'Nick Bryant is brilliant. He has a way of showing you what you've been missing from the whole story whilst never leaving you feeling stupid.' - Emily Maitlis 'Bryant is a genuine rarity, a Brit who understands America' - Washington Post In When America Stopped Being Great, veteran reporter and BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant reveals how America's decline paved the way for Donald Trump's rise, sowing division and leaving the country vulnerable to its greatest challenge of the modern era. Deftly sifting through almost four decades of American history, from post-Cold War optimism, through the scandal-wracked nineties and into the new millennium, Bryant unpacks the mistakes of past administrations, from Ronald Reagan's 'celebrity presidency' to Barack Obama's failure to adequately address income and racial inequality. He explains how the historical clues, unseen by many (including the media) paved the way for an outsider to take power and a country to slide towards disaster. As Bryant writes, 'rather than being an aberration, Trump's presidency marked the culmination of so much of what had been going wrong in the United States for decades - economically, racially, politically, culturally, technologically and constitutionally.' A personal elegy for an America lost, unafraid to criticise actors on both sides of the political divide, When America Stopped Being Great takes the long view, combining engaging storytelling with recent history to show how the country moved from the optimism of Reagan's 'Morning in America' to the darkness of Trump's 'American Carnage'. It concludes with some of the most dramatic events in recent memory, in an America torn apart by a bitterly polarised election, racial division, the national catastrophe of the coronavirus and the threat to US democracy evidenced by the storming of Capitol Hill.

The Politics of Evidence Based Policymaking identifies how to work with policymakers to maximize the use of scientific evidence. Policymakers cannot consider all evidence relevant to policy problems. They use two shortcuts: 'rational' ways to gather enough evidence, and 'irrational' decision-making, drawing on emotions, beliefs, and habits. Most scientific studies focus on the former. They identify uncertainty when policymakers have incomplete evidence, and try to solve it by improving the supply of information. They do not respond to ambiguity, or the potential for policymakers to understand problems in very different ways. A good strategy requires advocates to be persuasive: forming coalitions with like-minded actors, and accompanying evidence with simple stories to exploit the emotional or ideological biases of policymakers.

In early 2010 Russia once again entered a turbulent period. From the system of property distribution, to structure of the political elites and relations between the Center and the regions - various spheres of Russian life are in a state of flux. Two major factors are driving this change: oil prices which are unlikely to grow the way they did in the 2000s and the rapidly deteriorating efficiency of governance. Relations between federal and regional elites, as well as public activism, are derived from these two factors and play an important role of their own. Will change take an evolutionary path or is Russia facing another revolution? The book offers a view of the Russian future until 2025 based on thematic scenarios created by an international team of Russia scholars whose expertise range from politics and economics to demographics and foreign policy.

Preponderance in U.S. Foreign Policy: Monster in the Closet identifies and explains the factors contributing to the presence and severity of blunders, or gross errors in strategic judgment resulting in significant harm to the national interest, in U.S. foreign policy since 1945. It contends that when U.S. policymakers overestimate the capacity of American power to transform the politics of other states, the likelihood of a foreign policy resulting in a blunder increases. It concomitantly contends that the prevailing grand strategy of American preponderance since the Second World War precipitates the frequency and severity of foreign-policy blunders. The dissertation pursues four original lines of research: (1) the presentation of a sui generis framework for foreign-policy evaluation; (2) the new delineation of the concept and classification of the foreign-policy blunder; (3) the gathering of empirical data with regard to the decision-making of policymakers and the results of two corresponding foreign-policy blunders, the Vietnam War and the Iraq War; and (4) the demonstration of the two contentions within the overarching research question of what factors contribute to the presence and severity of blunders in modern U.S. foreign policy. The book presents a theoretical model examining and explaining the cultural and ideational connections between the pursuit of the grand strategy of American preponderance, decision-making in U.S. foreign policy, and blunders in modern U.S. foreign policy.

