Reshaping The Agenda

From 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, until the present, Congress enacted hardly any major legislation outside of the tax law President Trump signed in 2017. In the same period, the Supreme Court dismantled much of America's campaign finance law, severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, permitted states to opt-out of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, weakened laws protecting against age discimination and sexual and racial harassment, and held that every state must permit same-sex couples to marry. This powerful unelected body, now controlled by six very conservative Republicans, has and will become the locus of policymaking in the United States. Ian Millhiser, Vox's Supreme Court correspondent, tells the story of what those six justices are likely to do with their power. It is true that the right to abortion is in its final days, as is affirmative action. But Millhiser shows that it is in the most arcane decisions that the Court will fundamentally reshape America, transforming it into something far less democratic, by attacking voting rights, dismantling and vetoing the federal administrative state, ignoring the separation of church and state, and putting corporations above the law. The Agenda exposes a radically altered Supreme Court whose powers extend far beyond transforming any individual right--its agenda is to shape the very nature of America's government, redefining who gets to have legal rights, who is beyond the reach of the law, and who chooses the people who make our laws.

Long gone are the times when class-based political parties with extensive membership dominated politics. Instead, party politics has become issue-based. Surprisingly few studies have focused on how the issue content of West European party politics has developed over the past decades. Empirically, Reshaping of West European Party Politics studies party politics in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK from 1980 and onwards. This book highlights the more complex party system agenda with the decline, but not disappearance, of macroeconomic issues as well as the rise in 'new politics' issues together with education and health care. Moreover, various 'new politics' issues such as immigration, the environment, and European integration have seen very different trajectories. To explain the development of the individual issues, this volume develops a new theoretical model labelled the 'issue incentive model' of party system attention. The aim of the model is to explain how much attention issues get throughout the party system, which is labelled 'the party system agenda'. To explain the development of the party system agenda, one needs to focus on the incentives that individual policy issues offer to large, mainstream parties, i.e. the typical Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, or Conservative/Liberal parties that have dominated West European governments for decades. The core idea of the model is that the incentives that individual policy issues offer to these vote and office-seeking parties depend on three factors, namely issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations. The issue incentive model builds on and develops a top-down perspective on which the issue content of party politics is determined by the strategic considerations of political parties and their competition with each other. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Political Science, University of Houston.

Thanks to the rise of mutual funds and retirement plans, the actual owners of the world’s corporate giants are no longer a few wealthy families. Rather, they’re the huge majority of working people who have their pensions and life savings invested in shares of today’s largest companies. These grassroots owners have ideas about value that differ from those of tycoons or Wall Street traders. And corporate directors and executives are coming under increasing pressure to respond. The New Capitalists provides examples—from GE to Disney to British Petroleum—of enterprises whose shareholders have recently wielded their control in ways unimaginable just several years ago. Authors Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik and David Pitt-Watson describe how civil ownership will profoundly alter our world—including forcing the rise of a new species of corporation. It has already begun demolishing old rules and habits, laying the groundwork for a new “constitution of commerce.” The authors spell out conventional thinking destined for extinction—and fresh strategies companies must implement to survive in the emerging “civil economy.” They also outline how investors, advisors, activists, and policy makers can make their voices heard.

"Experienced politicians and legislators have always known that by shaping the agenda they can influence decisions. In the past, experienced politicians' knowledge has been mostly anecdotal. The development of social choice theory provides a basis for a fuller and more systematic understanding of the effects of agendas on outcomes. In this book, the appreciation of the role and workings of agendas that has been developed using social choice theory is presented in a nontechnical way." "This collection of essays explores several features of agenda formation by developing ideas such as that most issues are one-dimensional, agenda items and issues are certain to change because losers have an interest in changing them, domestic concerns at least partially determine agendas and issues in international politics, and new issues and arguments can abruptly change the expectations about winning. The distinguished contributors argue that the knowledge needed to compete includes knowing what the possible agenda items or issues are, where they come from, and how to manipulate them advantageously."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations, the world has faced its biggest shared test since the Second World War in the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Yet while our welfare, and indeed the permanence of human life, depend on us working together, international cooperation has never been harder to achieve. This report answers a call from UN Member States to provide recommendations to advance our common agenda and to respond to current and future challenges. Its proposals are grounded in a renewal of the social contract, adapted to the challenges of this century, taking into account younger and future generations, complemented by a new global deal to better protect the global commons and deliver global public goods. Through a deepening of solidarity—at the national level, between generations, and in the multilateral system—Our Common Agenda provides a path forward to a greener, safer and better future.

In the past few decades, the narrow intellectual foundations of the university have come under serious scrutiny. Previously marginalized groups have called for improved access to the institution and full inclusion in the curriculum. Reshaping the University is a timely, thorough, and original interrogation of academic practices. It moves beyond current analyses of cultural conflicts and discrimination in academic institutions to provide an indigenous postcolonial critique of the modern university. Rauna Kuokkanen argues that attempts by universities to be inclusive are unsuccessful because they do not embrace indigenous worldviews. Programs established to act as bridges between mainstream and indigenous cultures ignore their ontological and epistemic differences and, while offering support and assistance, place the responsibility of adapting wholly on the student. Indigenous students and staff are expected to leave behind their cultural perspectives and epistemes in order to adopt Western values. Reshaping the University advocates a radical shift in the approach to cultural conflicts within the academy and proposes a new logic, grounded in principles central to indigenous philosophies.

"[A] well-integrated volume by...one of the best known political scientists working on women and politics.... [It] includes contributions by leading scholars in the field, and provides a well-written and accessible overview of the impact of women in office at every level..." -- Pippa Norris, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University "This [book] will be the standard-bearer not simply because it contains most of the early research in the field but more importantly, because of the wide-ranging scope and diversity of the research and the subsequently nuanced and contextualized arguments presented."-Beth Reingold, Emory University In recent years the numbers of women serving in public offices at various levels of government have increased markedly. Is the increasing presence of women in public office making a difference? Are women public officials having a distinctive impact on public policy and the political process? These questions are central to the studies in The Impact of Women in Public Office. These studies examine the impact of women public officials serving in various offices and locales at local, state, and national levels. They are the product of a large, coordinated research project sponsored by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University and funded by the Charles H. Revson Foundation. The subjects of these studies range from a single, very prominent U.S. Senator, who served in Congress from the early 1940s to the early 1970s, to local council members in a New Jersey county in the 1980s. They include state legislators from across the country. The research presented in this volume offers compelling evidence that women public officials do have a gender-related impact on public policy and the political process. Nevertheless, context matters; these studies demonstrate that the impact of women public officials varies considerably across political environments. Finally, the research in this volume suggests that identification with feminism and/or of particular racial or ethnic group also influence how and to what extent women public officials are making a difference. Contributors include Edith J. Barrett, Susan Abrams Beck, Janet K. Boles, Susan J. Carroll, Debra L. Dodson, Lyn Kathlene, Elaine Martin, Nancy E. McGlen, Meredith Reid Sarkees, Janann Sherman, Sue Thomas, Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, and Susan Welch.