As the author of “The Conservative Mind” and other seminal books, Russell Kirk is usually thought of as one of the American conservative political movement's most important progenitors. But as this collection demonstrates, Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirk's was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements...

Presuming that a strong relationship exists between one's identity and political behavior, American politicians have long targeted immigrant and ethnic communities based on their shared ethnic or racial identity. But to what extent do political campaign messages impact voters' actual decisions and behaviors? This new book is one of the first to examine and compare the campaign efforts used to target Latinos with those directed at the rest of the electorate....

Broadcast to tens of millions of Americans, the presidential debates are the Super Bowl of politics. A good performance before the cameras can vault a contender to the front of the pack, while a gaffe spells national embarrassment and can savage a candidacy. The slim margin for error has led the two major parties to seek-and achieve, under the aegis of the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates-tight control through scripting, severe time limits,...

Are you well-informed about the two candidates for President in 2024? How do we prepare to vote in 2024? At the beginning of 2024, there is no "go to" standard for fairly measuring the effectiveness of our presidents, and I hope that this book will get the ball rolling on that. Reading the Kindle or paperback edition of "Rate the Presidents, Part I: Compare Biden and Trump on 10 Dimensions", will get you most of the way there. I have been researching...

In the wake of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the case that allowed corporate and union spending in elections, many Americans despaired over the corrosive influence that private and often anonymous money can have on political platforms, campaigns, and outcomes at the federal and state level. In McComish v. Bennett (2011), the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the matching funds feature of so-called "Clean Elections" public...

On the afternoon of election day 2004, the world was abuzz with the news: exit polls indicated that John Kerry would decisively win the election and become the next president of the United States. That proved not to be the case. According to the official count—the number of votes tallied, not necessarily the number of votes cast—George W. Bush beat Kerry by a margin of three million votes. The exit polls, however, had predicted a margin of victory...

"Without drastic adjustment, this system cannot last much longer," writes Van Reybrouck, regarded today as one of Europe's most astute thinkers. "If you look at the decline in voter turnout and party membership, and at the way politicians are held in contempt, if you look at how difficult it is to form governments, how little they can do and how harshly they are punished for it, if you look at how quickly populism, technocracy and anti-parliamentarianism...

Some aspects of the 2014 midterm elections would have been unimaginable a decade earlier. SuperPACs spent unlimited amounts of money, candidates used Twitter and other social media to communicate with voters, and Democrats found themselves all but entirely cast out of federal office in the South. Other aspects of the midterm elections, such as primary elections, direct mail, and the hurdles faced by members of marginalized communities in making their...

Politics was once, described as the art of the possible. It no longer feels that way. Today, it seems more like a battle between two feudal armies. Part of this book is aimed at showing it doesn't have to be that way. Polarization didn't start with Trump and it won't end with him unless we can somehow rescue the country from the political ditch into which it has fallen. So Another purpose of this book is to examine just how we got here and how the...

Across the Western world, people are desperate for a radical shift in politics and for new kinds of politicians. Primary defeats for established figures and shock results in referendums are becoming the norm, while outsiders are shaking up political cultures. In this book, Ali Milani, a rising star in the UK's Labour Party, brings a unique perspective to the key political issues we're facing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and shows how young...