"A guide to competencies needed by the federal government's new top officials. The transition from one president to another, regardless of which party wins the 2016 elections, will mean many things, one of which is that some 3,000 to 4,000 new senior presidential appointees will take office in the first months of 2017. They will join some 6,000 members of the Senior Executive Service and nearly 1,000 admirals and generals already working in the top ranks of government. But the little-known truth is that the federal government has no formal, or even informal, continual learning program for its new high-level managers. If history is a guide, many of the next president's appointees will never have served in the federal government or, indeed, at any level of government. This means that they will need to hone their considerable skills to meet new challenges. This new, revised, and updated edition of the The Presidential Appointee's Handbook is intended to fill the need for learning by helping new presidential appointees develop the knowledge, skills, and capabilities they will need in their challenging assignments. Additionally, the new edition provides frameworks for success in areas such as strategic foresight, planning for results, risk management, and resilience that are designed to give appointees templates for achieving their goals. Blending theory with the demands of day-to-day practice, the book clarifies the roles and responsibilities of top government executives, helps them build a network of shared experiences and relationships, and lays out common competencies and codes of proper behavior for government leaders at all levels. "

This book studies the dynamics of political discourse in governance processes. It demonstrates the process in which political discourses become normative mechanisms, first marking socially constructed realities in politics, second playing a role in delineating the subsequent policy frames, and third influencing the public sphere.

When David Cameron and Nick Clegg stepped out into the rose garden at No. 10 to launch the first coalition government since the Second World War, some doubted whether the coalition could survive a full term - or even a full year. Five years later, this bold departure for British politics had weathered storms, spending cuts and military strikes, rows, referendums and riots.In this compelling insider account, David Laws lays bare the inner workings of the coalition government from its birth in 2010 to its demise in 2015. As a key figure at the heart of government, he witnessed first-hand the triumphs, the tantrums and the tactical manoeuvrings.Now, he brings this experience to bear, revealing how crucial decisions were made and uncovering the often explosive divisions between and within the coalition parties. Honest, insightful and at times shocking, Coalition shines a powerful light on perhaps the most fascinating political partnership of modern times.

Political parties can make or break women's attempts to stand for political office, yet there have been surprisingly few systematic studies into the 'secret garden' of political recruitment. This book investigates this under-researched area, bringing together insights from feminist and new institutional theory to explore and understand the gendered dynamics of institutional innovation and change in candidate selection and recruitment. Drawing on an original empirical case study of candidate selection in post-devolution Scotland, Gender and Political Recruitment highlights the complex and gendered dynamics of institutional design, continuity and change in the political recruitment process and illustrates the difficulties of reforming recruitment in the face of powerful institutional and gendered legacies.

While globalization and the European construction increasingly undermine the model of the nation-state in the Mediterranean world, conversions reveal the capacity of religion to disrupt, and unsettle previous understandings of political and social relations. Converts' claims and practice are often met with the hostility of the state and the public while converts can often be perceived either as traitors or as unconscious and weak tools of foreign manipulation. Based on first-hand ethnographical research from several countries throughout the Mediterranean region, this book is the first of its kind in studying and analyzing contemporary conversions and their impact on recasting ideas of nationalism and citizenship. In doing so, this interdisciplinary study confronts historical, anthropological, political science and sociological approaches which offers an insight into the national, legal and political challenges of legislating for religious minorities that arise from conversions. Moreover, the specific examination of contemporary religious conversion contributes more widely to debates about the delinking of religion and culture, globalization, and secularism.

This collection of original essays deals with aspects of the history of the House of Lords in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the internal management of the Lords and its external influence.>

Party Influence in Congress challenges current arguments and evidence about the influence of political parties in the US Congress. Steven S. Smith argues that theory must reflect policy, electoral, and collective party goals. These goals call for flexible party organizations and leadership strategies. They demand that majority party leaders control the flow of legislation; package legislation and time action to build winning majorities and attract public support; work closely with a president of their party; and influence the vote choices for legislators. Smith observes that the circumstantial evidence of party influence is strong, multiple collective goals remain active ingredients after parties are created, party size is an important factor in party strategy, both negative and positive forms of influence are important to congressional parties, and the needle-in-the-haystack search for direct influence continues to prove frustrating.

