Stories of religious conversion have been told for millennia. Yet many prominent figures such as Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton, and Rick Perry have also used stories of their change from one political worldview to another as a communication strategy aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the public. This book is about political conversion stories in public discourse, in their evolution from and interactions with religion. From a historical perspective, it charts the development of conversion narratives from religious contexts to their contemporary applications as specifically political messages. Since these narratives continue to be used in the culture wars, this book examines several related autobiographies that contributed to the use of this strategy in contemporary U.S. politics. Each case shows how shifts during the postwar period called for conversion texts under varying guises, and illustrates how and why the majority of these stories have been of conversions from the ideological left to the right. Examining political conversion as a form of public persuasion, Political Conversion ultimately provides insight into what these types of civic-religious stories mean for democratic communication and communities.

New York City has the largest council-sponsored Participatory Budgeting (PB) processes in North America. From its inception in Brazil, PB was a process that empowered the least-advantaged members of the community by providing a way to propose budget allocations through voting. This book reports on a multi-methodological study of New York City's participatory budgeting (PB) process from the perspective of a city resident over time. A participatory budgeting slogan purports that the initiative offers "real power" and "real money" to constituents at a local level. To critically examine such top-down assertions, and different than much that has been written about PB, this book researches and navigates its events the way a member of the community would see it. The study reveals a lack of transparency, manipulation by city agencies, the favorable treatment of insider proposed projects, and a failure to reveal the basis of project costs. It also finds that there is no singular participatory budgeting project in New York City. Instead, there are numerous participatory budget projects, as many as there are council members who engage in the practice. This book provides a ground-level view of these limitations and recommends substantial reform.

This book engages a key question facing governments and similar institutions in countries of immigration or emigration: how should these governments and institutions communicate with immigrants so that they will listen to and act on their messages? Drawing on original research with Mexican emigrants in New York and the Mexican government's Seguro Popular health care program, the authors examine the ways in which governments integrate migrants into diasporic political, medical, educational, and other systems, and how migrant-sending countries communicate with their emigrants abroad. In analyzing how these efforts fail or succeed, this book presents strategies and policy recommendations that many governments and institutions can use to engage their citizens or clients ethically and effectively. Offering a valuable approach to the study of race, migration, and public policy, this book will be of key importance to researchers and graduate students in public health, sociology, marketing and business, political science, Latinx studies, and international communication.

Shows the maddening difficulties that voter ID requirements create for participants in US democracy and offers concrete solutions for every person's vote and voice to count Over the past decade, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of voter ID laws has skyrocketed, limiting the ability of nearly twenty-five million eligible voters from exercising their constitutional right to cast a vote. In States of Confusion, Don Waisanen, Sonia Jarvis, and Nicole Gordon explore this crisis and the difficulties it has created for American voters, offering practical solutions for this increasingly important problem. Focusing on ten states with the strictest voter documentation requirements, the authors show how people face major barriers to exercising their fundamental democratic right to vote and are therefore slipping through the cracks of our electoral system. They explore voter experiences by drawing on hundreds of online surveys, audits of 150 election offices, community focus groups, and more. Waisanen, Jarvis, and Gordon call on policymakers to adopt uniform national voter identification standards that are simple, accessible, and cost-free. States of Confusion offers a comprehensive and up-to-date look at the voter ID crisis in our country, as well solutions for practitioners, government agencies, and citizens.

This project offers a new leadership framework for the next generation of nonprofit professionals. Based on five years of data collected from the New York Community Trust Leadership Fellowship - designed to address leadership development gaps in the nonprofit sector - it constructs three dimensions and eleven themes for the theory and practice of leadership standpoints. Leadership standpoints are a framework for practicing inclusion, building spaces for performance, and thinking and acting with range. Those using leadership standpoints continuously interact with diverse stakeholders, constantly verify others' views and interests, and remain keenly attentive to power distributions, material constraints, and hidden or unacknowledged voices that need surfaced, while expanding their personal and social outlooks to elevate performance and meet pressing demands best addressed through broadly informed decisions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book engages a key question facing governments and similar institutions in countries of immigration or emigration: how should these governments and institutions communicate with immigrants so that they will listen to and act on their messages? Drawing on original research with Mexican emigrants in New York and the Mexican government's Seguro Popular health care program, the authors examine the ways in which governments integrate migrants into diasporic political, medical, educational, and other systems, and how migrant-sending countries communicate with their emigrants abroad. In analyzing how these efforts fail or succeed, this book presents strategies and policy recommendations that many governments and institutions can use to engage their citizens or clients ethically and effectively. Offering a valuable approach to the study of race, migration, and public policy, this book will be of key importance to researchers and graduate students in public health, sociology, marketing and business, political science, Latinx studies, and international communication.