I entered college in September of 1975, a working class kid from Queens whose father, Hyman Isaac, was an unemployed linotype operator (I wonder how many of our younger readers even know what that is; it's a typesetter, a trade that no longer exists), and whose mother, Sylvia Isaac, was an office secretary. I thus enrolled at Queens College, the neighborhood school, part of the City University of New York which, in 1975, offered free tuition to all New York City high school graduates. A month later, on October 30, the New York Daily News carried one of the most famous newspaper headlines of the century: “Ford to the City: Drop Dead.” The Ford in question was Gerald Ford, the unelected President of the United States who had acceded to the office from the House of Representatives when first the Vice-President (Spiro Agnew) and then the President (Richard Nixon) resigned amid scandal and disgrace. And his “drop dead” to “the city”—New York City—was a strong declaration that the US government would not bail New York out of the severe fiscal crisis in which it was mired. That same autumn, the State of New York passed the New York State Financial Emergency Act of The City of New York, placing the city in receivership, under the fiscal control of a state-appointed Emergency Financial Control Board: EFCB. That acronym, and a second with which it was conjoined—MAC, or “Big MAC,” the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the bond authority led by Felix Rohatyn that became the veritable executive office of the city—is indelibly stamped on the psyches of all who lived in and around New York in those years. For me, a teenage college student, the most palpable effect of all of this was the abolition of tuition-free higher education in New York City in 1976—a sour note during that year's bicentennial celebration of American freedom.

Democratic theory assumes that successful democratic representation will create close ideological congruence between citizens and their governments. The success of different types of election rules in creating such congruence is an ongoing target of political science research. As often in political science, a widely demonstrated empirical finding, the greater congruence associated with proportional representation election rules, has ceased to hold. I suggest that systematically taking account in our theories of conditional effects of local context can often provide a remedy. The systematic incorporation of levels of political party polarization into theory of election laws and ideological congruence extended the temporal and spatial range of the theory. Data from the Comparative Manifesto research program and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) research program are used to test the revised theory empirically. Suggestions for generalizing our theories of political context are offered. The results of this research continue the interactions between substantive research, ongoing political events, and the great normative issues of representation and democracy.

Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation of policy attitudes that we validate using a distinctive opinion survey of our own design, fielded not long after the onset of the Great Recession. The survey tracks citizens' economic experiences, expectations, and policy attitudes within multiple domains of risk (employment, medical care, family, and wealth arrangements). These investigations show that economic insecurity systematically and substantially affects citizens' attitudes toward government's role. Citizens' economic worries largely track exposure to substantial economic shocks. Citizens' policy attitudes in turn appear highly responsive to economic worries, as well as to the experience of economic shocks—with worries and shocks creating greater support for government policies that buffer the relevant economic risk. Attitudes seem most affected by temporally proximate shocks, shocks befalling households that have weak private safety nets, and shocks occurring within the domain most relevant to the policy in question, though attitudes are also (more weakly) correlated with shocks in other domains. The magnitude of these associations rivals partisanship and ideology and almost always exceeds that for conventional measures of socio-economic status. Given the long-term increase in economic insecurity and current sluggish recovery, understanding how insecurity shapes citizens' policy attitudes and political behavior should be a major concern of political science.

It is important to know what wealthy Americans seek from politics and how (if at all) their policy preferences differ from those of other citizens. There can be little doubt that the wealthy exert more political influence than the less affluent do. If they tend to get their way in some areas of public policy, and if they have policy preferences that differ significantly from those of most Americans, the results could be troubling for democratic policy making. Recent evidence indicates that “affluent” Americans in the top fifth of the income distribution are socially more liberal but economically more conservative than others. But until now there has been little systematic evidence about the truly wealthy, such as the top 1 percent. We report the results of a pilot study of the political views and activities of the top 1 percent or so of US wealth-holders. We find that they are extremely active politically and that they are much more conservative than the American public as a whole with respect to important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs. Variation within this wealthy group suggests that the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wealth-holders (people with $40 million or more in net worth) may tend to hold still more conservative views that are even more distinct from those of the general public. We suggest that these distinctive policy preferences may help account for why certain public policies in the United States appear to deviate from what the majority of US citizens wants the government to do. If this is so, it raises serious issues for democratic theory.