This handy guide and supplemental text examines trends in information and communication technology (ICT) that impact the day-to-day operations of federal, state, and local government. It seeks to improve service delivery, human resource administration, political participation, education, and citizen input (e-democracy), while at the same time recognizes that with ICT's great promise comes great peril in the form of erosion of personal privacy (e-surveillance). Through the use of numerous examples and exercises, Robert Cropf helps students and practitioners alike explore the ways technological change shapes public policy, develop useful tools and skills for working in or with e-government, and understand the role that social media plays in helping to spark political, economic, and social change.

Aside for the secretaries of state, those lofty roles at the Home Office, MOD, Exchequer, and Foreign office, the ministers of the UK are a cast of roles that expand, and contract based on the whims and political needs of the Prime Minister. Within their portfolios those MPs and Lords are immensely powerful - able to reshape whole sectors of British society, grant or refuse government contracts and planning permission, and intervene in matters throughout the country. And yet, few members of the British Public could name every single minister and fewer still could say the extent of each minister's responsibilities. We like to imagine that they are competent, prepared, and entirely in control, and we hold them to standards as though they are. But they are often none of those things. These men and women serve at the pleasure of the Prime Minister. Any misstep or scandal can invite media attention, public outcry, and their swift departure. At the same time, their resignations can shatter political alliances and bring down Prime Ministers and even governments. Their positions are, therefore, both immensely powerful and precarious. In Fifteen Minutes of Power, Peter Riddell draws on interviews with former ministers, conducted on behalf of the Institute of Government, to reveal the fraught existence of these powerful men and women.

Since the first elections of 1994, the South African constitution officially guarantees and promotes a wide range of political and civil rights and institutionalizes the separation of powers with an independent judiciary. This has made South Africa a political symbol of change, hope and democracy in Africa and around the world. However, since the introduction of free and fair electoral processes and with ANC dominating the presidency and the parliamentary seats, the political scene has been scattered by democratic challenges. South Africa remains a flawed democracy, combining free elections and respect for basic civil liberties with problems of governance, an underdeveloped political culture, and low levels of public participation. Today, South Africa stands at a crossroads. While the constitutional democracy has survived, South African democracy seems to have weakened by state capture, internal ANC implosion, corruption, societal polarization, social exclusion, xenophobia, and threats of state economic bankruptcy. South Africa faces growing discontent symbolized in intensified societal and political debates, protests and demonstrations providing for the question if this is a sign of dissatisfied citizens demanding deeper democracy or activities questioning the established constitutional democracy from an anti-democratic, populist, and radical point of view. South Africas Democracy at the Crossroads explores the question; what are the challenges to future democratization in South Africa?

In spite of all that has been written on the U.S. presidency, no book before this has come forth in the 20th century on the president as party leader. A respected senior scholar, James W. Davis has studied the presidency for more than 40 years and has been on the campaign trail with candidates and incumbents and at national party meetings. He has written a lively text that is tailor-made for courses on the presidency, political parties, and elections. This is good reading for everyone who is interested in American government and politics and who wants to understand what makes a president a strong leader. This history and political analysis shows how presidents and political parties need each other and demonstrates why presidents must understand and be immersed in the political process to be effective. The text examines the emergence of the party leader through nominating and general election campaigns, presidential and congressional party interaction, eras of divided government, as well as the relationship between the president and the party's national committee. It also presents the role of the presidential party and of the president in his public roles and then discusses reforms that may strengthen the president as an executive and as a party leader.

Why do governments backtrack on major policy reforms? Reversals of pension privatization provide insight into why governments abandon potentially path-departing policy changes. Academics and policymakers will find this work relevant in understanding market-oriented reform, authoritarian and post-communist politics, and the politics of aging populations. The clear presentation and multi-method approach make the findings broadly accessible in understanding social security reform, an issue of increasing importance around the world. Survival analysis using global data is complemented by detailed case studies of reversal in Russia, Hungary, and Poland including original survey data. The findings support an innovative argument countering the conventional wisdom that more extensive reforms are more likely to survive. Indeed, governments pursuing moderate reform - neither the least nor most extensive reformers - were the most likely to retract. This lends insight into the stickiness of many social and economic reforms, calling for more attention to which reforms are reversible and which, as a result, may ultimately be detrimental.

