New Books In Public Policy

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press, 2013) locates the emergence of a series of three “moral crusades” against narcotics that each accompanied a perceived crisis in collective values and political legitimacy in nineteenth and twentieth century Japan. In the first moral crisis after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, opium became a symbol of difference between Japan and an “Other” epitomized by Qing China, as Japan sought to “leave Asia” and “enter” the West. Here, Kingsberg traces a series of attempts to regulate drug use in Taiwan in the wake of Japan’s transformation into a formal empire. Between the end of WWI and Japan’s defeat in WWII, Japan saw its second moral crisis as it navigated the most protracted and intense moral crusade against narcotics in its history. The central chapters of Kingsberg’s b

Much of the progress in technology today has come about as a result of innovators who did not seek prior approval from regulatory bodies and such. Yet, even with the beneficial results from innovations like the commercial Internet, mobile technologies, and social networks, a disposition exists to be overly cautious with respect to new things.  Adam Thierer calls this the “precautionary principle” in his new book Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom (Mercatus Center, 2014). The “precautionary principle”–which, Thierer argues, is based on fear and concern about loss of control–limits the creativity inherent in unfettered tinkering. In contrast, Thierer advocates “permissionless innovation,” an attitude that would allow experimentation to continue without hinderance. Of course does not mean that there is no use for policies for new technology, as some developments require regulation. Policymakers should, however, take a “wait and see” approach to setting rules fo

Nicholas Carnes is the author of White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Carnes is an assistant professor of public policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. There is surprisingly little in the research literature on the link between social class and legislative behavior. For a topic that seems so ripe for investigation, Carnes’ data collection and analysis open new ground and answer pressing questions. He shows that formerly blue collar workers who serve in Congress behave differently than formerly white collar workers. Blue collar workers are in the extreme minority in numbers, meaning their efforts to pass legislation that tilts towards the working class are often stymied. Carnes offers fresh insight into why this matters for representation more generally and several recommendations for how to rectify this in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arica Coleman did not start out to write a legal history of “the one-drop rule,” but as she began exploring the relationship between African American and Native peoples of Virginia, she unraveled the story of how the law created a racial divide that the Civil Rights movement has never eroded. Virginia’s miscegenation laws, from the law of hypo-descent to the Racial Integrity Act, are burned into the hearts and culture of Virginians, white, black and Indian. That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia (Indiana University Press, 2014)  demonstrates how people continue to insist on racial discrimination and racial purity even though the legal barriers have been lifted and the biological imperatives of “blood purity” have been discredited. Dr. Coleman traces the origins the one-drop rule–that one African American ancestor made a person “colored”–from the days of slavery to the present. She shows how Indians came to disavow their African Amer

In 1927 Russian-American legal theorist Alexander Sack introduced the doctrine of “odious debt.” Sack argued that a state’s debt is “odious” and should not be transferable to successor governments after a revolution, if it was incurred without the consent of the people; and not for their benefit. This doctrine has largely been rejected, with a firm presumption of “sovereign continuity” emerging instead: post-revolutionary governments must repay sovereign debt even if it was incurred to cover the personal expenses of plutocrats. If they fail to do so, their credit reputation is harmed. As Odette Lienau explains in a striking line, “we can now imagine prosecuting the leaders of a fallen regime for crimes against a state’s population while simultaneously asking that population to acknowledge and repay the fallen regime’s debts.” In Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics, Reputation, and Legitimacy in Modern Finance (Harvard University Press, 2014), Lienau unfolds the historical conditions from which this seeming

In this episode, I talk with Carlo C. DiClemente, a Presidential Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County, about his co-authored book, Substance Abuse Treatment and the Stages of Change: Selecting and Planning Interventions (Guilford Press, 2013). We examine the stages-of-change model (also known as the transtheoretical model) in behavioral change, particularly in substance abuse and drug addiction treatment. We discuss the complexity involved in substance abuse, and the need to consider stage status in effective treatment. We talk about relapse and its implications for individuals’ recovery trajectories. The importance of the individual client as the central mechanism of change is emphasized throughout our discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (Ashgate, 2013), a new book by Constance DeVereaux (Colorado State University) and Martin Griffin (University of Tennessee) sets out to challenge assumptions about policy making and culture in the contemporary world. The book has, at its centre, an understanding of narrative as both a practice that is central to what it means to be human and an analytical tool for understanding policy and culture. The book uses a wide range of case studies to illustrate the importance of this dual understanding of narrative to account for debates and differences between understandings of global culture as potentially threatening, in the form of globalization, or liberating, in the form of transnationalism. The case studies range from film and media studies, historical examples of Berlin and the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts, as well as questions over cultural heritage, through to readings of fictional case studies using the

