American Political System Research Articles

Smart on crime: the struggle to build a better American penal system

Preface Acknowledgments Smart on Crime Politics Introduction Crime Politics in the American Political System Coalition Politics and Reform in the Criminal Justice Subsystem Rise of the Smart on Crime Coalition Explaining the Emergence of the Smart on Crime Coalition Policy Learning Bringing Policy Back into the Picture When Is Reform Really Reform? Collapse of the Rehabilitative Model and Rise of the Tough on Crime Coalition Calm before the Storm The Storm: The Rehabilitative Model Gets Blown Away Politicalization of Rehabilitation Research Sagging Support for Rehabilitation on the Left Building an Institutional Legacy Tough on Crime Coalition Crisis and Opportunity in the American Penal System To the Victors Go the Spoils Problems on the Ground: Consequences of the Tough on Crime Regime The Penal System and Inequality Diminishing Marginal Returns of Mass Incarceration Conditions Facilitating the Search for Alternatives and Policy Learning Economic Crisis The Contemporary Prison System Is a Different Beast Examining Changes in Public Attitudes on Crime and Punishment Fear of Crime Saliency of Crime Prisoner Reentry and the Politics of the Second Chance Act Pressure from the Bottom Up Conceptualizing Prisoner Reentry Ohio Plan Developments in Corrections Policy Research Conservatives Begin the Push for Prisoner Reentry Introduction of the SCA Prison Fellowship Ministries Fight to Protect Inmates' Religious Freedom Framing the Meaning of the SCA Correctional Associations Second Chance Advocacy in the Senate Political Progress in the House Roadblocks in the Senate Closing the Deal Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 Policy Context Challenging the Unique Dangers of Crack Cocaine Proposals for Change Legal Challenges to the Federal Sentencing Process New Proposals for Crack Sentencing Reform Mobilizing Support for Crack Sentencing Reform Texas Introduction to the Problem Environment Bringing an Engineer's Perspective to the Texas Penal System Emergence of New Organized Groups Justice Reinvestment Broad-Based Smart on Crime Coalition Texas Penal System and the Shifting Dimensions of Political Debate Appendix Ohio Diffusion of Smart on Crime Policy Ideas Ohio Seeks Technical Assistance Policy Learning among Conservatives in Ohio California Shifting Political Environment Return of the Structural Injunction Prison Realignment in California Evaluating the Smart on Crime Movement De-Incarceration and Crime Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty? References Index

M*A*S*H, The Longest Yard , and the Integrationist Imagination in the Postsegregation Era

IToward the end of Richard Hooker's 1968 satirical novel M*A*S*H, the soldier-surgeons of the 4,077th unit of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) compete in a football game against another team composed of US military medical personnel-the Evacuation (Evac) Hospital of the 325th division. At the time of the contest, both units are actively deployed in providing medical aid to wounded combatants during the Korean War-a harrowing and horrific task that is made (somewhat) more bearable by the dark humor Captains Benjamin Pierce, Augustus Duke Forrest, and Trapper John McIntyre adopt as they go about their job of reattaching severed limbs and removing shrapnel from human flesh. Participating in a football game might seem to offer a welcome diversion from their bloody employment. The surgical team of unit 4077, however, does not treat their game against the Evac Hospital squad as mere recreational amusement. For Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper, as well as their commanding officer, Colonel Henry Blake, beating the team of division 325 is a serious affair. The Evac Hospital possesses the veritable football powerhouse of the Far East war theater, and to upset General Hammond, the coach of the 325th, and his squad, Hawkeye plots to bring in a ringer: Dr. Oliver Wendell Jones, a black army neurosurgeon who, as a civilian, played professional football for the Philadelphia Eagles.1The outlandish conceit of Jones living a double life as a pro football player and neurosurgeon, while attesting, in no small measure, to the ironic aspects of Hooker's work, serves a practical purpose in the novel: it draws attention to a salient issue of military racial politics-and, by extension, American racial politics in other contexts-during the 1960s. The seriousness with which Hawkeye and his unit approach the game underscores Hooker's commitment to exploring racial integration in the armed services as it pertained to black participation in recreational activities with their white comrades. In this way, M*A*S*H evokes an integrationist imaginary, which derives its significance from the potent forms of racism that persisted in the mid- and late 1960s in the military and other institutions, despite the American political system's and the military's avowed commitment to ensuring racial equality. Following the passage of the Johnson administration's Civil Rights Bill in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, formal racial segregation was eliminated across the country. The question for civil rights advocates and racial liberalists changed in the aftermath of these landmark pieces of legislation: once united in battling racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, civil rights proponents wondered how, with formal segregation dismantled by congressional law, equality might be achieved.2 What civil rights proponents, along with those sympathetic to its cause, discovered was that it was easier to change the laws regarding racial segregation (no minor task in the 1960s given the intransigence of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans in Congress opposed to the passage of civil rights) than to change white attitudes about race, which led, in turn, to various kinds of informal racial segregation outside the purview of the law.The American military provides a fascinating point of reference for the conversation that emerged between the dismantling of formal segregation and the persistence of informal segregation in the 1960s. In a RAND Corporation (an important global policy think tank in California) study commissioned in mid-1990s, and eventually published in 1998 under the title Foxholes and Color Lines: Desegregating the U.S. Armed Services, researchers Sherie Mershon and Steven Scholssman offer a history of integration in the military that demonstrates both the achievements and the failures of this American institution in enacting racial equality before the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Mershon and Scholssman's work describes the events that led to the desegregation of US combat forces during the Korean War; although some experiments in integrating black and white troops were initiated in the European theater in World War II (WWII), the major coup in military racial policies came later, with the issuing of President Truman's Executive Order 9981 in 1948. …

