congregation-based community organizing and the pursuit of human rights by local members of Amnesty International—the book shows how these groups develop distinctive ways of talking about politics and create characteristic stories, ceremonies, and practices. According to this book, the way people engage in politics matters just as much as the content of their ideas: when activists make the moral basis for their activism clear, engage issues with passion, and articulate a unified social vision, they challenge the recent ascendancy of conservative discourse. On the basis of these case studies, the book addresses currently debated topics such as individualism in America and whether strains of political thought strongly informed by religion and moral values are compatible with tolerance and liberty.

In addition to their obvious roles in American politics, race and gender also work in hidden ways to influence profoundly the way we think—and vote—about a vast array of issues that don't seem related to either category. As this book reveals, politicians and leaders often frame these seemingly unrelated issues in ways that prime audiences to respond not to the policy at hand but instead to the way its presentation resonates with their deeply held beliefs about race and gender. The book shows, for example, how official rhetoric about welfare and Social Security has tapped into white Americans' racial biases to shape their opinions on both issues over the past two decades. Similarly, the way politicians presented health care reform in the 1990s divided Americans along the lines of their attitudes toward gender. Combining cognitive and political psychology with innovative empirical research, the book illuminates the emotional underpinnings of politics in the United States.

How do threats of terrorism affect the opinions of citizens? Speculation abounds, but until now no one had marshaled hard evidence to explain the complexities of this relationship. Drawing on data from surveys and original experiments conducted in the United States and Mexico, this book shows how our strategies for coping with terrorist threats significantly influence our attitudes toward fellow citizens, political leaders, and foreign nations. It reveals, for example, that some people try to restore a sense of order and control through increased wariness of others — especially of those who exist outside the societal mainstream. Additionally, voters under threat tend to prize “strong leadership” more highly than partisan affiliation, making some politicians seem more charismatic than they otherwise would. The book argues that a wary public will sometimes continue to empower such leaders after they have been elected, giving them greater authority even at the expense of institutional checks and balances. Having demonstrated that a climate of terrorist threat also increases support for restrictive laws at home and engagement against terrorists abroad, the book concludes that our responses to such threats can put democracy at risk.

America is in civic chaos, its politics rife with conspiracy theories and false information. Nationalism and authoritarianism are on the rise, while scientists, universities, and news organizations are viewed with increasing mistrust. Its citizens reject scientific evidence on climate change and vaccinations while embracing myths of impending apocalypse. And then there is Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who won the support of millions of conservative Christians despite having no moral or political convictions. What is going on? The answer can be found in the most important force shaping American politics today: human intuition. On one side are rationalists. They use science and reason to understand reality. On the other side are intuitionists. They rely on gut feelings and instincts as their guide to the world. Intuitionists believe in ghosts and End Times prophecies. They embrace conspiracy theories, disbelieve experts, and distrust the media. They are stridently nationalistic and deeply authoritarian in their outlook. And they are the most enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump. A generation ago, intuitionists were dispersed across the political spectrum, when most Americans believed in both God and science. Today, intuitionism is ideologically tilted toward the political right. Modern conservatism has become an Intuitionist movement, defined by conspiracy theories, strident nationalism, and hostility to basic civic norms. Enchanted America is a clarion call to rationalists of all political persuasions to reach beyond the minority and speak to intuitionists in a way they understand.

Direct democracy is alive and well in the United States. Citizens are increasingly using initiatives and referendums to take the law into their own hands, overriding their elected officials to set tax, expenditure, and social policies. This book provides an even-handed and historically based treatment of the subject. Drawing upon a century of evidence, the author argues against the popular belief that initiative measures are influenced by wealthy special interest groups that neglect the majority view. Examining demographic, political, and opinion data, he demonstrates how the initiative process brings about systematic changes in tax and expenditure policies of state and local governments that are generally supported by the citizens. The author concludes that, by and large, direct democracy in the form of the initiative process works for the benefit of the many rather than the few.

