Comparative Politics

How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.

Over the past three decades, citizens of democracies who claim to value freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law have increasingly embraced illiberal politicians and platforms. Democracy is in trouble - but who is really to blame? In Our Own Worst Enemy, Tom Nichols challenges the current depictions of the rise of illiberal and antidemocratic movements in the United States and elsewhere as the result of the deprivations of globalization or the malign decisions of elites. Rather, he places the blame for the rise of illiberalism on the people themselves.

A celebrated foreign policy expert and key impeachment witness reveals how declining opportunity has set America on the grim path of modern Russia—and draws on her personal journey out of poverty, as well as her unique perspectives as an historian and policy maker, to show how we can return hope to our forgotten places.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith’s canonical book on political science turns conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single proposition: leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they must. As Bueno de Mesquita and Smith show, democracy is essentially just a convenient fiction.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a "rational" Western nation—even though Russian leaders for centuries have thought and acted based on their country's different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders almost always act in their own predictable and rational ways.

Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, Marine Le Pen, Hugo Chávez - populists are on the rise across the globe. But what exactly is populism? Should everyone who criticizes Wall Street or Washington be called a populist? What precisely is the difference between right-wing and left-wing populism? Does populism bring government closer to the people or is it a threat to democracy? Who are "the people" anyway and who can speak in their name? In this groundbreaking volume, Jan-Werner Müller argues that at populism's core is a rejection of pluralism.

Medicare for All is the leading proposal to achieve to universal health coverage in America. But what is it exactly? How would it work? More importantly, is it practical or practicable? This book goes beyond partisan talking points to offer a serious examination of how Medicare for All would transform the way we give, receive, and pay for healthcare in America.

Christianity or Islam: which is the real religion of peace? Almost any liberal pundit will tell you that there's a religion bent on destroying our Constitution, stripping us of our liberties, and imposing religious rule on the U.S. And that religion is . . .Christianity! About Islam, however, the Left is silent--except to claim a moral equivalence between the two: if Islam has terrorists today, that's nothing compared to the Crusades, inquisitions, and religious wars in Christianity's past.

The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."

Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state.

The practice of Wicca is more popular than ever. While some Wiccans are unable to find a coven, others simply prefer to practice alone. Known as the Father of American Wicca, Raymond Buckland provides this indispensable, comprehensive guide to the solitary practice of Wicca through every season of life. From becoming a witch to improving your life through magic to mastering spells, rites, traditions, and celebrations, this thoroughly modern handbook is the guidebook you need as you travel the time-honored path of the solitary practitioner.

The American dream of equal opportunity is in peril. America's economic inequality is shocking, poverty threatens to become a heritable condition, and our healthcare system is crumbling despite ever increasing costs. In this thought-provoking book, Edward D. Kleinbard demonstrates how the failure to acknowledge the force of brute luck in our material lives exacerbates these crises leading to warped policy choices that impede genuine equality of opportunity for many Americans.

With relentless media coverage, breathtaking events, and extraordinary congressional and independent investigations, it is hard to believe that we still might not know some of the most significant facts about the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet beneath the surface events of the Bush presidency lies a secret history, a series of hidden events that makes a mockery of current debate.

Goodwin describes the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft. With the help of the "muckraking" press, Roosevelt had wielded the Bully Pulpit to challenge and triumph over abusive monopolies, political bosses, and corrupting money brokers. Roosevelt led a revolution that he bequeathed to Taft only to see it compromised as Taft surrendered to money men and big business. The rupture led Roosevelt to run against Taft for president, an ultimately futile race that gave power away to the Democrats.

Alan Watts is today remembered as a trailblazing interpreter of Eastern philosophy, but The Two Hands of God reveals a different side of his multifaceted genius. In this ambitious work, Watts takes listeners on a fascinating journey through the mythology of China, Egypt, India, the Middle East, and medieval Europe. His theme is the human experience of polarity, a condition in which opposing qualities define and complement each other. Watts illustrates the way great sages and artists across time have seen beyond the apparent duality of the universe to find a deeper unity.

Why do politicians engage in nasty politics? Why do they use insult, accusations, intimidation, and in rare cases violence against their domestic political opponents? In Nasty Politics, Thomas Zeitzoff answers these questions by examining this global political trend in the US, Ukraine, and Israel and looking at how key leaders such as Trump, Zelensky, and Netanyahu use it. Nasty Politics highlights how it influences the kinds of politicians who run for office and deepens our understanding for why so many politicians now rely on outsized anger and withering insults for political gain.

Moisés Naím turns to the trends, conditions, and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it. He concentrates on the three “P”s - populism, polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but are combined by today’s autocrats to undermine democratic life in new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people go about gaining it and using it has been transformed.

The US tax code is a total write-off. Overstuffed with loopholes and special interest provisions, it works for no one - except tax lawyers, accountants, and corporations, that is - certainly not me and you. Not for the first time, we have to tear it up and start over. That happened in 1922, and again in 1954, and again in 1986. There's a pattern here; we reach this point every 32 years. Which means the next complete re-write of the tax code is due in 2018. Can we write a new tax code that is fair and simple? In fact, we can.

More than five years in the making, Mark Gevisser’s The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers is a globetrotting exploration of how the human rights frontier around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide - and describe - the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the 21st century. No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results.