Americanisation of Nigerian Political Communications: Matters Arising from the 2015 General Elections

This paper aims to provide useful insight into the Americanisation of Nigerian political communication placing more emphasis on the 2015 general elections and the consequences of this on our domestic political system. Nigeria was colonised by Britain. It, however, changed to the American presidential system of government in 1979. Thus, Nigeria is rapidly following the footsteps of America not just in the system of government but also in the adoption of its political communications techniques. Many of the election practices currently being employed in political campaigns across the world appear to have their immediate origin in America. Some of the electoral practices like the employment of communication consultants, personal attack rather than issue based campaign, the adaptation of communication to ‘media logic’, the frequent opinion polls, the use of the new media, the emphasis on image and others appear to have been dominant practices in American political system prior to the adoption by other countries across the globe. The researcher adopted document research as research methodology for the study. The research was anchored on the globalisation theory. The Americanisation of political communication has brought new standards to the field of political communication. The research shows great American influence in Nigerian political communication system. The paper recommends the employment of American political system in Nigeria with consideration on its workability based on the differences in political, media, economic and socio-cultural environment of both countries. Keywords: Political communication, Americanisation, Campaigns, Election and Mediatisation

Comparison of the Influence of the Chinese Lobby and the Israeli Lobby in the United States

The article is about how pro-Israel and pro-China interest groups try to lobby on the ground of Capitol, White House and executive branch. The study of the lobbying results is based on «General theory of action» T. Parsons. It is concluded that for lobbying interests the main point will be the representation of the interests in the political and public spaces and the creating of advocacy and lobbying infrastructure. The ability of the Israeli lobby to achieve the goal can be explained, firstly, by political inclusion in the decision-making process, and, secondly, by almost axiomatic representation Israel interests through the national interests of the United States. The Israeli lobby can be considered as the religious lobby. It can use the possibilities of Jewish religious organizations in grass root action. Also this gives the opportunity to avoid the requirements of the LDA. From the point of view of the theory of Talcott Parsons, the success of the Israeli lobby is the cause of the action of a large number of actors that may form in large groups. Another advantage of the Israeli lobby is the ability of its members to get relevant information about the current situation in different spheres of political life in the U.S. The objective of the present study was to reveal the ways in which China lobby succeeds. The influence of China lobby on decision-making process in the United States can be explained through strong economic ties between American corporations and the Chinese market. When lobbying China uses numerous Chinese Diaspora in many States, as well as trying to interest of the former high-ranking American officials, granting them special privileges for doing business in China. In comparison to the Israeli lobby, the Chinese lobby has weaknesses. Chinese interest groups are not included in the political system of the USA and this is the disadvantage of the Chinese way of lobbying. Unlike Israel lobby Chinese one is external. The interests of the chinese pressure groups do not coincide with American national interests. Their actors are not rooted in the American political system.

State of the Union: The Play, the Film, and the Progress of the Isolationist Bogey

This article argues that the adaptation of the play State of the Union into a film made the changes to the original that were necessary in a rapidly developing Cold War political culture. Helpful in this project was the way in which a Cold War culture had borrowed from an earlier form of postwar internationalism. In particular, it appropriated the demonization of isolationists as breeders of a corrupt domestic American political system that threatened republicanism and world peace alike. Indeed, the continuity in the representation of isolationists in the immediate postwar period of the play and the very different period of the film helped to lend legitimacy to the otherwise new Cold War rhetoric. The film, therefore, was able to make only minor revisions to the play and yet serve entirely different ideological purposes.

