By Jennifer L. Johnson - For about a decade, one of the most influential forces in US anti-immigrant politics was the Minuteman Project. The armed volunteers made headlines patrolling the southern border. What drove their ethno-nationalist politics?
Jennifer L. Johnson spent hundreds of hours observing and interviewing Minutemen, hoping to answer that question. She reached surprising conclusions. While the public face of border politics is hypermasculine—men in uniforms, fatigues, and suits—older women were central to the Minutemen. Women mobilized support and took...
Edited by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost - In the Spring of 2009, the Tea Party emerged onto the American political scene. In the wake of Obama’s election, as commentators proclaimed the “death of conservatism,” Tax Day rallies and Tea Party showdowns at congressional town hall meetings marked a new and unexpected chapter in American conservatism. Accessible to students and general readers, Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party brings together leading scholars and experts on the American Right to examine a political...
Luke Howie and Perri Campbell - This book leads an interdisciplinary debate on how global events have irreparably altered young peoples’ futures, identifies young people's feelings of doubt when faced with current global events, and argues for a different future, and deals with anxiety in the contexts of the disasters of the 21st century – the GFC and rise of ISIS.
Alina Polyakova - Across Europe, radical right-wing parties are winning increasing electoral support. The Dark Side of European Integration argues that this rising nationalism and the mobilization of the radical right are the consequences of European economic integration. The European economic project has produced a cultural backlash in the form of nationalist radical right ideologies. This assessment relies on a detailed analysis of the electoral rise of radical right parties in Western and Eastern Europe. Contrary to popular belief, economic performance...
Karen Trapenberg Frick - On 17 October 1989, one of the largest earthquakes to occur in California since the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906 struck Northern California. Damage was extensive, none more so than the partial collapse of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge’s eastern span, a vital link used by hundreds of thousands of Californians every day.
The bridge was closed for a month for repairs and then reopened to traffic. But what ensued over the next 25 years is the extraordinary story that Karen Trapenberg Frick tells here. It is a cautionary tale to...
Edited by Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell, and Olivier Roy - Western democracies are experiencing a new wave of right-wing populism that seeks to mobilize religion for its own ends. With chapters on the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland and Israel, Saving the People asks how populist movements have used religion for their own ends and how church leaders react to them. The authors contend that religion is more about belonging than belief for populists, with religious identities and traditions being...
By Arlie Russell Hochschild - When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, “Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed...
By Corey Fields - What do you think of when you hear about an African American Republican? Are they heroes fighting against the expectation that all blacks must vote democratic? Are they Uncle Toms or sellouts, serving as traitors to their race? What is it really like to be a black person in the Republican Party?
Black Elephants in the Room considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on...
Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser - Buzzwords, the term often floats from one meaning to another, and both social scientists and journalists use it to denote diverse phenomena. What is populism really? Who are the populist leaders? And what is the relationship between populism and democracy? This book answers these questions in a simple and persuasive way, offering a swift guide to populism in theory and practice.
Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser present populism as an ideology that divides society into two...
Michael Minkenberg - This book provides a timely account of recent radical right movements, political parties, electoral competition, and governance in Eastern Europe, incorporates quantitative and qualitative data, drawing on perspectives form comparative and historical sociology, electoral research, and analysis of public opinion trend, and offers a historical analysis of key conditions and legacies that have impacted and shaped the current nature of democracies in Eastern Europe.