With world affairs so troubled, what kind of foreign policy should the United States pursue? This book looks for answers in a surprising place: among the American people. Drawing on a series of national surveys conducted between 1974 and 2004, the authors reveal that—contrary to conventional wisdom—Americans generally hold durable, coherent, and sensible opinions about foreign policy. Nonetheless, their opinions often stand in opposition to those of policymakers, usually because of different interests and values, rather than superior wisdom among the elite. The book argues that these gaps between leaders and the public are harmful, and that by using public opinion as a guideline, policymakers could craft a more effective, sustainable, and democratic foreign policy. The authors support this argument by painting a comprehensive portrait of the military, diplomatic, and economic foreign policies Americans favor. They show, for example, that protecting American jobs is just as important to the public as security from attack, a goal the current administration seems to pursue single-mindedly. And contrary to some officials' unilateral tendencies, the public consistently and overwhelmingly favors cooperative multilateral policy and participation in international treaties. Moreover, Americans' foreign policy opinions are seldom divided along the usual lines: majorities of virtually all social, ideological, and partisan groups seek a policy that pursues the goals of security and justice through cooperative means.

The widespread assumption in American politics that core social identities—such as religion, race, and ethnicity—shape politics but are, themselves, largely impervious to political influence. This book challenges this conventional wisdom by looking at religion, a social identity whose political relevance is routinely discussed in both academic and non-academic circles. The book demonstrates that individuals' partisan identities, which solidify in young adulthood, can influence religious decisions later in life. The findings refute the claim that America's current polarization is solely the product of religious sorting into the political parties, with seculars supporting the Democrats and the devout joining the Republican ranks. Instead, partisans also help produce this religious-political polarization, as Democrats select out of organized religion and Republicans select into it. The book sheds light on religion’s role in politics by highlighting politics' role in religion and offers an important step in understanding how politics influences group identification.

In recent years, as government agencies have encouraged faith-based organizations to help ensure social welfare, many black churches have received grants to provide services to their neighborhoods' poorest residents. This collaboration, activist churches explain, is a way of enacting their faith and helping their neighborhoods. But as this book demonstrates, this alliance also serves as a means for black clergy to reaffirm their political leadership and reposition moral authority in black civil society. Drawing on both survey data and fieldwork in New York City, the author reveals that African American churches can use these newly forged connections with public agencies to influence policy and government responsiveness in a way that reaches beyond traditional electoral or protest politics. The churches and neighborhoods, he argues, can see a real benefit from that influence—but it may come at the expense of less involvement at the grassroots.

President Barack Obama has signaled a sharp break from many policies of George W. Bush's administration, but he remains committed to federal support for religious social service providers. Like Bush's faith-based initiative, though, Obama's version of the policy has generated loud criticism as the communities that stand to benefit suffer through an ailing economy. This book reveals that virtually all of the critics, as well as many supporters, have long misunderstood both the true implications of faith-based partnerships and their unique potential for advancing social justice. Unearthing the intellectual history of the faith-based initiative, the book locates its roots in the pluralist tradition of Europe's Christian democracies, in which the state shares sovereignty with social institutions. It argues that Catholic and Dutch Calvinist ideas played a crucial role in the evolution of this tradition, as churches across nineteenth-century Europe developed philosophical and legal defenses to protect their education and social programs against ascendant governments. Tracing the influence of this heritage on the past three decades of American social policy and church-state law, the book finally untangles the radical beginnings of the faith-based initiative. A major contribution from an important new voice at the intersection of religion and politics, this book points the way toward policymaking that combines strong social support with a new moral focus on the protection of families and communities.

Thirty years ago there were nine African Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today there are four times that number. This book explores what representation has meant—and means today—to black voters and to the politicians they have elected to office. It follows the careers of four black representatives—Louis Stokes, Barbara Jordan, Chaka Fattah, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones—from their home districts to the halls of the Capitol. The author finds that while these politicians had different visions of how they should represent their districts (in part based on their individual preferences, and in part based on the history of black politics in America), they shared crucial organizational and symbolic connections to their constituents. These connections, which draw on a sense of “linked fates,” are ones that only black representatives can provide to black constituents.