Money and Banks in the American Political System. By Kathryn C. Lavelle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 306p. $94.99 cloth, $29.99 paper. - The Rise of Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America. By Gail Radford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 218p. $85.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.

Money and Banks in the American Political System. By Kathryn C. Lavelle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 306p. $94.99 cloth, $29.99 paper. - The Rise of Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America. By Gail Radford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 218p. $85.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.

The Futility of Nigeria’s Flirtation with American Politico-Systemic Model: The Imperative of Political Culture

This paper focuses on the politico-cultural explanation for the failure of Nigeria to replicate and sustain the American political type democratic system. It looked as such variables as their history, culture, religion, and political culture itself as its units of analysis. Our aim and objective, is to demonstrate that, like revolution, political systems are outgrowths of political and socio-cultural experiences of peoples, and thus may not be sustainably imported or transferred from one country to another. The work is purely comparative, and descriptively analytical. Data for its development were generated from secondary qualitative sources. It concludes that there are multi-pronged factorial disparities in Nigeria’s political evolution vis-a-vis the America’s, most of which have both historic and politico-cultural nexus. It therefore suggests that Nigeria should look inwards to appreciate its unique history and culture for enduring political model than flirting unsustainably with the American political systemic model which, itself, provides an explanation for its sustenance and relative stability. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3p229

A Different democracy: American government in a thirty-one-country perspective

American democracy differs greatly from other democracies around the world. But is the American way more or less efficacious than comparable democracies in Asia, Latin America, or Europe? What if the United States had a prime minister instead of (or in addition to) a president, or if it had three or more parties in Congress instead of two? Would there be more partisan animosity and legislative gridlock or less? These are the kinds of questions that thinking about U.S. government in comparative perspective helps us to analyze. This valuable contribution to political studies takes a unique approach to a much-studied subject, looking at the U.S. government from a comparative point of view. Four distinguished scholars in the field examine the Constitution, the two-party system, the division of power between state and federal governments, and other major features of the American political system in terms of how they differ from other democracies, and they explore what those differences ultimately mean for democratic performance. By merging two important fields of study, American government and comparative political systems, this essential text offers a new and refreshingly insightful view of American exceptionalism.

Death does not become her: An examination of the public construction of female American soldiers as liminal figures

AbstractSince the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, over 150 female American military personnel have been killed, over 70 following hostile fire. Given Western society’s long-standing practice of reserving the conduct of collective violence to men, these very public deaths are difficult to encompass within the normative and ideological structures of the contemporary American political system. This study examines the ways in which the public duty to commemorate the heroism of soldiers – and the private desire to accurately remember daughters and wives – poses a significant challenge to coherent discursive representation. In doing so, the study employs hermeneutical interpretation to analyse public representations of female soldiers and their relation to death in US popular culture. These representations are examined via Judith Butler’s concept of grievability – the possibility of receiving recognition as a worthy life within the existing social imaginary. It is argued that female soldiers are grievable as both ‘good soldiers’ and ‘good women’, but not as ‘good female soldiers’. The unified subject position of ‘good female soldier’ is liminal, and thus rendered socially and politically unintelligible. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications of this liminality for collective mourning and the possibility of closure after trauma.

Wpływ diasporalnych grup nacisku politycznego na przebieg wyborów federalnych w Stanach Zjednoczonych na przykładzie „lobby pro-izraelskiego”

Main purpose of this paper is to: 1) define the overall role of diaspora interest groups in American political system, and 2) assess their real impact on the course of the federal elections in the United States. The analysis has been narrowed to Jewish organizations commonly referred as „pro-Israel lobby” and their political activity. Author described main tools and mechanisms used by Jewish pressure groups to exert influence on democratic institutions in the US, in order to pursue their ethnic interests.

The White House saga

Frank Capra expressed his gratitude to the immigrant dream come true by creating a brilliant cinematic myth about the American political system, presenting it as an 'inherently good' when in the hands of honest and good people. His 'morality fairytales', 'fantasies of good will' imbued with belief in restoration of old-new principles, offer complex reflections on an idealised Americanism of the 1930s which have become the foundation of representations of the American political system. The Capraesque narrative - 'a blend of optimism, humor, patriotism, and, to those who really understand his work, (and) darkness, despair, and the need to fight for things you care about...' (Bassinger 1982: 48) - as a combination of all-American values, ordinary people and historical figures, a democracy myth - has been extended by an endless network of intertextual echoes in film and TV production. Following the developmental lines - through political melodrama, melodramatic politics and political soap opera - one will be led from Capra to the series The West Wing (1996 - 2006), House of Cards (2013 - 2015) and Madame Secretary (2014 - ); from the comprehensive Washington Postcard (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) to the focal points at the White House; from Capra's comedy to the saga of the fight against terrorism led by the president and both ordinary and trained American citizens (White House Down, 2013, Roland Emmerich).

