Party Wars is the first book to describe how the ideological gulf now separating the two major parties developed and how today’s fierce partisan competition affects the political process and national policy. Barbara Sinclair traces the current ideological divide to changes in the Republican party in the 1970s and 1980s, including the rise of neoconservativism and the Religious Right. Because of these historical developments, Democratic and Republican voters today differ substantially in what they consider good public policy, and so do the politicians they elect. Polarization has produced institutional consequences in the House of Representatives and in the Senate—witness the majority party’s threat in 2004–2005 to use the “nuclear option” of abolishing the filibuster. The president’s strategies for dealing with Congress have also been affected, raising the price of compromise with the opposing party and allowing a Republican president to govern largely from the ideological right. Other players in the national policy community—interest groups, think tanks, and the media—have also joined one or the other partisan “team.” Party Wars puts all the parts together to provide the first government-wide survey of the impact of polarization on national politics. Sinclair pinpoints weaknesses in the highly polarized system and offers several remedies.

Political campaigns today are won or lost in the so-called ground war--the strategic deployment of teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers who work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter. Ground Wars provides an in-depth ethnographic portrait of two such campaigns, New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender's and that of Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, who both ran for Congress in 2008. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen examines how American political operatives use "personalized political communication" to engage with the electorate, and weighs the implications of ground war tactics for how we understand political campaigns and what it means to participate in them. He shows how ground wars are waged using resources well beyond those of a given candidate and their staff. These include allied interest groups and civic associations, party-provided technical infrastructures that utilize large databases with detailed individual-level information for targeting voters, and armies of dedicated volunteers and paid part-timers. Nielsen challenges the notion that political communication in America must be tightly scripted, controlled, and conducted by a select coterie of professionals. Yet he also quashes the romantic idea that canvassing is a purer form of grassroots politics. In today's political ground wars, Nielsen demonstrates, even the most ordinary-seeming volunteer knocking at your door is backed up by high-tech targeting technologies and party expertise. Ground Wars reveals how personalized political communication is profoundly influencing electoral outcomes and transforming American democracy.

This is the first comprehensive research study to analyze and explain the influence the prolonged Arab-Israeli conflict has had on Israel. It focuses on the manner in which all of the Israeli-Arab wars since 1949, including the Intifada and the Gulf War, have affected state and society in Israel. In addition, it examines the influences of other, more limited Israeli military operations. These subjects are investigated within a broad theoretical framework based on a critical analysis of the literature. The author suggests an analytic qualitative model for understanding wars and internal political order and makes significant corrections to paradigms that deal with political order and wars, from the Marxist paradigm to the liberal paradigm.

Political parties formed the cornerstone of the liberal democracy for which Britain claimed it was fighting in the Second World War. However, that conflict represented the most sustained challenge to the British party system during the twentieth century. War forced the suspension of normal electoral politics, and exerted considerable extra demands on the time and loyalties of party activists and organizers. This all posed a serious challenge to the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. Parties at War uses an unusually broad and deep range of records of the main political parties to explore how they responded to the challenge of war. Extensive use of the local as well as the national-level papers of the major parties offers a fuller picture than ever previously attempted. Andrew Thorpe focuses on what parties actually did, at both local and national levels, to sustain their organization during the war. He assesses the varying impacts of war, not just on each of the parties, but also over time, and between the different regions and areas of Britain. Thorpe demonstrates how wartime struggles over organization had significance not just for the election of the first majority Labour government in 1945, but also for the longer-term development of 'party' in modern British politics.

Conservatives and liberals alike are currently debating the probable future of the Republican Party. What direction will conservatives and republicans take on foreign policy in the age of Obama? This book tackles this question.

What does it mean that our most popular modern myth is a radical left story about fighting corporate authoritarianism? From its roots in the 1960s new left, Star Wars still speaks to millions of people today. By design, the saga mirrors our own time and politics. A real empire of corporate domination has arisen within weakened and corrupted republics. Now it threatens our existence on a planetary scale. But the popularity of Star Wars also suggests that if we tell the right stories, we can welcome many more people to the rebellion and the fight for a better world...

Politics of War describes the emergence of the United States as a world power between the years 1890 and 1920-our contrivance of the Spanish-American War and our gratuitous entrance into World War I-and by filling in the back story of an era in which mendacious oligarchy organized the country's politics in a manner convenient to its own indolence and greed, Karp offers a clearer understanding of our current political circumstance.

Historian Mary P. Ryan traces the fate of public life and the emergence of ethnic, class, and gender conflict in the 19th-century city. Using as examples New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco, Ryan illustrates the way in which American cities of the 19th century were as full of cultural differences and as fractured by social and economic changes as any metropolis today. 41 photos.

The term "culture wars" refers to the political and sociological polarisation that has characterised American society the past several decades. This new edition provides an enlightening and comprehensive A-to-Z ready reference, now with supporting primary documents, on major topics of contemporary importance for students, teachers, and the general reader. It aims to promote understanding and clarification on pertinent topics that too often are not adequately explained or discussed in a balanced context. With approximately 640 entries plus more than 120 primary documents supporting both sides of key issues, this is a unique and defining work, indispensable to informed discussions of the most timely and critical issues facing America today.

A history of wars through the ages and across the world, and the irrational calculations that so often lie behind them Benjamin Franklin once said, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” But what determines whether war or peace is chosen? Award-winning sociologist Michael Mann concludes that it is a handful of political leaders—people with emotions and ideologies, and constrained by inherited culture and institutions—who undertake such decisions, usually irrationally choosing war and seldom achieving their desired results. Mann examines the history of war through the ages and across the globe—from ancient Rome to Ukraine, from imperial China to the Middle East, from Japan and Europe to Latin and North America. He explores the reasons groups go to war, the different forms of wars, how warfare has changed and how it has stayed the same, and the surprising ways in which seemingly powerful countries lose wars. In masterfully combining ideological, economic, political, and military analysis, Mann offers new insight into the many consequences of choosing war.