Few transformations have been as important in American politics as the incorporation of African Americans into the Democratic Party over the course of the 1930s–60s and the Republican Party's growing association with more conservative positions on race-related policies. This paper traces the relationship between New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism in the mass public. A key finding is that by about 1940, economically-liberal northern white Democratic voters were substantially more pro-civil rights than were economically-conservative northern Republican voters. While partisanship and civil rights views were unrelated among southern whites, economic conservatives were more racially conservative than their economically liberal counterparts, even in the south. These findings suggest that there was a connection between attitudes towards the economic programs of the New Deal and racial liberalism early on, well before national party elites took distinct positions on civil rights. Along with grassroots pressure from African American voters who increasingly voted Democratic in the 1930s–40s, this change among white voters likely contributed to northern Democratic politicians' gradual embrace of civil rights liberalism and Republican politicians' interest in forging a coalition with conservative white southerners. In attempting to explain these linkages, I argue that the ideological meaning of New Deal liberalism sharpened in the late 1930s due to changes in the groups identified with Roosevelt's program and due to the controversies embroiling New Dealers in 1937–38.

This article examines the legal and normative debates about the Occupy Toronto movement in order to illuminate the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It challenges the view that the occupation of parks and plazas was an illegitimate privatization of public space. In both New York City and Toronto, the courts relied on a theory that Habermas called “German Hobbesianism.” This sovereigntist theory of the public was used to justify removing the protesters and disbanding the encampments. The alternative is what I call the populist model of the public, a term which describes the political mobilization of the people outside the institutional structures of the state. While my focus is on public space, I suggest the appropriation of space was the most visible aspect of a broader call for collective control of the common wealth of society. In other words, we should understand the occupations synecdochally as struggles over the meaning and power of public and private.

The so-called “subprime mortgage crisis” has led to intense scrutiny of American housing policy, mortgage finance, and even the goods of homeownership. Some critics allege that the housing bubble and ensuing financial crisis were consequences of misguided state intervention, while others contend that the sources of the crisis lay in the pathologies of unregulated markets. Both sides, however, treat the crisis and its underlying causes primarily through an economic lens of cost-benefit analysis. Building on the insights of contemporary political theorists and the new institutionalism in political science, we consider American housing policy from the vantage of virtue theory. Not only is housing and mortgage policy inevitably normative, but public policy can be an important tool in fostering what we call the “subprime virtues” of truth-telling, promise-keeping, frugality, moderation, commitment, foresight, and judgment that are absolute prerequisites for any decent society.

Although the subprime crisis regenerated interest in and stimulated debate about how to study the politics of global finance, it has not sparked the development of new approaches to International Political Economy (IPE), which remains firmly rooted in actor-centered models. We develop an alternative network-based approach that shifts the analytical focus to the relations between actors. We first depict the contemporary global financial system as a network, with a particular focus on its hierarchical structure. We then explore key characteristics of this global financial network, including how the hierarchic network structure shapes the dynamics of financial contagion and the source and persistence of power. Throughout, we strive to relate existing research to our network approach in order to highlight exactly where this approach accommodates, where it extends, and where it challenges existing knowledge generated by actor-centered models. We conclude by suggesting that a network approach enables us to construct a systemic IPE that is theoretically and empirically pluralist.

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the most severe global economic downturn since the Great Depression. The crisis has provoked soul-searching among economists, yet international political economy (IPE) scholars have been relatively sanguine. We argue that IPE has strayed too far away from studying the geopolitical and systemic causes and consequences of the global economy. IPE must explain the generation and transformation of global financial orders. Both the distribution of political power and the content of economic ideas will shape any emergent global financial order. A Kuhnian life-cycle framework of global financial orders permits a systemic approach to global finance that integrates the study of power and social logics into our understanding of markets.

Through a discussion of the 2008 mortgage crisis and its similarities to the Great Depression of the 1930's and the Great Recession of 2007–09, I argue that the very notions of economic “crisis” and “recovery” are politically and ideologically constructed, and that conditions of vulnerability, often simply taken for granted as part of the normal social landscape when they affect marginalized populations, become regarded as crises when they affect dominant groups. Each of these crises, I argue, reveals different facets of the ways in which the power, normativity, and privilege of those perceived to be affected by economic hard times serve (1) to construct some economic troubles as “normal” and others as “crises;' (2) to prevent economic problems related to structural inequalities from being treated as crises by dominant political actors and institutions; and (3) to shape ideas about the ostensible solutions and ends to economic crises. By calling attention to these features of economic “crisis,” I aim to demonstrate the relevance of scholarship on race, class, gender, and intersectionality to the understanding of fundamental questions of contemporary political economy not often viewed from this perspective.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008, authors and politicians have regularly reminded us of the duality of crisis and opportunity. For policymakers, administrations, and candidates, crises represent opportunities to implement long-desired reforms, seize the public stage, and reframe old arguments in the light of today's urgency. As the books under review here suggest, crises also represent opportunities for scholars. Arguments that failed to gain traction in the past may now deserve new attention as they help us understand the roots of crisis or how to recover from it. New audiences may be receptive to established arguments, now that other policies have caused us grief and are failing to promote recovery. The public and decision makers could be open to listening to these arguments and their implications, now that crisis has revealed deep vulnerabilities.

