The Best Political Process Books 2025

1. Magnolia Home Ent - The Brink [DIGITAL VIDEO DISC]

THE BRINK follows Steve Bannon for a year leading up to the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States, shedding light on his efforts to mobilize and unify far-right parties in order to win seats in the May 2019 European Parliamentary elections. To maintain his power and influence, the former Goldman Sachs banker and media investor reinvents himself - as he has many times before - this time as the self-appointed leader of a global populist movement. A keen manipulator of the press and gifted self-promoter, Bannon continues to draw headlines and protests wherever he goes, feeding the powerful myth on which his survival relies.

Magnolia Home Ent - The Brink [DIGITAL VIDEO DISC] Movies Magnolia Home Ent PG

2. New Democracy Forum: Why Americans Still Don't Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way (Paperback)

Americans take for granted that ours is the very model of a democracy. At the core of this belief is the assumption that the right to vote is firmly established. But in fact, the United States is the only major democratic nation in which the less well-off, the young, and minorities are substantially underrepresented in the electorate. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward were key players in the long battle to reform voter registration laws that finally resulted in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (also known as the Motor Voter law). When Why Americans Don't Vote was first published in 1988, this battle was still raging, and their book was a fiery salvo. It demonstrated that the twentieth century had witnessed a concerted effort to restrict voting by immigrants and blacks through a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, and unwieldy voter registration requirements. Why Americans Still Don't Vote brings the story up to the present. Analyzing the results of voter registration reform, and drawing compelling historical parallels, Piven and Cloward reveal why neither of the major parties has tried to appeal to the interests of the newly registered-and thus why Americans still don't vote.

New Democracy Forum: Why Americans Still Don't Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way (Paperback)

3. Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, (Hardcover)

For over sixty years, Jews have ranked as the most liberal white ethnic group in American politics, figuring prominently in social reform campaigns ranging from the New Deal to the civil rights movement. Today many continue to defy stereotypes that link voting patterns to wealth. What explains this political behavior? Historians have attributed it mainly to religious beliefs, but Marc Dollinger discovered that this explanation fails to account for the entire American Jewish political experience. In this, the first synthetic treatment of Jewish liberalism and U.S. public policy from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, Dollinger identifies the drive for a more tolerant, pluralistic, and egalitarian nation with Jewish desires for inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society. The politics of acculturation, the process by which Jews championed unpopular social causes to ease their adaptation to American life, established them as the guardians of liberal America. But, according to Dollinger, it also erected barriers to Jewish liberal success. Faced with a conflict between liberal politics and their own acculturation, Jews almost always chose the latter. Few Jewish leaders, for example, condemned the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, and most southern Jews refused to join their northern co-religionists in public civil rights protests. When liberals advocated race-based affirmative action programs and busing to desegregate public schools, most Jews dissented. In chronicling the successes, limits, and failures of Jewish liberalism, Dollinger offers a nuanced yet wide-ranging political history, one intended for liberal activists, conservatives curious about the creation of neo-conservatism, and anyone interested in Jewish communal life.

Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, (Hardcover) Author: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691005096 Format: Hardcover Publication Date: 2000-07-23 Page Count: 312

4. The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s, (Paperback)

After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, hundreds of thousands of southern women went to the polls for the first time. In The Weight of Their Votes Lorraine Gates Schuyler examines the consequences this had in states across the South. She shows that from polling places to the halls of state legislatures, women altered the political landscape in ways both symbolic and substantive. Schuyler challenges popular scholarly opinion that women failed to wield their ballots effectively in the 1920s, arguing instead that in state and local politics, women made the most of their votes. Schuyler explores get-out-the-vote campaigns staged by black and white women in the region and the response of white politicians to the sudden expansion of the electorate. Despite the cultural expectations of southern womanhood and the obstacles of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other suffrage restrictions, southern women took advantage of their voting power, Schuyler shows. Black women mobilized to challenge disfranchisement and seize their right to vote. White women lobbied state legislators for policy changes and threatened their representatives with political defeat if they failed to heed women's policy demands. Thus, even as southern Democrats remained in power, the social welfare policies and public spending priorities of southern states changed in the 1920s as a consequence of woman suffrage.

The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s, (Paperback) Author: University of North Carolina Press ISBN: 9780807857762 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2006-12-11 Page Count: 352

5. Race, Ethnicity, and Politics: Counting on the Latino Vote : Latinos as a New Electorate (Paperback)

Latinos, along with other new immigrants, are not being incorporated into U.S. politics as rapidly as their predecessors, raising concerns about political fragmentation along ethnic lines. In Counting on the Latino Vote, Louis DeSipio uses the first national studies of Latinos to investigate whether they engage in bloc voting or are likely to do so in the future. To understand American racial and ethnic minority group politics, social scientists have largely relied on a black-white paradigm. DeSipio gives a more complex picture by drawing both on the histories of other ethnic groups and on up-to-date but underutilized studies of Hispanics' political attitudes, values, and behaviors. In order to explore the potential impact of Hispanics as an electorate, he analyzes the current Latino body politic and projects the possible voting patterns of those who reside in the United States but do not now vote.

Latinos, along with other new immigrants, are not being incorporated into U.S. politics as rapidly as their predecessors, raising concerns about political fragmentation along ethnic lines. In Counting on the Latino Vote, Louis DeSipio uses the first national studies of Latinos to investigate whether they engage in bloc voting or are likely to do so in the future. To understand American racial and ethnic minority group politics, social scientists have largely relied on a black-white paradigm. DeSipio gives a more complex picture by drawing both on the histories of other ethnic groups and on up-to-date but underutilized studies of Hispanics' political attitudes, values, and behaviors. In order to explore the potential impact of Hispanics as an electorate, he analyzes the current Latino body politic and projects the possible voting patterns of those who reside in the United States but do not now vote.