Classics by Faculty
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August Nimtz, Islam and Politics in East Africa: the Sufi Order in Tanzania (University of Minnesota Press, 1980).
As the final pages of this book were being written, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 erupted—an upheaval that resonates with dramatic impact until today. With those developments as a backdrop, I tried to address the significance of my findings about the nexus between Islam and politics on the East African coast. As was often the case elsewhere in the Muslim world Sufi or male mystical organizations exercised political influence, especially at the local level. Primarily an exploratory study, I argued, on the basis of a detailed historical look at one town in Tanzania, that Sufi organizations were more likely to be influential if they became vehicles for advancing the interests of historically subjugated layers of society. While that had been true in the past there was no guarantee, however, that would be the case in the future. That depended, I concluded—again, with Iran very much in mind—on whether secular organizations existed to play a similar role. The emergence of Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon in recent years would appear to validate that conclusion.
John L. Sullivan, co-author, Political Tolerance and American Democracy (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Philip Converse Award for the Most Outstanding Book Published Five or More Years Ago, given by the American Political Science Association’s Organized Section on Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior, 2006.
Arguing that most measures of political tolerance contain content bias, the authors create and explore a “content-controlled” measure of political tolerance. This measurement strategy involves creating a maximally difficult test of tolerance for all citizens regardless of their ideological leanings. How extensively will citizens support the extension of civil liberties to groups and individuals whom they dislike the most and oppose most strongly? Relying on both national and local survey data, the authors show that levels of intolerance remain relatively high, that this conceptualization of political tolerance attenuates the relationship between education and political tolerance, and that individual differences in perceived threat, personality, and internalization of democratic norms all have powerful effects on levels of political tolerance.
John Freeman, Democracy and Markets: The Politics of Mixed Economies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989; Second printing 1991.
The debate about what form of democratic-market system is most desirable motivates the book. Four political-economic systems are critically evaluated: the combinations of two forms of democratic interest intermediation, pluralism and corporatism, and of two kinds of market--one composed primarily of private enterprises another made up of a mix of private and public enterprises. The four systems’ capacities to produce different blends of intra and intergenerational equity are compared. Evidence is drawn from the historical experiences of several North American and European countries, especially from the experiences of Britain and Austria. In the year it appeared, Democracy and Markets won the International Studies Association’s Quincy Wright Book Award. It subsequently was translated into Chinese. A Spanish version of the book is under contract.
Daniel Kelliher, Peasant Power in China: The Era of Rural Reform, 1979-1989, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992.
While scholars agree that China’s transformation into a market economy originated in the vast countryside, the question of who was responsible for the initial reforms has remained controversial. This book, based on rural fieldwork carried out while the reforms were still underway in the 1980s, was the first to argue that the startling economic change began as illegal innovations by villagers still living under the Maoist commune system. The great contribution of Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic government was to allow these surreptitious changes (in land tenure, private markets, credit practices, and paid labor) to progress without enforcing the laws against them. The book argues that it was this quiet experiment from the bottom-up, combined with benign neglect from the top Communist Party leadership, that allowed the transformation of the village China to take place.
Michael Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State and Society in Egypt and Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Confonting the Costs of War provides a systematic examination of the relationship between war-making and state-making. What determines the strategies by which a state mobilizes resources for war? And does war preparation strengthen or weaken the state in relation to society? In addressing these questions, Michael Barnett develops a novel theoretical framework that traces the connection between war preparation and changes in state-society relations, and applies that framework to Egypt from 1952 to 1977 and Israel from 1948 through 1977. War preparation, according to Barnett, helps to explain states’ growing expansion over society during their early years - and their decline in later years. The dissertation on which the book was based won the APSA's Gabriel Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics and the International Studies Association's Quincy Wright Award.
W. Phillips Shively, co-author, Cross-Level Inference, University of Chicago Press, 1995. Recipient of 1996 Outstanding Book Award, National Conference of Black Political Scientists.
This book reviews one of the enduring problems of data analysis in the social sciences: inference from data at one level of aggregation to behavior at another level. For instance, one might try to infer from data at one level of aggregation (county data) on the 1860 election, to processes at another level (individual voters), in order to ascertain what the class basis of Abraham Lincoln’s vote was. The book presents this as an “identification” problem, and therefore inherently lacking a fixed solution. Instead, inferences must be constructed from the available, aggregated data, from other sources of evidence, and from assumptions devised by the investigator. It analyzes regression solutions for cross-level inference, and presents additional strategies for developing cross-level inferences in varying circumstances: polynomial regression, factor analysis, and tabular approaches.
Kathryn Sikkink, co-author, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Cornell University Press, 1998. Grawemeyer World Order Award, and International Studies Association Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations. Translated into Spanish as /Activistas Sin Fronteras: Redes de Defensa en Política Internacional/ (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2000); Chinese translation by Peking University Press, 2005; Arabic translation by the Arabic Book Program, American Cultural Center, Amman, Jordon, 2005.
Activists beyond Borders was one of the earliest works in international relations to draw attention to and analyze the role of non-governmental activist networks in world politics. The book blends theory and empirical research on transnational advocacy networks operating both historically and recently on diverse issues including anti-slavery, human rights, environmental politics and women's rights. The authors draw on theory from social movements, international relations, and comparative politics and present their own theoretical propositions about the dynamics of the emergence, strategies and impact of activists from different nationalities working together to advance social change.
Lawrence Jacobs, co-author, Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Winner of book awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association and the Kennedy School of Harvard University.
Politicians poll now more ever and, yet, there is growing evidence that they don't tailor their government policies to what a majority of Americans prefer. Politicians Don't Pander argues that politicians use polls not so much to shape their decisions but rather to craft their words, arguments, and symbols in order to change public opinion to support what politicians and their supporters desire. This book flips the normal notion of "pandering" on its head. It goes on to suggest that politicians' use of crafted talk to move public opinion to support their policy goals propels the media to focus on conflict and disagreement and to alarm Americans about government.