In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book details the country’s halting attempts to craft a copyright regime responsive both to its position as a net importer of published work and to its peculiar political geography as a British dominion bordering the United States. Bannerman charts Canada’s early, largely unsuccessful effort to craft a less restrictive policy in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 1886 Berne Convention-the multilateral agreement that established the enduring framework for the international copyright system. The main obstacle, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was Britain’s insistence on a uniform and Berne-friendly policy throughout the empire. Even as those imperial constraints fell away over the first half of the 20th century, Canada increasingly aligned with powerful net exporters like France and Britain–in large part, Bannerman shows,

In this episode, I sit down with Karen G. Weiss, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University, to talk about her book, Party School: Crime, Campus, and Community (Northeastern University Press, 2013). We discuss the subculture of the “party university,” and how such an environment normalizes and encourages extreme binge drinking and reckless partying. We talk about how extreme partying harms students as well as the larger community, and why students willingly put themselves (and others) at risk for victimization. We discuss why the party subculture appears so resistant to change, and why efforts from university personnel and law enforcement often appear futile. We also explore possible ways to transform the party subculture and address the problems it causes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Weil is the author of The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is a visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. The Sovereign Citizen is an historical study of denaturalization in the United States. It tells the story of what Weil believes is a revolution in the concept of citizenship, through exhaustive archival research. But is also a story about the actors that have made law what it is – immigrants, political radicals, criminal defense lawyers, bureaucrats, and judges.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Darnton, author of books, articles, and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. Darnton joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the future of libraries, the printed press, and his project – the Digital Public Library of America, or D.P.L.A. – which he hopes will foster a culture of “Open Access” to help promote the free communication of knowledge and sharing of intellectual wealth in order to create this “digital commonwealth.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Burkart‘s Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Conflicts (MIT Press, 2014) considers the democratic potential and theoretical significance of groups espousing radical perspectives on intellectual property and cyber-liberty. Focusing on the Swedish Pirate Party, Burkart details the history of these movements, noting the ways in which they have impacted both the local politics of Europe and the international culture industries. Employing conceptual models drawn from both critical theory and new social movement theory, Burkart makes a compelling case that the politics of piracy must understood as a defense of common culture. Just as social movements have come together to protect the environment, pirate politics aim to keep the Internet a space in individual and communal rights are not overrun by the interests of governments and corporations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many have argued in recent years that the U.S. constitutional system exalts individual rights over responsibilities, virtues, and the common good. Answering the charges against liberal theories of rights, James Fleming and Linda McClain develop and defend a civic liberalism that takes responsibilities and virtues–as well as rights–seriously. In Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (Harvard University Press, 2013), they provide an account of ordered liberty that protects basic liberties stringently, but not absolutely, and permits government to encourage responsibility and inculcate civic virtues without sacrificing personal autonomy to collective determination. The battle over same-sex marriage is one of many current controversies the authors use to defend their understanding of the relationship among rights, responsibilities, and virtues. Against accusations that same-sex marriage severs the rights of marriage from responsible sexuality, procreation, and parenthood, they argue that same-se

In Emergencies and Politics: A Sober Hobbesian Approach (Cambridge UP, 2013), Tom Sorell argues that emergencies can justify types of action that would normally be regarded as wrong. Beginning with the ethics of emergencies facing individuals, he explores the range of effective and legitimate private emergency response and its relation to public institutions, such as national governments. He develops a theory of the response of governments to public emergencies which indicates the possibility of a democratic politics that is liberal but that takes seriously threats to life and limb from public disorder, crime or terrorism. Informed by Hobbes, Schmitt and Walzer, but substantially different from them, the book widens the justification for recourse to normally forbidden measures, without resorting to illiberal politics. This book will interest students of politics, philosophy, international relations and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, however, environmental concerns often brought together public figures with wildly different political orientations. Throughout his book, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan (University of Washington Press, 2013), Brian Allen Drake analyzes the complex relationship between modern conservatism and postwar environmentalism. Through a wide-ranging narrative that fuses together elements of political, intellectual, and cultural history, Drake illuminates the tense nature of a movement that sought to balance an aversion to centralized government power with a desire to protect America’s natural landscape. Brian Allen Drake is a lecturer in the University of Georgia History Department. His previous work has appeared in Environmental History, the Great Plains Quarterly, and

