In "Electing Judges, " leading judicial politics scholar James L. Gibson responds tothe growing chorus of critics who fear that the politics of running for office undermine judicial independence and even the rule of law. While many people have opinions on the topic, few have supported them with actual empirical evidence. Gibson rectifies this situation, offering the most systematic and comprehensive study to date of the impact of campaigns on public perceptions of fairness, impartiality, and the legitimacy of elected state courts-and his findings are both counterintuitive and controversial....

It s not what you say, but how you say it. Solving problems with words is the essence of politics, and finding the right words for the moment can make or break a politician s career. Yet very little has been said in political science about the elusive element of tone.
In "Political Tone," Roderick P. Hart, Jay P. Childers, and Colene J. Lind analyze a range of texts from speeches and debates to advertising and print and broadcast campaign coverage using a sophisticated computer program, DICTION, that parses their content for semantic features like realism, commonality, and certainty, as...

Forty years ago, viewers who wanted to watch the news could only choose from among the major broadcast networks, all of which presented the same news without any particular point of view. Today we have a much broader array of choices, including cable channels offering a partisan take. With partisan programs gaining in popularity, some argue that they are polarizing American politics, while others counter that only a tiny portion of the population watches such programs and that their viewers tend to already hold similar beliefs.
In "How Partisan Media Polarize America," Matthew Levendusky...

Eight of the last twelve presidents were millionaires when they took office. Millionaires have a majority on the Supreme Court, and they also make up majorities in Congress, where a background in business or law is the norm and the average member has spent less than two percent of his or her adult life in a working-class job. Why is it that most politicians in America are so much better off than the people who elect them- and does the social class divide between citizens and their representatives matter?
With "White-Collar Government," Nicholas Carnes answers this question with a...

The United States routinely has one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any developed democracy in the world. That rate is also among the most internally diverse, since the federal structure allows state-level variations in voting institutions that have had--and continue to have--sizable local effects. But are expansive institutional efforts like mail-in registration, longer poll hours, and "no-excuse" absentee voting uniformly effective in improving voter turnout across states?

With How the States Shaped the Nation, Melanie Jean Springer places contemporary reforms in...

The numbers are staggering: One-third of America s adult population has passed through the criminal justice system and now has a criminal record. Many more were never convicted, but are nonetheless subject to surveillance by the state. Never before has the American government maintained so vast a network of institutions dedicated solely to the control and confinement of its citizens.
A provocative assessment of the contemporary carceral state for American democracy, Arresting Citizenship argues that the broad reach of the criminal justice system has fundamentally recast the...