An exploration of political traditions and their usage in explanations of British politics. This book includes an evaluation of both classical and critical approaches to the British Political Tradition. It also analyses more recent uses of political tradition by Bevir, Rhodes and Marquand.

The presence of women in Congress is at an all-time high - approximately one of every five members is female - and record numbers of women are running for public office for the 2018 midterms. At the same time, Congress is more polarized than ever, and little research exists on how women in Congress view their experiences and contributions to American politics today. Drawing on personal interviews with over three-quarters of the women serving in the 114th Congress (2015-17), the authors analyze how these women navigate today's stark partisan divisions, and whether they feel effective in their jobs. Through first-person perspectives,A Seat at the Tabl looks at what motivates these women's legislative priorities and behavior, details the ways in which women experience service within a male-dominated institution, and highlights why it matters that women sit in the nation's federal legislative chambers. It describes the strategies women employ to overcome any challenges they confront as well as the opportunit es available to them. The book examines how gender interacts with political party, race and ethnicity, seniority, chamber, and district characteristics to shape women's representational influence and behavior, finding that party and race/ethnicity are the two most complicating factors to a singular narrative of women's congressional representation. While congresswomens perspectives, experiences, and influence are neither uniform nor interchangeable, they strongly believe their presence matters in myriad ways, affecting congressional culture, priorities, processes, debates, and outcomes.

This book analyses institutional reforms implemented by Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, under his second administration from 2012 to 2020. Also examined is the evolution in the role of such actors in Japanese politics as bureaucrats, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) factions, and backbenchers of the ruling party. Chapters offer multi-dimensional explanations for the preconditions of successful gradual institutional change in political systems, characterized by relatively strong veto players, rigid governmental structures, and numerous unofficial decision-making rules. It is argued that enhancement of the prime minister's position was implemented through the creative use of pre-existing policy venues, coupled with minor institutional changes in decision-making bodies. Using three illustrated case studies, it is demonstrated how the prime minister managed to centralize the decision-making process: a result of strategic appointment of ministers, empowerment of the Cabinet Secretariat and also taking advantage of wider advisory organs, largely circumventing deliberations on key policies in the ruling party. Seemingly minor changes thus manifested in a major redefinition of decision-making patterns: a result of the long-term perspective of the Abe administration. Gradual Institutional Change in Japan: Kantei Leadership under the Abe Administration will be useful for students seeking to understand the process of successful gradual institutional change and for scholars of Japanese studies and political science.

This book examines the U.S. war on drugs at home and abroad. It provides a brief history of the war on drugs. In addition, it analyzes drug trafficking and organized crime in Colombia and Mexico, and the role of the United States government in counternarcotics policies. This work also examines the opioid epidemic, addiction, and alternative policies.

This book examines the development of Welsh devolution in the context of great economic and political uncertainty. Drawing on research carried out over more than a decade, it explores whether Welsh devolution has developed the capacity to resist internal and external pressures and to continue to pursue a distinctive political and policy agenda.

This book is the first study to offer a comprehensive theoretical and empirically tested answer to the question of ethnic interest group influence. It presents the argument that such groups exert influence through three different types of power - material, identity, and alignment power. Each type of power is operationalized by a variety of indicators, allowing for clear-cut answers as to what makes an ethnic interest group successful - or not. The group in focus in this case study is the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), widely assumed to be one of the most influential ethnic interest groups in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. The analysis comprises a structured-focused comparison of how CANF influenced the outcome of two different legislatives debates that directly affected US policy towards Cuba, and why it failed to do so in a third instance. Ethnic Groups in US Foreign Policy-Making not only provides an innovative approach to the study of these interest groups, but also benefits from strong political relevance, as ethnic interest groups have provoked considerable controversy in the public and among policy makers in recent years.