Pretty much every day you can read an article–usually somewhat intemperate–about how women can or can’t “have it all.” Rarely, however, do you read anything about the way in which men try to balance work and family. The assumption seems to be that fathers either: a) don’t want to “balance” anything; or b)say they want to “balance” work and family but actually don’t, or don’t try very hard to bring it off. As Gayle Kaufman points out in her terrific new book Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2013), both of these assumptions are, well, wrong. Most American fathers want to play an active role in their family’s lives, and particularly in the rearing of their children. They face the same challenge as their working wives: how to have rich working lives and nurture their families all at the same time. In Superdads, Kaufman tries to figure out how and to what extent they are finding a good “balance.” Her answers are sobering for those wishing to “have it all.” In the live

Children born in the 1970s and 1980s received just a handful of vaccinations: measles, rubella, and a few others. Beginning the 1990s, the numbers of mandated vaccines exploded, so that today a fully-vaccinated child might receive almost three dozen vaccinations by the time he or she turns six. Worries over vaccinations are nothing new, but in recent years they have reached a new state of intensity. Supposed links between vaccinations and the spike in diagnoses of autism have generated a well-publicized anti-vaccination movement. Mark A. Largent addresses the roots of this controversy in Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), a book that is as refreshing for its accessible, readable style as it is for the nuanced, dispassionate, and fair manner it treats the players in this debate, from health care professionals to Jenny McCarthy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Virginia Gray, David Lowery, and Jennifer Benz are the authors of Interest Group$ and Health Care Reform Across the United State$ (Georgetown University Press, 2013). Gray is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, UNC, Chapel Hill, Lowery is Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University, and Jennifer Benz is a Senior Researcher at NORC at the University of Chicago. In the wake of the passage of national health care reform (Affordable Care Act (ACA)), we may all have overlooked the plethora of policy making at the state level. Why is it that the ACA took over 50 years to pass, yet states have regularly changed their own health care regulations? This book investigates how state policy makers have reformed health care laws from 1988-2002 with a focus on: market controls; mandated employee coverage; coverage for needy families; and single-payer systems. As the title suggests, they pay particular attention to the role interest groups have played in reform. The authors end the book with a

Gregory Heller is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Heller is Senior Advisor at Econsult Solutions, Inc. in Philadelphia. Bacon’s vision and leadership on urban renewal helped to create the physical landscape of what Philadelphia is today. He was central to many of the public and private projects that recreated this modern city. But, as the book title suggests, Bacon’s legacy is more than just as a planner. Heller dubs Heller ‘the planner as policy entrepreneur’. In doing so, Heller’s biography of Bacon can be read as an extended case-study in the policy process and urban politics. Bacon’s deep belief in public participation resulted in a vision for planning that was profoundly democratic and a great departure from many of his contemporaries who were often dismissive or indifferent of public input. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Social stability and justice requires that we live together according to rules. And this in turn means that the rules must be enforced. Accordingly, we sometimes see fit to punish those who break the rules. Hence society features a broad system of institutions by which we punish. But there is a deep and longstanding philosophical disagreement over what, precisely, punishment is for. The standard views are easy to anticipate. Some say that we punish in order to give offenders what they deserve. Others claim that we punish in order to encourage others to obey the rules. Still others see punishment as a process of rehabilitating offenders. Recent theorists have attempted to combine these views in various ways. The debates go on. In his new book, Punishment (Routledge, 2012), Thom Brooks reviews the leading debates concerning punishment and makes a compelling case for a distinctive theory of punishment called the “unified theory.” Brooks contends that the unified theory can embrace several highly intuitive penal