Americans have benefited from substantial improvements in health since the end of World War II. They live longer and grow taller; they have the safest and cheapest food supply on the planet; they have seen virtually all childhood diseases brought under control. Yet concerns about health remain widespread today. Cancer seems to be everywhere; autoimmune, nervous, and environmental diseases have reached pandemic proportions; medical malpractice suits have proliferated.

How can we have received so many benefits while still being as worried as ever about our health and the health care...

That large financial contributions distort American politics and American democracy is an idea that stands as a truism in political debate. It has fired reform movements; it has inspired round after round of efforts to limit who can give to candidates and parties, how much they can give, and how much campaigns can spend. The laws have generated constitutional arguments about free speech, a still inconclusive literature on whether contributions actually shape policy, and a great deal of work for lawyers and financial analysts who monitor compliance. In the wake of Enron's collapse and...

This volume offers a comparative analysis of the challenges facing center-left parties in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, the European Union, Poland, and Russia. Among the questions addressed are:

-If the traditional social bases of left parties are now too limited for winning in majoritarian politics, what kind of coalitions and ideas, which reach beyond those bases and yet retain them, may be effective?

- If the answer to the first question is that such umbrella coalitions are too torn to be workable, what is the alternative? What is gained and lost in...

In recent years, the Journal of Policy History has emerged as a major venue for scholarship on American policy history in the period after 1900. Indeed, it is for this reason that it is often praised as the leading outlet for scholarship on American political history in the world. Only occasionally, however, has it featured essays on the early republic, the Civil War, or the post-Civil War era. And when it has, the essays have often focused on partisan electioneering rather than on governmental institutions. The rationale for this special issue of the Journal of Policy...