The good neighbor: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the rhetoric of American power

No modern president has had as much influence on American national politics as Franklin D. Roosevelt. During FDR's administration, power shifted from states and localities to the federal government; within the federal government it shifted from Congress to the president; and internationally, it moved from Europe to the United States. All of these changes required significant effort on the part of the president, who triumphed over fierce opposition and succeeded in remaking the American political system in ways that continue to shape our politics today. Using the metaphor of the good neighbour, Mary E. Stuckey examines the persuasive work that took place to authorise these changes. Through the metaphor, FDR's administration can be better understood: his emphasis on communal values; the importance of national mobilisation in domestic as well as foreign affairs in defence of those values; his use of what he considered a particularly democratic approach to public communication; his treatment of friends and his delineation of enemies; and finally, the ways in which he used this rhetoric to broaden his neighbourhood from the limits of the United States to encompass the entire world, laying the groundwork for American ideological dominance in the post-World War II era.

“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man

“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man

A Black Feminist Statement

A Black Feminist Statement The Combahee River Collective We are a collective of black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974.1 During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows: (1) The genesis of contemporary black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics; (3) the problems in organizing black feminists, including a brief herstory of our collective; and (4) black feminist issues and practice. 1. The Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism Before looking at the recent development of black feminism, we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women’s extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our [End Page 271] membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. As Angela Y. Davis points out in “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. There have always been black women activists—some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown—who had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. Contemporary black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters. A black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American women’s movement beginning in the late 1960s. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. In 1973 black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate black feminist group. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of us were active in those movements (civil rights, black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives were greatly affected and changed by their ideology, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of black and white men. There is also undeniably a personal genesis for black feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual black women’s lives. Black feminists and many more black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and, most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that [End Page 272] we women use to struggle...

The United States and Alternative Energies since 1980: Technological Fix or Regime Change?

Awareness of global warming has been widespread for two decades, yet the American political system has been slow to respond. This essay examines, first, political explanations for policy failure, focusing at the federal level and outlining both short-term partisan and structural explanations for the stalemate. The second section surveys previous energy regimes and the transitions between them, and policy failure is explained by the logic of Thomas Hughes’s ‘technological momentum’. The third section moves to an international perspective, using the Kaya Identity and its distinction between energy intensity and carbon intensity to understand in policy terms ‘technological fixes’ vs. low-carbon alternatives. The final section reframes US energy policy failure and asks: (1) Why, between 1980 and 1999, was America’s actual performance in slowing CO2 emissions better than its politics would seem capable of delivering? (2) How and why has the United States since c. 2007 managed to reduce per capita CO2 emissions?

The Scales of Money: Monetary Sovereignty and the Spatial Dimensions of American Politics after the Civil War

Abstract With its victory in the Civil War, the Union affirmed the primacy of the national sovereignty of the United States. After the conflict, the country was absorbed by the consequences of this momentous event. Yet, even in this context, the monetary policies of the government became contentious and led to the eventual redefinition of sovereignty. This article explores how the American institutional structure and political system allowed the money question to become a spatial issue, opposing the great sections of the country. In turn, this sectionalism triggered a confrontation between alternative understandings of what sovereignty entailed in terms of both political legitimacy and spatial scales. By the end of the century, the scope of sovereign power would be redefined, and currency abandoned as one of its instruments.

American Politics and its Debt Issue

The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the on-going debate about the United States’ debt level and how U.S. lawmakers are attempting to resolve it. On the surface, it seems like they are not working together to resolve the issue, but further complicating it with various tactics, such as the government shutdown. That raises the question, “why is this the case?” to which the answer can be found through the understanding of the American political system and the way it was founded. It should be noted that many leading economists have questioned the very idea as to why we are making a big deal about the U.S. debt issue and assert that the U.S. does not have a debt crisis to begin with, and the issue is simply made up for political reasons. Many leading economists have a position on this argument and they strongly believe that their position is the correct one. The objective of this paper is to highlight those views as well as share its own view on the important topic while keeping an eye on why the U.S. political system functions the way it does.