Americans tend to see negative campaign ads as just that: negative. Pundits, journalists, voters, and scholars frequently complain that such ads undermine elections and even democratic government itself. But the author of this book takes the opposite stance, arguing that when political candidates attack each other, raising doubts about each other's views and qualifications, voters—and the democratic process—benefit. In this study of negative advertising in presidential campaigns from 1960 to 2004, the author asserts that the proliferating attack ads are far more likely than positive ads to focus on salient political issues, rather than politicians' personal characteristics. Accordingly, the ads enrich the democratic process, providing voters with relevant and substantial information before they head to the polls. The author concludes that if we want campaigns to grapple with relevant issues and address real problems, negative ads just might be the solution.

From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political history, but when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this revelation, this book explores conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It argues that the Americans' response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristics—such as what they cost in lives and resources—than by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence their ideas about domestic issues. With the help of World War II-era survey data, the book begins by disproving the myth of “the good war” that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack did not significantly alter public opinion, but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. The book also sheds new light on American reactions to other crises. It shows, for example, that American attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments they make during times of peace. With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, this book offers a reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influence each other.

Legacies of Losing in American Politics shows the enduring and unnoticed significance of defeated leaders and ideas at three crucial junctures of American constitutional history. The Anti-Federalists at the Founding, Andrew Johnson at Reconstruction, and Barry Goldwater at the height of the New Deal order were all losers in the battles that defined the major turning points of American political development. Yet all defied conventional wisdom and prevailed in important ways over the long run. Still more surprising, the mechanisms that account for their well-known profound losses prove to be the very instruments that ultimately transformed their failure into success. These counter-intuitive victories, and the unusual reasons for them, provoke a re-thinking of the two most important synoptic accounts of American politics. The standard narrative that American politics is marked by successive and progressive “constitutional moments” is recast to reflect the profound effects of these “anti-moments.” And a recent and powerful argument that the United States is not defined solely by its liberal tradition is reinforced by this account of how America’s multiple traditions are sustained by the actions of leaders at the highest levels in the nation’s most constitutive moments. Legacies of Losing describes and explains American politics as a braiding of constitutional and anti-constitutional arguments, and liberal and anti-liberal inheritances.

Once elected, members of Congress face difficult decisions about how to allocate their time and effort. On which issues should they focus? What is the right balance between working in one’s district and on Capitol Hill? How much should they engage with the media to cultivate a national reputation? William Bernhard and Tracy Sulkin argue that these decisions and others define a “legislative style” that aligns with a legislator’s ambitions, experiences, and personal inclinations, as well as any significant electoral and institutional constraints. Bernhard and Sulkin have developed a systematic approach for looking at legislative style through a variety of criteria, including the number of the bills passed, number of speeches given, amount of money raised, and the percentage of time a legislator voted in line with his or her party. Applying this to ten Congresses, representing twenty years of Congressional data, from 1989 to 2009, they reveal that legislators’ activity falls within five predictable styles. These styles remain relatively consistent throughout legislators’ time in office, though a legislator’s style can change as career goals evolve, as well as with changes to individual or larger political interests, as in redistricting or a majority shift. Offering insight into a number of enduring questions in legislative politics, Legislative Style is a rich and nuanced account of legislators’ activity on Capitol Hill.

When conservatives took control of the federal judiciary in the 1980s, it was widely assumed that they would reverse the landmark rights-protecting precedents set by the Warren Court and replace them with a broad commitment to judicial restraint. Instead, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist has reaffirmed most of those liberal decisions while creating its own brand of conservative judicial activism. Ranging from 1937 to the present, this book traces the legal and political forces that have shaped the modern Court. The book argues that the tensions within modern conservatism have produced a court that exercises its own power quite actively, on behalf of both liberal and conservative ends. Despite the long-standing conservative commitment to restraint, the justices of the Rehnquist Court have stepped in to settle divisive political conflicts over abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, presidential elections, and much more. The book focuses in particular on the role of Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, whose deciding votes have shaped this uncharacteristically activist Court.