Beyond Polarization

Beyond Polarization is a story of hope about positive collective action. Written from an insider's perspective, it tells the story of California's Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative--groundbreaking legislation passed after a ten-year public process that left an enduring legacy. The MLPA process provides a blueprint for successful public policy to conserve not just marine life, but any natural resource in contention across jurisdictions. The book is organized by geographical region, each with its unique stakeholders and concerns. Steven Yaffee, an expert on collaborative decision making, explains how its lessons can be applied to similar initiative processes across the country and internationally. Beyond Polarization offers an optimistic message about the public policy process in a time of civic division: that policymakers, scientists, and local citizens can successfully collaborate to protect natural resources we all have a stake in.

This book explores a number of important issues to illuminate the common ground between Peter Singer and Christian ethics.

Beyond Duality and Polarization explores an experience-based learning model, the Phenomenal Patterning approach for personal transformation. Rather than traditional prescriptive learning, methods of personal discovery help us understand how the human mind actually functions. Dr. Koziey introduces two modern Zen skills, watching and catharsis, to increase self-awareness. This frees us from habitual patterns we learned in childhood. We identify the patterns of our own thinking and behaving and see that many of the problems we face are self-created. Repressions are revealed in the shadow psyche and we are able to dissolve our negativity. The overriding message is that when we stop fighting, life starts flowing again.

Regulatory change is typically understood as a response to significant crises like the Great Depression, or salient events that focus public attention, like Earth Day 1970. Without discounting the importance of these kinds of events, change often assumes more gradual and less visible forms. But how do we ‘see’ change, and what institutions and processes are behind it? In this book, author Marc Eisner brings these questions to bear on the analysis of regulatory change, walking the reader through a clear-eyed and careful examination of: the dynamics of regulatory change since the 1970s social regulation and institutional design forms of gradual change – including conversion, layering, and drift gridlock, polarization, and the privatization of regulation financial collapse and the anatomy of regulatory failure Demonstrating that transparency and accountability – the hallmarks of public regulation – are increasingly absent, and that deregulation was but one factor in our most recent significant financial collapse, the Great Recession, this book urges readers to look beyond deregulation and consider the broader political implications for our current system of voluntary participation in regulatory programs and the proliferation of public-private partnerships. This book provides an accessible introduction to the complex topic of regulatory politics, ideal for upper-level and graduate courses on regulation, government and business, bureaucratic politics, and public policy.

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 One of Bill Gates’s “5 books to read this summer,” this New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller shows us that America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this “superbly researched” (The Washington Post) and timely book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results. “The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.” “A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. “Well worth reading” (New York magazine), this is an “eye-opening” (O, The Oprah Magazine) book that will change how you look at politics—and perhaps at yourself.

In many societies all over the world, an increasing polarization between contrasting groups can be observed. Polarization arises when a fear born of difference turns into ‘us-versus-them’ thinking and rules out any form of compromise. This volume addresses polarizations within societies as well as within churches, and asks the question: given these dynamics, what may be the calling of the church? The authors offer new approaches to polarizing debates on topics such as racism, social justice, sexuality and gender, euthanasia, and ecology and agriculture in various contexts. They engage in profound theological and ecclesiological reflection, in particular from the Reformed tradition. Contributors to this volume are: Najib George Awad, Henk van den Belt, Nadine Bowers Du Toit, Jaeseung Cha, David Daniels, David Fergusson, Jan Jorrit Hasselaar, Jozef Hehanussa, Allan Janssen, Klaas-Willem de Jong, Viktória Kóczián, Philipp Pattberg, Louise Prideaux, Emanuel Gerrit Singgih, Peter-Ben Smit, Thandi Soko-de Jong, Wim van Vlastuin, Jan Dirk Wassenaar, Elizabeth Welch, Annemarieke van der Woude, and Heleen Zorgdrager.

The congressional agenda, Frances Lee contends, includes many issues about which liberals and conservatives generally agree. Even over these matters, though, Democratic and Republican senators tend to fight with each other. What explains this discord? Beyond Ideology argues that many partisan battles are rooted in competition for power rather than disagreement over the rightful role of government. The first book to systematically distinguish Senate disputes centering on ideological questions from the large proportion of them that do not, this volume 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, Lee contends, 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, Beyond Ideology provides a timely taxonomy of exactly what stands in his way.