PIMPING FICTIONS: AFRICAN AMERICAN CRIME LITERATURE AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF BLACK PULP PUBLISHING

PIMPING FICTIONS: AFRICAN AMERICAN CRIME LITERATURE AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF BLACK PULP PUBLISHING. By Justin Gifford. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. 216 pp. $74.50, cloth; $24.95, paperback; $24.95, e-book.In his wildly popular single-cum-political-anthem, Dirt Off Your Shoulder (2003), rapper-mogul Jay Z spits, If you feelin' like a nigga, go and brush your shoulders off / Ladies is pimps too, go and brush your shoulders off. His inclusion of women in the pimp is a brilliant, if wickedly deceptive, move. What Jay Z no doubt recognizes is the political baggage that is bound up in the ideas of and pimping, particularly as they concern black women, sexual violence/exploitation, and black-thug masculinity. He seems simultaneously aware of the cultural and gendered capital of these ideas as they concern black men and revolutionary politics. Indeed, the and player were elevated in blaxploitation films of the 1970s as heroic figures; their hypermasculinity and sexual prowess were inextricably linked to their bravery in the face of white male power. Even the iconic blaxploitation film Foxy Brown (1974), starring Pam Grier, reproduces these hypermasculine and playa versions of black masculinity to a large extent.Though the unwritten, if not also unspeakable, code of black respectability has long resisted at least the pimp-criminality version of these notions of black masculinity (because, as the thinking goes, the celebration of criminality to any extent reinforces white supremacist notions of black pathology), the tropes have remained viable in black spaces over several generations due in part to working-class blacks' extant mistrust of the (white) police and legal system, as well as to a comparable mistrust of an assimilation-minded segment of the black middle class. To be clear, the hypermasculine and playa aspects of black masculinity are not necessarily objectionable or even totally out of sync with the class, sexuality, and gender codes of black respectability (consider the love that middle- and upperclass blacks in particular continue to shower on the likes of Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, and Charles Barkley, to name but a few); rather, what may be seen as objectionable are the aspects of these tropes that link black masculinity to criminality, anti-intellectualism, and pathological behavior in general. Jay Z's Dirt Off Your Shoulder is a stroke of genius from a cultural marketing standpoint, then, because it anticipates and attends to the exploitative gendered baggage of pimping even as it recuperates the revolutionary fervor of these age-old, hypermasculine/playa tropes. Culturally speaking, Jay Z is able to have his hypermasculinity/black respectability cake and eat it too.The success, if you will, of Jay Z's song is perhaps most evidenced by the way in which President Barack Obama famously invoked and performed Jay Z's patented gesture of brushing off his shoulders during a stump speech in which he was referencing the hate that was coming his way from the GOP. Without uttering a word, Obama communicated that he was a pimp-subversive of the American political system. That is to say, he indicated that he had managed to bend to his political will the very system of power that was ostensibly designed to keep black folks from ascending to the highest office of the land. Being an outsider black man with a scary, Muslim-sounding name ultimately emerged as more benefit than liability in Obama's political game.But, of course, as we have witnessed with both Obama's ascendance to the presidency and Jay Z's ascendance to international celebrity and economic power, the game is, at bottom, another iteration or expression of status quo power. For all of his hope rhetoric and brush-off-his-shoulders bravado and black cool, Obama is every bit a status quo president. Perhaps a consequence of his blackness and the attendant (unspoken) promise to his white constituency that he would govern as a postracial president is that Obama pays at best only cursory attention to long-standing issues of racial and structural inequalities. …

Who Taught You to Talk Like That?: The University and Online Political Discourse

Rancorous dialogue among political opponents is nothing new in the American political system. However, in the past two decades or so, pundits and scholars have noted an increase in the overall intensity and frequency of incivility among elected officials and citizens. At the collegiate level, many universities have undertaken some form of civility initiative to help students learn how to address political conversation in a civil manner. However, these initiatives are problematic in that they may tend to attract those already predisposed to such civility goals and lack in external validity. In this article, we investigate how university communities may be able to use online discussions, particularly spontaneous ones, to address controversial political issues. Using the asynchronous online postings at one liberal arts university, Furman University, in response to a campus visit by George W. Bush, we investigate the nature of political discourse in these unstructured political conversations. Through content analysis, we assess the level of democratic incivility versus impoliteness in the discussion, the role of anonymity in facilitating incivility, and the potential of such online exchanges for use by colleges to help socialize young people into how to engage in effective and civil political discourse.

Money and banks in the American political system

Money and banks in the American political system