The three books that form the basis of this review essay represent trenchant critiques of neoliberal economic theory and policies, including such foundational policy assumptions as globalization, deregulation, and reliance on sophisticated financial tools. Their authors, three prominent economists, draw our attention to problems of market failure, such as rampant rent-seeking behavior and externalities. By focusing on entrenched dilemmas that include widening inequality and the compatibility of democracy and globalization, they remind us of the ways in which markets are embedded in social institutions, and how such institutions both respond to markets and shape market outcomes. All bring with them a deep commitment to understanding the functioning of society and how to maintain the benefits of global capitalism while reining in its most destructive implications.

We are in an era of Big Books, books with a magisterial sweep of the history of the world. All share the desire to explain why some countries flourish, why some start and stall on the path to development, and why others seem never to find the path at all. In sociology, Big Books date back at least to Karl Marx and Max Weber. Their publication has been more or less regular ever since, and their authors tend to elaborate the sort of grand and general theories that have come under increasing attack in recent decades, given methodological advances that have transformed analytic tastes.

The early years of the twenty-first century have not been good for global capitalism. An international credit crisis and a widespread recession, with all of their attendant anxieties and miseries, have unsurprisingly shaken public support for free-market processes—especially within many of capitalism's traditional strongholds. As a colorful token of this lost faith, The Socialist Economic Bulletin, published by London's leftist former mayor Ken Livingstone, reported in 2010 a “tenfold increase” in sales of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in Germany from the year prior. Meanwhile, from the other end of the ideological spectrum, in 2011 The Economist reported that public support for free-market economics actually fared relatively well in Marx's native Germany, where it drew the highest level of support among the 25 national populations surveyed (just edging out nominally communist China). Indeed, support in both Germany and China was strong compared to capitalism's depressed standing in the United States. The percentage of American respondents willing to give at least qualified assent (i.e., to choose “somewhat agree” or better) to the claim that it is the “best” economic system fell from a leading 80% early in the millennium to just 59% by 2010.

Mark S. Anner opens Solidarity Transformed by referencing two wrenching changes that have transformed the world for workers: neoliberalism—the scaling back of welfare states, industrial policies, and labor protections—and globalization. He questions how these shifts have affected workers and how worker organizations in diverse settings have responded.

In the United States, the borderline obsessive academic focus with judicial independence as a political science concept would lead one to believe that judicial independence as an empirical political reality is persistently endangered. And yet, periodic partisan apoplexy about controversial Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding, it is anything but: Even with judicial potency in polities as disparate as Israel, India, and Germany, the American judiciary remains perhaps the most powerful and most stable in the world. But with all due respect to John Locke, all the world is emphatically not America. Elsewhere, of course, there are locales where the climate surrounding law and courts is rather different, where judicial independence is inconsistent, threatened, or downright fictitious. It is in the study of these nations that judicial independence deserves the central place in public law scholarship it already occupies in America. And with the publication of Maria Popova's Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies, students of at least two sets of those nations—post-Soviet states specifically and emerging democracies more generally—have both a clarion call for what they could be studying and a first-rate example of how they could be studying it.

I want to thank Justin Crowe for his thorough and generous review of my book. I wish our paths had crossed when I was still at the revision stage of the manuscript. I could have used his fresh perspective to strengthen the book's message to a wider audience.

Justin Crowe has written an accessible, thorough, and compelling history of the institutional development of the US Supreme Court and the federal judiciary it sits atop, from their inconspicuous inception in February 1790 to their current status as, perhaps, the most powerful judiciary in the world.

I thank Maria Popova for her generous, thoughtful, and constructive review of my book and am delighted to hear that despite my exclusively American focus, she finds much of import in my work for scholars of comparative judicial politics. In fact, her breakdown of the potentially generalizable theoretical insights to be drawn from my book was as edifying as it was gratifying. Needless to say, had I been aware of the ways in which some of the empirical phenomena I seek to explain in the American case have since been effectively replicated in, or speak to the circumstances of, other polities, I would have made a deliberate attempt to highlight that fact.