University of Michigan Press Blog

Daily Show With John Stewart: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Co-Author of "The Strategy of Campaigning," Predicts the Future of Iran's Nuclear Program

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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is the co-author (with Kiron K. Skinner, Serhiy Kudelia, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and Condoleezza Rice) of University of Michigan Press release The Strategy of Campaigning (2007), which explores the political careers of Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin, two of the most galvanizing and often controversial political figures of our time. Both men overcame defeat early in their political careers and rose to the highest elected offices in their respective countries.

Author of "Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea" Interview with The Young Turks

Joshua Hortwiz is one of two authors of this book Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea. He received a law degree from George Washington University and is currently a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

|Visit the authors' website at: Coalition to Stop Gun Violence|

|Also watch: "Guns and Liberty" on C-Span, Horwitz and Anderson at Hartford University|

Republican Heroes: The Racial Breakdown

Below: "Republican Heroes," from the Republican National Committee Site

Of the Republican Heroes posted:

• 8 out of 18 are identified as African American men
• 5 out of 18 are white men
• 1 is identified as a Latino man
• 4 out of 18 are white women
• 0 out of 18 are identified as Latino women
• 0 out of 18 are identified as African American women
• 0 out of 18 are identified as Asian American
• 0 out of 18 are identified as Native American

Want to know more?

Check out Race, Republicans, and the Return of the Party of Lincoln, by Tasha S. Philpot. (Winner: 2008 W. E. B. DuBois Outstanding Book Award) This important book focuses on how parties use racial images to shape and reshape the way citizens perceive them. 

Paper: 978-0-472-06967-5, $23.95   INFO

Inside Higher Ed: Eszter Hargittai and "Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have"

Originally published in INSIDE HIGHER ED, Oct. 30, 2009

For social scientists starting their careers, creating research models that work is crucial. A new book suggests that they may be unaware of problems they face in part because scholars don't share stories of what didn't work on their projects, and how to deal with particular challenges. Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. The essays in the collection are all by younger scholars, including the volume's editor, Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, a fellow at the Berman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a career advice columnist for Inside Higher Ed. Hargittai responded to questions about the book.

Q: I was struck by the part of your subtitle where you say "pretend they never have." Why do you think social scientists don't recognize or hide from problems with their research methods?

A: This title refers less to what social scientists recognize and more to what shows up in the final write-up of their projects. When one reads journal articles, the methodological sections tend to make the projects sound rather straight-forward. In books, details about methods are usually relegated to an appendix, at best, and do not tell the reader the reality of data collection. Instead, they are pretty, cleaned-up versions of what happened. For example, they will include the number of final interviews the researcher conducted, but they won't include details about how many attempts it took to get a person to come to an interview.

The Colbert Report | The Information Master

by David Bell, originally appeared in The New Republic on October 7th, 2009

The Information Master by Jacob Soll

Soll is also the author of Publishing The Prince (2005)

"That resonant piece of verbal shorthand, TMI--or Too Much Information--would make a fine epigraph for our age. Anyone with an Internet connection today has access to exponentially greater quantities of writing, images, sound, and video than anyone on earth could have imagined just twenty years ago. Small wonder that we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand. And small wonder that the management and control of information, whether by its "producers," by governments, or by corporations such as Google, has emerged as an increasingly important political concern, and as a subject of scholarship."

One Big (Straight, Gay, Multi-cultural, Traditional) Happy Family

by John Kenneth White, author of Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era

ALSO READ: John Kenneth White on:

MICHEAL JACKSON       SARAH PALIN

AT LEFT: Photo from MODERN FAMILY on ABC, a new show about a single family that must bridge generational, cultural, and social gaps.

"In 1970, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg famously defined the Real Majority of the U.S. electorate as being “un-young, un-poor, and un-black.” Today, Scammon and Wattenberg’s Real Majority is increasingly an historical artifact. Certainly, George W. Bush helped hasten the end of this Republican-leaning coalition by his poor performance. But Ronald Reagan also helped by getting much of his conservative agenda enacted into law. Redefining what is means to be a conservative is a central problem for the Republican Party in the Barack
Obama era.

But other factors are working to create a new majority poised to elect more Democrats. Since 1970, the U.S. has had four revolutions: (1) a racial revolution where whites will be a minority of the US population by mid-century; (2) a family revolution where having a mom, dad,
and kids living at home with their biological parents is no longer the norm; (3) a gay rights revolution where greater tolerance toward homosexuals is prevalent; and (4) a religious revolution where the location of faith is not necessarily in a church building, but in the heart of
the individual.

Toronto, Ontario - American Political Science Association 2009 Recap

Michigan Press staff went lake-jumping this past week to display our latest political science titles at the American Political Science Association's 2009 Annual Exhibit in Toronto, Ontario. We had great booth traffic, lots of sales, and some great face-to-face conversations with interested professors and authors, especially regarding Michigan's new Digital Transition (click for more info)--not to mention some great weather!

See below for just a few of the authors who stopped by to say hi, and some Toronto-area staff photos:

   
Seth Masket (left), author of No Middle Ground: How Informal Parties Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures, and Michael Brecher (right), author of International Political Earthquakes.

Andy Karch (left), author of Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion Among the American States and Steven Lobell (right), author of The Challenge of Hegemony: Grand Strategy, Trade, and Domestic Politics

Q&A with John Kenneth White, author of Barack Obama's America

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency marks a conclusive end to the Reagan era, writes John Kenneth White in Barack Obama's America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era. Reagan symbolized a 1950s and 1960s America, largely white and suburban, with married couples and kids at home, who attended church more often than not.  The demographics, however, have shifted: Marriage is at an all-time low. Cohabitation has increased from a half-million couples in 1960 to more than 5 million in 2000 to even more this year. Gay marriages and civil unions are redefining what it means to be a family. And organized religions are suffering, even as Americans continue to think of themselves as a religious people.

John Kenneth White is Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

  Listen to the podcast

Political Scientist? Stop by the UMP double booth (#418, 420) at the American Political Science Association Exhibit, Toronto, Sept 3-6

The University of Michigan Press will be going north o' the border this week to host a double booth at the American Political Science Association Exhibit in Toronto, Sept 3-6, with discounts, doughnuts, and delightful conversation. If you're around, stop by and check out some of our new releases below (and say hi)!

APSA 2009 FEATURED NEW RELEASE:

Barack Obama’s America
How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era
John Kenneth White
Cloth: 978-0-472-11450-4
Paper: 978-0-472-03391-1
More Info

NEW! Click to listen to the PODCAST interview with John Kenneth White, author of Barack Obama's America

--->Bookmark our new Online Subject Catalog
for other POLITICAL SCIENCE NEW RELEASES:
http://www.press.umich.edu/polisci/index.jsp 

"Racial Union" Wins American Political Science Association Award

CONGRATULATIONS to Julie Novkov, author of Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954, a stunning exploration of America's attitudes toward interracial marriage and winner of this year's Ralph J. Bunche Award given by the American Political Science Association. The Ralph J. Bunche Award is awarded for the best scholarly work in political science published in the previous calendar year that explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

Attending the American Political Science Association meeting in Toronto Sept 3-6? Check out Professor Novkov's book and many others at the UMP Booths, #418-420.