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SOMEWHERE IN THE MULTIVERSE, the United States took a slightly different turn on Nov. 8, 2016. Hillary Clinton narrowly won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and became the 45th president of [...]

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar Harvard University Press, 544 pp. Of all the institutions in American politics, the Electoral College is surely the strangest. [...]

United Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason University of Chicago Press, 192 pp. In June 2012, a hopeful Barack Obama predicted that once he won reelection, the [...]

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes observes: Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger [...]

Over the past four decades, large corporations have learned to play the Washington game. Companies now devote massive resources to politics, and their large-scale involvement increasingly redirects and constricts the [...]

America's political institutions are suffering from profound decay. The political parties--especially the Republicans--have become so constrained by their activists and addicted to short-term one-upmanship that they are incapable of governing [...]

When the Senate Worked for Us: The Invisible Role of Staffers in Countering Corporate Lobbies by Michael Pertschuk Vanderbilt University Press, 224 pp. There was a time, in the not-so-distant [...]

The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin by Katherine J. Cramer University of Chicago Press, 256 pp. Why Washington Won't Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis by [...]

In the July/August issue, Jonathan Rauch diagnosed the U.S. political system's malady as 'chaos syndrome,' and argued that the cure involved, in part, bringing back middlemen and backroom deals. Jonathan [...]

The House leadership's top-down management style isn't working. Is it time to try more democracy? Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives by James M. [...]

Perhaps no image makes liberals more likely to palm their foreheads than the infamous photo of a Tea Party protestor with a sign declaring, 'KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE!' [...]

A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum Princeton University Press, 213 pp. Richard Nixon may have [...]

The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life by Alyssa Katz Speigel & Grau, 336 pp. In 2011, Chamber of Commerce president Tom [...]

The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era by Sam Rosenfeld University of Chicago Press, 336 pp. That hyper-partisanship is wrecking American democracy is a truism of our times. But [...]

Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public Chicago Studies in American Politics Series by Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe University of Chicago Press, 224 pp. [...]

IN 2016, it's become fashionable to bemoan the state of American democracy. But maybe the problem is that we were expecting too much of it in the first place. That's [...]

Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy by Adam Sheingate Oxford University Press, 296 pp. Let's face it. Even those of [...]

The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones University of Chicago Press, 264 pp. We humans have [...]