The Challenge Of Politics

The Challenge of Politics introduces students to the fundamental questions of political science. With a distinctive normative approach that portrays politics as a potentially humanizing enterprise, authors Neal Riemer, Douglas W. Simon and Joseph Romance equip readers to recognize major forms of government, evaluate research findings, and understand how policy issues directly affect people’s lives. This comprehensive text balances classic and contemporary political theory with current events and empirical study. The Fifth Edition is fully revised to reflect recent national and international developments, including a new chapter on American Politics and Government.

"[This is] a textbook that offers students a good introduction to the science of politics while emphasizing the moral, empirical, and prudential dimensions of politics." —Prosper Bernard, Jr., College of Staten Island This updated Sixth Edition of The Challenge of Politics enables students to see how the subfields of political science converge around a set of crucial questions, such as "Can we as citizens and students articulate and defend a view of the good political life and its guiding political values?" "Can we bring political wisdom to bear on judgments about politics and public issues?" and "Can we develop a science of politics to help us understand significant political phenomena—the empirical realities of politics?" Balancing lessons of classic and contemporary theory with contemporary politics and empirical study, the book equips students with the tools they need to explore the impact of philosophy and ideology, recognize major forms of government, evaluate empirical findings, and understand how policy issues directly affect people’s lives. The updated Sixth Edition includes new material on the 2016 presidential elections, the role of social media in politics, and an expanded discussion on the rise of populist movements. Give your students the SAGE edge! SAGE edge offers a robust online environment featuring an impressive array of free tools and resources for review, study, and further exploration, keeping both instructors and students on the cutting edge of teaching and learning. Learn more at edge.sagepub.com/simon6e.

The Challenge of Hegemony explains how international forces subtly influence foreign, economic, and security policies of declining world powers. Using detail-rich case studies, this sweeping study integrates domestic and systemic policy to explain these countries' grand strategies. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications for the future of American foreign policy. "His conceptually rigorous and tightly reasoned study . . . reminds us that power is never value neutral but organizes commercial systems in liberal or imperial terms." ---Perspectives on Politics "Lobell's book is tightly written, nicely argued and thoroughly researched to a fault. He seems to delight in historical detail. The complexity of his approach is refreshing." ---International Affairs "The Challenge of Hegemony is a pleasure to read. It is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich." ---International Studies Review "The Challenge of Hegemony offers a compelling reinterpretation of key historical cases and provides wise guidance as to how the United States should wield its power today." --Charles A. Kupchan, Council on Foreign Relations "Lobell demonstrates clearly how the international environment confronting great powers interacts with their domestic political coalitions to produce different grand strategies. Through a masterful sweep of history, Lobell shows us the alternative trajectories before the United States today." --David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego

The subject of bisexuality continues to divide the lesbian and gay community. At pride marches, in films such as Go Fish, at academic conferences, the role and status of bisexuals is hotly contested. Within lesbian communities, formed to support lesbians in a patriarchal and heterosexist society, bisexual women are often perceived as a threat or as a political weakness. Bisexual women feel that they are regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not openly scorned. Drawing on her research with over 400 bisexual and lesbian women, surveying the treatment of bisexuality in the lesbian and gay press, and examining the recent growth of a self-consciously political bisexual movement, Paula Rust addresses a range of questions pertaining to the political and social relationships between lesbians and bisexual women. By tracing the roots of the controversy over bisexuality among lesbians back to the early lesbian feminist debates of the 1970s, Rust argues that those debates created the circumstances in which bisexuality became an inevitable challenge to lesbian politics. She also traces it forward, predicting the future of sexual politics.

This text starts by explaining the fundamental goal of good political science research—the ability to answer interesting and important questions by generating valid inferences about political phenomena. Before the text even discusses the process of developing a research question, the authors introduce the reader to what it means to make an inference and the different challenges that social scientists face when confronting this task. Only with this ultimate goal in mind will students be able to ask appropriate questions, conduct fruitful literature reviews, select and execute the proper research design, and critically evaluate the work of others. The authors' primary goal is to teach students to critically evaluate their own research designs and others’ and analyze the extent to which they overcome the classic challenges to making inference: internal and external validity concerns, omitted variable bias, endogeneity, measurement, sampling, and case selection errors, and poor research questions or theory. As such, students will not only be better able to conduct political science research, but they will also be more savvy consumers of the constant flow of causal assertions that they confront in scholarship, in the media, and in conversations with others. Three themes run through Barakso, Sabet, and Schaffner’s text: minimizing classic research problems to making valid inferences, effective presentation of research results, and the nonlinear nature of the research process. Throughout their academic years and later in their professional careers, students will need to effectively convey various bits of information. Presentation skills gleaned from this text will benefit students for a lifetime, whether they continue in academia or in a professional career. Several distinctive features make this book noteworthy: A common set of examples threaded throughout the text give students a common ground across chapters and expose them to a broad range of subfields in the discipline. Box features throughout the book illustrate the nonlinear, "non-textbook" reality of research, demonstrate the often false inferences and poor social science in the way the popular press covers politics, and encourage students to think about ethical issues at various stages of the research process.

In recent years the engagement between the environmental 'agenda' and mainstream political theory has become increasingly widespread and profound. Each has affected the other in palpable and important ways, and it makes increasing sense for political theorists in each camp to engage with one another. This book, first published in 2006, draws together the threads of this interconnecting enquiry in order to assess its status and meaning. Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley have gathered together a team of renowned scholars to think through the challenge that political ecology presents to political theory. Looking at fourteen familiar political ideologies and concepts such as liberalism, conservatism, justice and democracy, the contributors question how they are reshaped, distorted or transformed from an environmental perspective. Lively, accessible and authoritative, this book will appeal to scholars and students alike.

This timely and accessible book explores the links between politics, learning and sustainability. Its central focus is the future of people and the planet itself. The challenges that we face in combatting climate change and building a more sustainable world are complex and the book argues that if we are to successfully meet these challenges we need a fundamental change in the way we do politics and economics, embedding a lifelong commitment to sustainability in all learning. We have no option but to make things work for the better. After all, planet earth is the only home we have! The book will be important reading for academics and students in a variety of related subjects, including politics, public policy, education, sustainable development, geography, media, international relations and development studies. It will also be a valuable resource for NGOs and policy makers.

This volume examines the reasons why some despair at the prospects for an ecological form of democracy, and challenges the recent ‘deliberative turn’ in environmental political thought. Deliberative democracy has become popular for those seeking a reconciliation of these two forms of politics. Demand for equal access to a public forum in which the best argument will prevail appears to offer a way of incorporating environmental interests into the democratic process. This book argues that deliberative theory, far from being friendly to the environmental movement, shackles the ability those seeking radical change to make their voices heard in the most effective manner. Mathew Humphrey challenges beliefs about the relationship between ecological politics and democracy at a time when those who take direct action are being swept up in the War on Terror. By calling for a more open and contested form of democracy, in which the boundaries of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ behaviour are not decided in advance of actual debate, Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory is an original contribution to the literature on environmental politics, ecological thought and democracy.