Political Science Books

Transforming Leadership, Burns, James MacGregor ISBN: 9780802141187

An award-winning historian critically examines the role of leadership in the twenty-first century, outlining a program of Transforming Leadership, through which leaders can become agents of positive social change. Reprint.

Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why It Matters, Grimmer, Justin ISBN: 9781107026476

This text examines the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation, demonstrating how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using new statistical techniques to analyze massive data sets, Justin Grimmer makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.

Mo(ve)Ments of Resistance: Politics, Economy and Society in Israel/Palestine, 1931 2013, Grinberg, Lev Louis ISBN: 9781618113788

Grinberg summarizes both his own work and that of other political economists, providing a coherent historical narrative covering the time from the beginning of Socialist Zionism (1904) to the Oslo Accords and the neoliberalization of the economy (1994-1996). The theoretical approach of the book combines eventful sociology, path dependency, and institutional political economy. Grinberg argues that historical political events have been shaped not only by political and economic forces but also by resistance struggles of marginal and weaker social groups: organized workers, Palestinians, and Mizrachi Jews. Major historical turning points in history, like the Separation War in 1948, the military occupation in 1967, and the Oslo peace process in 1993, are explained in the context of previous social and economic resistance struggles that affected the political outcomes.

Comparing Liberal Democracies: The United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the European Union, Gunlicks, Arthur B. ISBN: 9781462057245

In this age of a globalism, understanding the governments and politics of other countries is important in understanding the world around us. In "Comparing Liberal Democracies," author Arthur B. Gunlicks contributes to this understanding in a discussion of the institutional structures and backgrounds of four liberal or Western democracies: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the most state-like international organization, the European Union. Gunlicks provides a systematic and thematic (rather than country-by-country) approach that promotes comparisons of similarities and differences based on variables and concepts familiar to American and European students and the attentive publics in Europe and North America. After laying out a historical background, he explores liberal democratic, semi-democratic, and non-democratic states; territorial organization; presidential versus parliamentary political systems; separation of powers and checks and balances in these different political systems; electoral systems; legal systems; and the liberal democratic welfare state. A comprehensive core text, "Comparing Liberal Democracies" provides the background and concepts necessary for a better understanding of liberal democracies in general and of the American and major European democracies in particular.