New Books in Public Policy

• Jeanne Sheehan, "American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

  American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) analyzes the roots of widespread disenchantment with American government. While blame often falls on the individuals in office, they are not operating in isolation. Rather they are working within a system designed by the Framers with one goal in mind, protectionism. Although the Framers got much right, their commitment to protection of liberty led them to design a system replete with divisions of power. Whatever its merits at the founding, the government today is frequently described as dysfunctional and far too often unresponsive to the majority, unaccountable, and unable to deliver for its people.  For those disillusioned with the current state of government and committed to effectuating meaningful change, this book advocates in favor of a fundamental reassessment of the system's primary objectives, followed by deliberation as to how it should be restructured accordingly. It not only presents specific reform proposals, but it ends with a stark warning: until and unless we embrace reasoned structural reform, we cannot be surprised if at some point the people become so frustrated that they either disengage, fight back, or seek solace in autocratic alternatives.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

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• Ryan J. Vander Wielen et al., "The House that Fox News Built?: Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan News" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

  The influence of partisan news is presumed to be powerful, but evidence for its effects on political elites is limited, often based more on anecdotes than science. Using a rigorous quasi-experimental research design, observational data, and open science practices, The House that Fox News Built?: Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan News (Cambridge UP, 2024) carefully demonstrates how the re-emergence and rise of partisan cable news in the US affected the behavior of political elites during the rise and proliferation of Fox News across media markets between 1996 and 2010. Despite widespread concerns over the ills of partisan news, evidence provides a nuanced, albeit cautionary tale. On one hand, findings suggest that the rise of Fox indeed changed elite political behavior in recent decades. At the same time, the limited conditions under which Fox News' influence occurred suggests that concerns about the network's power may be overstated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

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• Patrick Condon, "Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis" (U British Columbia Press, 2024)

  How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing costs ensued. In just one city, Vancouver, land prices increased by 600 percent between 2008 and 2016. How much wealth have investors extracted from urban land? In Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis (U British Columbia Press, 2024), Patrick Condon explains how we have let land, our most durable resource, shift away from the common good – and proposes bold strategies that cities in North America could use to shift it back. Patrick Condon is the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the founding chair of the UBC Urban Design program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

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• Ruth Braunstein, "My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America" (Princeton UP, 2025)

  In My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against “taxpayer funded abortions,” and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good. Though taxpaying is often portrayed as dull and technical, exposure to collective rituals, civic education, propaganda, and protest transforms the practice for many Americans into either a sacred rite of citizenship or a profane threat to what they hold dear. These sacred and profane meanings can apply to the act of taxpaying itself or to the specific uses of tax dollars. Despite intense disagreement about these meanings, politically diverse Americans engaged in both taxpaying and tax resistance valorize the individual taxpayer and “my tax dollars.”Braunstein explores the profound implications of this meaning making for tax consent, the legitimacy of the tax system, and citizens’ broader understandings of their political relationships. Going beyond the usual focus on tax policy, Braunstein’s innovative view of taxation through the lens of cultural sociology shows how citizens in value-diverse societies coalesce around shared visions of the sacred and fears of the profane. Interviewee: Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

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• Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)

  Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency of this topic. Today we welcome philosopher Jake Monaghan to discuss his book, Just Policing (Oxford UP, 2023), which applies interdisciplinary insights to examine the morality of policing. Though the injustices of our world seemingly require some kind of policing, the police are often sources of injustice themselves. But this is not always the result of intentionally or negligently bad policing. Sometimes it is an unavoidable result of the injustices that emerge from interactions with other social systems. This raises an important question of just policing: how should police respond to the injustices built into the system? Just Policing attempts an answer, offering a theory of just policing in non-ideal contexts. Monaghan argues that police discretion is not only unavoidable, but in light of non-ideal circumstances, valuable. This claim conflicts with a widespread but inchoate view of just policing, the legalist view that finds justice in faithful enforcement of the criminal code. But the criminal code leaves policing seriously underdetermined; full enforcement is neither possible nor desirable. Police need an alternative normative framework for evaluating and guiding their exercise of power. Just Policing critiques popular approaches to police abolitionism while defending normative limits on police power. The book offers a defense of police discretion against common objections and evaluates controversial issues in order maintenance, such as the policing of "vice" and homelessness, democratic control over policing, community policing initiatives, police collaborations and alternatives like mental health response teams, and possibilities for structural reform. Jake Monaghan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. His research is primarily in moral and political philosophy. He is interviewed by Tom McInerney, an international lawyer, scholar, and strategist, who has worked to advance rule of law and development internationally for 25 years. He has taught in the Rule of Law for Development Program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law since 2011. He writes the Rights, Regulation and Rule of Law newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

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