Bücher der Reihe Elements in American Politics

The Lautenberg Act was passed in 2016, winning support across businesses and environmental groups. Does that portend more progressive actions? We show it as a function of the status quo changing due to regulatory efforts abroad, and in the United States, and from outside pressures on business. These processes may not be unique to toxics.

Directly compares the British House of Commons and United States House of Representatives. Through similar motivations, member ideology and party agenda are revealed to produce party disloyalty based on data of legislative voting agenda following changes in agenda control. Legislative scholars are encouraged to regard commonalities of both political systems.

Does Trump's election mean Americans reflexively resist factual information? Evidence strongly suggests not. Americans across the political spectrum are responsive to factual information, even when facts undercut claims made by their party's politicians. However, being more factually accurate does not generally change people's political beliefs.

Following the 2014 elections, a group of organized conservatives called the House Freedom Caucus regularly issued threats against its own party's leadership. This Element posits explanations for why such threat-making might occur and what might increase its likelihood of success, then tests those explanations.

In the United States, politics has become tribal and personalized. Using data from surveys, experiments, and Americans' own words, we explore the content of partisan stereotypes and find that they come in three main flavors-parties as their own tribes, coalitions of other tribes, or vehicles for political issues.

Building on a deep theoretical foundation and drawing on numerous examples, we examine how policies spread across the American states. We argue that for good policies to spread while bad policies are pushed aside, states must learn from one another.

A central question in political representation is whether government responds to the people. To understand that, we need to know what the government is doing, and what the people think of it. We seek to understand a key question necessary to answer those bigger questions: How does American public opinion move over time?

This Element explores the growing party divisions on the environment in the United States. It draws upon quantitative and qualitative data from several decades of national and state politics. The study contributes theory to the party position change literature, showing that interest groups change parties, but in turn are changed by them. In the 1970s the characteristics that predicted voters' attitudes on the environment also predicted legislators' votes. Yet as environmentalists and their opponents aligned with parties, officials had incentives to set their own views aside to represent new party constituencies. Influence flowed in both directions, however. Environmentalists were drawn to the Democrats as they confronted GOP-linked business lobbies. Environmentalists' resulting need to cooperate with other groups close to Democrats led them to change their positions. Although environmentalists were long unwelcoming to minorities, they embraced immigration reform, allied with unions on trade, and worked with civil rights lobbies and labor in battles over judicial nominations. The Element concludes with discussion of how the current party alignment on the environment might change.

With the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election, populists have come to power in the US for the first time in many years. However, US political scientists have been flat-footed in their response, failing to anticipate or measure populism's impact on the campaign or to offer useful policy responses. In contrast, populism has long been an important topic of study for political scientists studying other regions, especially Latin America and Europe. The conceptual and theoretical insights of comparativist scholars can benefit Americanists, and applying their techniques can help US scholars and policymakers place events in perspective.