What is the role of race in social policy? Have race-based programmes failed? Should welfare and civil rights be blind to colour?

The closely contested presidential election of 2000, which many analysts felt was decided by voters for the Green Party, cast a spotlight on a structural contradiction of American politics. Critics charged that Green Party voters inadvertently contributed to the election of a conservative Republican president because they chose to "vote their conscience" rather than "choose between two evils." But why this choice of two? Is the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans an immutable and indispensable aspect of our democracy? Lisa Disch maintains that it is not. There is no constitutional...

Why has child care legislation developed along its present course? How did the political players influence lawmakers? What do the politics of child care legislation over the past thirty years indicate for the future? Based on more than one hundred interviews with legislators and executive branch officials, archival research, and secondary sources, this book looks at the politics behind child care legislation, rather than analyzing child care as a work and family issue.

Identifying key junctures at which major child care bills were introduced and debated (1971, 1990, and 1996), Sally Cohen...

How did the Christian Right come to predominate in the Republican Party? Why, on the other hand, do secular and religiously liberal beliefs largely prevail in the Democratic Party? Our understanding of the rift between the Democratic and Republican parties--a rift in many ways fueled by religious beliefs--requires an analysis of the entire spectrum of religious and nonreligious players in the American political process and how their influence has evolved over a long period of time.

Employing a sizeable collection of data on party members, activists, and elites, Geoffrey Layman examines...

From "Don't ask, don't tell" to the Defense of Marriage Act, from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to the continued battle against AIDS, gays and lesbians have been in the spotlight during the Clinton administration. They now form a political interest group as well as a social community, and political scientists, legal scholars, and the media have started speculating on the impact of this newfound prominence.

Gays and Lesbians in the Democratic Process puts theory to the test by compiling the current research of political scientists working in an empirical tradition. The...