Building on We the People’s unparalleled focus on participation and the citizen’s role, new coauthor Megan Ming Francis uses her experience as an instructor and scholar of race and ethnicity politics to?energize coverage of race and social movements. New Check Your Understanding questions—in both print and ebook formats—motivate students and builds confidence in their learning. In the Norton Illumine Ebook Check Your Understanding questions include rich answer-feedback that helps students practice their learning. InQuizitive activities confirm chapter-level understanding and allow students to practice applying essential concepts.

The authors of this timely book, Who Gets What?, harness the expertise from across the social sciences to show how skyrocketing inequality and social dislocation are fracturing the stable political identities and alliances of the postwar era across advanced democracies. Drawing on extensive evidence from the United States and Europe, with a focus especially on the United States, the authors examine how economics and politics are closely entwined. Chapters demonstrate how the new divisions that separate people and places-and fragment political parties-hinder a fairer distribution of resources and opportunities. They show how employment, education, sex and gender, and race and ethnicity affect the way people experience and interpret inequality and economic anxieties. Populist politics have addressed these emerging insecurities by deepening social and political divisions, rather than promoting broad and inclusive policies.

The extraordinary swings in the scope and content of the policy agenda during the first Clinton administration revealed a fundamental partisan divide over the social role of the federal government. This book argues that the recent conflicts over social policy represent key elements in strategies that parties designed in an attempt to consolidate their hold over the federal government. Long frustrated by divided government, each party exceeded its electoral mandate in hopes of enacting major policy reforms aimed to shift politics in their direction for the foreseeable future.

The book traces the overreaching and limited legislative success that characterized the first Clinton administration's approach to three distinctive features of politics and policymaking: the polarization of political elites; the predominance of advertising campaigns and intense interest group politics as political parties have ceased to mobilize ordinary people; and the unprecedented role that budgetary concerns now play in social policymaking. Although neither party managed to enact its major transforming agenda, Congress did pass new policies--most notably welfare reform--that together with a host of other changes in the states and the private sector altered the landscape for social policy. The poor have been the biggest losers as Democrats and Republicans have fought to win the middle class over to their vision of the future.

The authors first analyze the institutions and tools of policymaking, including Congress, the political use of public opinion polling, and the politics of the deficit. They then consider policies designed to win over the middle class, including health care policy, employer-provided social benefits, wages and jobs, and crime policy. Last, they address policies targeted at the disadvantaged, including welfare, affirmative action, and urban policy.

In addition to the editor, the contributors include John Ferejohn, Lawrence R. Jacobs, Robert Y. Shapiro, Paul Pierson, Mark A. Peterson, Cathie Jo Martin, Ann Lin, R. Kent Weaver, Linda Williams, and John Mollenkopf.

Copublished with the Russell Sage Foundation

The mission of the "Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects" series is to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars about the effectiveness of select policy approaches, reforms, and experiments in addressing the key social and economic problems facing today's cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas.

Volume four of the series introduces and examines thoroughly the concept of regional resilience, explaining how resilience can be promoted --or impeded --by regional characteristics and public policies.

The authors illuminate how the walls that now segment metropolitan regions across political jurisdictions and across institutions --and the gaps that separate federal laws from regional realities --have to be bridged in order for regions to cultivate resilience.

Contributors: Patricia Atkins, George Washington University; Pamela Blumenthal, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; Sarah Ficenec, George Washington University; Alec Friedhoff, Brookings Institution; Kathryn Foster, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Juliet Gainsborough, Bentley University; Edward Hill, Cleveland State University; Kate Lowe, Cornell University; John Mollenkopf, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Mai Nguyen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California; Rolf Pendall, Urban Institute; Nancy Pindus, Urban Institute; Sarah Reckhow, Michigan State University; Travis St. Clair, George Washington University; Todd Swanstrom, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Margaret Weir, University of California, Berkeley; Howard Wial, Brookings Institution; Harold Wolman, George Washington University

Building on We the People's unparalleled focus on participation and the citizen's role, new coauthor Megan Ming Francis uses her experience as an instructor and scholar of race and ethnicity politics to energize coverage of race and social movements. New Check Your Understanding questions--in both print and ebook formats--motivate students and builds confidence in their learning. In the Norton Illumine Ebook Check Your Understanding questions include rich answer-feedback that helps students practice their learning. InQuizitive activities confirm chapter-level understanding and allow students to practice applying essential concepts.

The authors of this timely book, Who Gets What?, harness the expertise from across the social sciences to show how skyrocketing inequality and social dislocation are fracturing the stable political identities and alliances of the postwar era across advanced democracies. Drawing on extensive evidence from the United States and Europe, with a focus especially on the United States, the authors examine how economics and politics are closely entwined. Chapters demonstrate how the new divisions that separate people and places-and fragment political parties-hinder a fairer distribution of resources and opportunities. They show how employment, education, sex and gender, and race and ethnicity affect the way people experience and interpret inequality and economic anxieties. Populist politics have addressed these emerging insecurities by deepening social and political divisions, rather than promoting broad and inclusive policies.

Americans claim a strong attachment to the work ethic and regularly profess support for government policies to promote employment. Why, then, have employment policies gained only a tenuous foothold in the USA? To answer this question, Margaret Weir highlights two related elements: the power of ideas in policy-making and the politics of interest formation. Rather than seeing policy as a straightforward outcome of public preferences, she shows how ideas frame problems and how interests form around possibilities created by the interplay of ideas and politics. By examining Keynesian macroeconomic policy in the 1930s and 1940s, labour market policies in the 1960s and 1970s, and efforts to develop new planning mechanisms in the late 1970s, Weir shows how early decisions restricted the scope for later initiatives. As a result, policies in the 1960s emphasized racial differences and thus drew opposition for creating special interest measures for Afro-Americans.

This volume places the welfare debates of the 1980s in the context of past patterns of U.S. policy, such as the Social Security Act of 1935, the failure of efforts in the 1940s to extend national social benefits and economic planning, and the backlashes against "big government" that followed reforms of the 1960s and early 1970s. Historical analysis reveals that certain social policies have flourished in the United States: those that have appealed simultaneously to middle-class and lower-income people, while not involving direct bureaucratic interventions into local communities. The editors suggest how new family and employment policies, devised along these lines, might revitalize broad political coalitions and further basic national values.

The contributors are Edwin Amenta, Robert Aponte, Mary Jo Bane, Kenneth Finegold, John Myles, Kathryn Neckerman, Gary Orfield, Ann Shola Orloff, Jill Quadagno, Theda Skocpol, Helene Slessarev, Beth Stevens, Margaret Weir, and William Julius Wilson.

Emphasizing the relevance of politics and government in everyday life, "We the People" provides tools to help students think critically about American government and politics. The Sixth Edition has been carefully updated to reflect most recent developments, including the ongoing conflict in Iraq and the 2006 midterm elections. Complemented by a rich package of multimedia tools for instructors and students, including a new video-clip DVD, "We the People" is now more pedagogically effective than ever.