New Books in Political Science New Books Network

The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) traces the political history of American political parties, not so much as historical institutions with different constituents—though it does that—but as living and breathing entities that have, over the course of more than 200 years, been, at times, vitally engaged with politics. The role of parties in the political system is to work in an organized way to get control of government and to connect electoral actors with the power to do things within the governmental system. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld dive into all kinds of archival data and information to get at the records and comments of party stalwarts, not just presidents or elected officials often associated with the parties. They were looking to see how the folks who were inside the parties, or parts of the parties, thought about the parties themselves and their work in them. Some of this is well-trodden ground, but much of the political history in The Hollow Parties really fleshes out much more of the daily engagement among party members and how they made American political parties work and thus how they made American politics work. But part of the story is also that the parties did not and do not always work the same in tandem. In fact, according to the examples laced throughout the book, often times one party, say a dominant party like the Republican Party during and after the Civil War, or the Democratic Party in the post-war period, operated differently and was structured differently than its opposition.
The underlying thesis of The Hollow Parties is that while the political parties at the moment, at this time of high polarization, may seem to be vessels of ideology antagonistic to stable democracy, in fact, we need parties to be vitally engaged in politics, as they have been in the past. Scholzman and Rosenfeld also note that the current polarized era has produced different outcomes in the ways the parties operate: for the Democrats, they become ineffectual; for the Republicans, they have become extremists. The Hollow Parties explains that it may currently feel as if the parties are hollow, especially on the Right where so many other entities have come into the space that had belonged to the party itself. But that the way to stem the crisis in democracy in the United States is for the parties to re-establish themselves as functional political institutions working with and in the formal components of the American political system. The Hollow Parties explains a kind of typology of how the parties in the United States operate and that at different times, each party has embodied different strands within this typology. This is a useful and important framework to consider how American political parties function and how these different strands aim towards different forms of operation and different goals.
Finally, this book is beautifully written, marrying archival information with contemporary examples and whisking the reader along on a fascinating and revealing ride through American political development. The Hollow Parties focuses on American political parties but can’t help but enlighten the reader about American history and current political developments that are all directly connected to past party activities and political history.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature of freedom and its relationship to capitalism. 
While many agree that freedom is good and we want more of it, we don’t agree about what it is, whose freedom we’re talking about, or what outcomes we desire.
Stiglitz asks the question: whose freedom are we talking about, and what happens when one person’s freedom means a loss of freedom for someone else?
Narratives of neoliberalism have been accepted as gospel despite decades of research showing that less regulation and more trust in the 'hidden hand' of free market economics do not produce greater prosperity or freedom for most individuals. 
Stiglitz examines how unregulated markets reduce economic opportunities for majorities by prioritizing the freedom of corporations and wealthy individuals over that of individuals, resulting in the siphoning wealth from the many to ensure the freedom of the few, from property and intellectual rights to education and opportunity. 
The Road to Freedom re-evaluates of what constitutes a good society and provides a roadmap to achieve it.
Recommended reading:  The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy
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Global risks present formidable challenges to international law. Although they have long been identified in many other scientific disciplines, they are currently only considered on a sectoral basis in international law in the absence of a legal definition. 
The aim of Sarah Cassella's book Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023) is threefold: to identify the main elements that characterise global risks in a legal perspective, to determine the characteristics that make them a new category of risk, and to analyse the changes they bring about in the main mechanisms of international law. Drawing on the relationship between international law and other legal systems, and in particular national law, this book highlights possible responses to the challenges posed by global risks. The study is based on extensive practice related to the examples of climate change and pandemics, but opens up perspectives on conclusions that could be common to other global risks, such as financial risks or cyber risks.
Sarah Cassella, Ph.D. (2009), is Professor of International Law at Université Paris.
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In this episode of International Horizons, Professor Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE) and Professor in the School of International Service at American University, discusses with RBI Director John Torpey her approach to dealing with the climate crisis. Fisher explains how the climate crisis is really a social crisis for which collective action seems impossible. Fisher further explains the actions of the players involved in resisting the problem of climate change and their interests in doing so. Finally, she explains how important it is to approach change through strong communities and the solid infrastructures that support them.
Fisher is the author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia UP, 2024).
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South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisation: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) by Dr. Joan E. Cho takes a closer look at the history of South Korea to show that Korea’s advance to democracy was not linear. Instead, while Korea’s national economy grew dramatically under the regimes of Park Chung Hee (1961–79) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980–88), the political system first became increasingly authoritarian. Because modernization was founded on industrial complexes and tertiary education, these structures initially helped bolster the authoritarian regimes. In the long run, however, these structures later facilitated the anti-regime protests by various social movement groups—most importantly, workers and students—that ultimately brought democracy to the country.
By using original subnational protest event datasets, government publications, oral interviews, and publications from labour and student movement organisations, Dr. Cho takes a long view of democratisation that incorporates the decades before and after South Korea’s democratic transition. She demonstrates that Korea’s democratisation resulted from a combination of factors from below and from above, and that authoritarian development itself was a hidden root cause of democratic development in South Korea. Seeds of Mobilization shows how socioeconomic development did not create a steady pressure toward democracy but acted as a “double-edged sword” that initially stabilised autocratic regimes before destabilising them over time.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented around methods, processes, and techniques. No longer viewed as founded in justice and morality, law became a way of doing things centered around legal procedure. Shedding its foundations in the 'people,' democracy became a technique of governance consisting of an endless process of interacting groups. Liberating themselves from the truths of labor, markets and market actors became intellectual and political techniques without necessary grounding in the reality of human behavior. Contrasting nineteenth and twentieth century legal, political, and economic thought, this book situates this transformation in the philosophical crisis of modernism and the rise of the administrative state.
Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami.
Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.
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