Government Systems

Over the last 30 years, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organization with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. Although the organization is unknown to the average citizen, this group of intellectuals has managed to monopolize the selection of federal judges, take over the Department of Justice, and control legal policy in the White House.

Von der Entstehungsgeschichte des Grundgesetzes bis zu den Herausforderungen einer global agierenden Demokratie. Politikwissenschaftler Prof. Dr. Karl-Rudolf Korte erklärt das Zusammenspiel der politischen Kräfte in Deutschland. Wie kommen Mehrheiten zustande? Welche Macht üben die Medien aus? Und wie kommt es zu politischen Entscheidungen? Im Hörbuch »Politik« bringt Prof. Dr. Karl-Rudolf Korte näher, wie Politik und Regieren in Deutschland funktioniert. Der Politikwissenschaftler erklärt außerdem, was Spitzenpolitiker leisten müssen und wofür wir einen Bundespräsidenten brauchen.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, looked at the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered why global economic governance structure had failed so spectacularly, and what could be done to reform them in the future. But then a funny thing happened. As he surveyed their actions in the wake of the crash, he realized that the evidence pointed to the exact opposite conclusion: global economic governance had succeeded.

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges - from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s.

19 Jahre saß Marco Bülow im Bundestag. Offen und eindringlich berichtet er in seinem neuen Buch von seinen konkreten Erfahrungen im Parlament und zeigt ...

In The Shadow System, award-winning journalist Sylvia A. Harvey follows the fears, challenges, and small victories of three families struggling to live within the confines of a brutal system. In Florida, a young father tries to maintain a relationship with his daughter despite a sentence of life without parole. In Kentucky, where the opioid epidemic has led to the increased incarceration of women, many of whom are white, one mother fights for custody of her children.

Global crises such as rising economic inequality, volatile financial markets, and devastating climate change illustrate the defects of a global economic order controlled largely by transnational corporations, wealthy states, and other elites. As the impacts of such crises have intensified, they have generated a new wave of protests extending from the countries of the Middle East and North Africa throughout Europe, North America, and elsewhere.

Resting on a convincing body of evidence that violence is not a necessary component of conflict among states and between states and non-state actors, World Beyond War asserts that war itself can be ended. We humans have lived without war for most of our existence and most people live without war most of the time. Warfare arose about 10,000 years ago (only five percent of our existence as Homo Sapiens) and spawned a vicious cycle as peoples, fearing attack by militarized states, found it necessary to imitate them.

Toxic Water, Toxic System exposes the consequences of a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost—including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people. Weaving together narratives of frontline activists along with archival data, Michael Mascarenhas provides a powerful exploration of the political alliances and bureaucratic mechanisms that uphold inequality.

An eye-opening account of the failures of our financial system, the sources of its staying power, and the path to meaningful economic reform.

Has American democracy's long, ambitious run come to an end? Possibly yes. As William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe argue in this trenchant new analysis of modern politics, the United States faces a historic crisis that threatens our system of self-government - and if democracy is to be saved, the causes of the crisis must be understood and defused.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime", and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to arms, bringing weapons and practices from the arena of war back home. The Punitive Turn in American Life offers a political and cultural history of the ways in which punishment and surveillance have moved to the center of American life and become imbued with militarized language and policies.

In The Ten Year War, veteran journalist Jonathan Cohn offers the compelling story of the defining political battle of our time, one that will shape political conversations for decades. At the heart of the book is the decades-old argument over what’s wrong with American health care and how to fix it. But the battle over health care was always about more than policy. The Ten Year War offers a deeper examination of how our governing institutions, the media and the two parties have evolved, and the dysfunction those changes have left in their wake.

Der nächste Kanzler? Friedrich Merz hat es gegen alle Widerstände und nach mehreren Anläufen an die Spitze der CDU geschafft. Jetzt hat der Kandidat der Union gute Aussichten, der nächste Bundeskanzler zu werden. Wer ist dieser Friedrich Merz, der nach seinem Ausstieg aus der Politik ein beispielloses Comeback versucht? Er provoziert mit Debatten über die »Leitkultur« und hat sich als Gegenentwurf zu Angela Merkel präsentiert. Wie verlief sein Weg an die Macht? Was sind seine politischen Standpunkte? Und was hätten wir von einem Kanzler Merz zu erwarten?

Es war keine intakte, heile, sichere Welt, in die die Coronapandemie einbrach. Schon zuvor war die Normalität in der Krise und die gesellschaftliche Gereiztheit nahm zu. In seinem klugen und nachdenklichen SPIEGEL-Bestseller erkundet Robert Habeck die Gründe für den Verlust an Selbstverständlichem und entwirft eine Politik, die den Problemen unserer Zeit angemessen ist. Ausgehend von persönlichen Erfahrungen der letzten Jahre sucht Robert Habeck Antworten auf die Frage, warum der Erfolg der liberalen Demokratie zum Misserfolg zu werden droht.

When it comes to the afflictions of the global economy, almost everyone - and especially Donald Trump - is quick to point the finger of blame at the state of international trade. But what about unconstrained capital flows? Unfettered capital has resulted in a string of financial and economic crises that have left our political systems strained and dialogue corroded. The once perceived benefits of openness have been cast to the wayside and the cracks in the global order can no longer be ignored.

One in 10 American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision - incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in 33 American children - and one in eight African American children - goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society. Journalist Nell Bernstein shows, through the deeply moving stories of real families, how the children of the incarcerated are routinely punished for their parents' status.

From the hosts of New Hampshire Public Radio’s Civics 101 and New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro comes A User's Guide to Democracy, a lively crash course in everything you should know about how the US government works.

Combining wisdom drawn from over a dozen years as a public defender and cutting-edge research in the fields of organizational and cultural psychology, Jonathan Rapping proposes a radical cultural shift to a “fiercely client-based ethos” driven by values-based recruitment training, awakening defenders to their role in upholding an unjust status quo, and a renewed pride in the essential role of moral lawyering in a democratic society.

How has the United States, with more resources than any nation, developed a healthcare system that delivers much poorer results, at near double the cost of any other developed country - such that legendary seer Warren Buffett calls the Medical Industrial Complex "the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness"?