Policy Wonks Research Articles

Book Review: A Guide to Good Money: Beyond the Illusions of Asset Inflation

As Brendan Brown and Robert Pringle take it upon themselves to provide an accounting of the existing monetary framework before introducing the reader to their prescriptions, _A Guide to Good Money: Beyond the Illusions of Asset Inflation_ is an excellent primer for those who wish simply to understand the opacities of modern money. On one level, therefore, it succeeds as both an easily digestible guide for the confused and a hopeful theoretical framework for the avid policy wonk. But further, and more broadly speaking, it triumphs too as a work of revisionist history in the best sense. Though marred by a note of eager neo-imperialist rhetoric, the book provides reason to push aggressively for reforms to curb the power of the Federal Reserve, and, if it cannot be destroyed entirely, to push for the adoption of a fiat regime consistent with the “super money” qualities insightfully laid out by Brown and Pringle.

Race and Diplomacy in Zimbabwe: The Cold War and Decolonization, 1960–1984 by Timothy Lewis Scarnecchia

<i>Race and Diplomacy in Zimbabwe: The Cold War and Decolonization, 1960–1984</i> by Timothy Lewis Scarnecchia

Rómulo Betancourt: His Historical Personality and the Genesis of Modern Democracy in Venezuela

Rómulo Betancourt: His Historical Personality and the Genesis of Modern Democracy in Venezuela

Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter Annelise Russell

Every U.S. Senator is on Twitter and every U.S. Senator pursues rhetorical agendas. Senators pursue rhetorical agendas as policy wonks, constituent servants, or partisan warriors. This is the central thesis of Annelise Russell’s new book Tweeting is Leading, the latest contribution to the renowned Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series. In Tweeting is Leading, Russell uses a wealth of content analytic and Senate demographic data to analyze and understand how federal elected officials use social media for their political public relations efforts. Dr. Russell is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Kentucky. Social media such as Twitter provide politicians the opportunity to bypass media gatekeepers and communicate directly with key publics. By 2013, every member of the U.S. Senate had a Twitter presence although the frequency of usage varied. For instance, Russell found that in 2013, the average senator tweeted 675 times but this ranged from a total of 23 to 2,272 tweets (p. 69). Russell collected data in both 2013, the first non-election year of universal adoption, and 2015, a second election off-year, to analyze frequency of tweeting, determinants of social media behavior, and content strategies from Senate accounts. Electoral off-years were chosen as the sample to focus on government communication when senators are not actively campaigning. Overall frequencies increased from 2013 to 2015 highlighting the increased importance of social media for strategic political communication. Russell argues that “the use of Twitter is now a normal part of lawmakers’ routines and seen as a common, if not necessary, element of lawmaking” (p. 51). One important finding was that there are not consistent variables explaining which senators use Twitter more frequently. There were not consistent patterns in how variables such as gender, age, partisanship, prior electoral performance, committee leader status, or seniority influence Twitter communication frequency.

Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

The Political Benefits of Voter ID Lawsuits

In one of the most pronounced developments in American political and election law over the past two decades, voter ID laws have developed from an insipid topic of interest only to policy wonks and local government enthusiasts into one of the most contentious and hot-button issues in American politics. To date, the Democratic party — either directly as plaintiffs or indirectly via its attorneys — have filed nearly a dozen lawsuits challenging voter ID laws across the United States, arguing such laws disproportionately burden minority voters. However, these lawsuits are puzzling considering the minimal impact these laws have, as social science scientists have yet to conclude these laws have a racially disparate impact. Furthermore, this litigation is costly and limited: it is time-consuming, expensive, ineffective, and risky. Why Democrats continue to litigate voter ID laws, in light of these costs and limitations, is the central inquiry of this Essay. To answer it, this Essay applies emerging sociolegal theories that reveal the benefits litigation engenders unto the litigating party, thus explaining the Democratic penchant for litigating voter ID laws.

The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism by Gregg Cantrell

Reviewed by: The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism by Gregg Cantrell Charles J. Holden The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism. By Gregg Cantrell. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 555. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-300-10097-6.) Gregg Cantrell’s sweeping account makes a strong case for the Texas Populist Party having played a critical role in the foundation of modern American liberalism. Responding to the juggernaut of industrialization, Texas Populists were among the first to recognize the painful truth that modern capitalism had “rendered the classical liberal model obsolete” (p. 13). These “new forms of concentrated power” by the late 1800s posed a grave threat to individual liberty (p. 13). Whereas organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the Farmers’ Alliance had formed to counter the reactionary forces of industrial capitalism, it was the genius of the Populists to carry the challenge into the political system. By doing so, they brought political and economic democracy together as part of the same fight. The turn to politics was both principled and pragmatic: Populists called for an activist government as the “only institution that the ‘people’ could control” and as the remaining “countervailing power” that could defend citizens’ liberties against unchecked corporate greed (pp. 147, 15). Cantrell’s impressive research enables him to capture important distinctions among Texas Populist leaders as well as regional differences within the state. The chapters also detail the rough-and-tumble of Texas politics, culminating in the election of 1896, when a combination of fraud, voter intimidation, and fusion managed to blunt Populist momentum. It is hard to imagine another book offering the kind of on-the-ground look at this important political party that Cantrell does. The short lifespan of the Populist Party, Cantrell argues, has left its ideological legacy underappreciated in the scholarship on modern American liberalism. To cite just one critical example, Cantrell contends it was the Populists who “normalized anti-laissez-faire and made it a legitimate position for debate” in American politics (p. 410). The Texas Populists, astute “policy wonks” that they were, pointed to successful government agencies such as the Post Office Department that served citizens’ interests efficiently and fairly while remaining beyond the invisible hand of laissez-faire capitalism (p. 124). [End Page 735] The normalization of anti-laissez-faire politics and the call for an activist state in the name of democracy bore fruit nationally in the Progressive era and were given principles among many in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust. While careful not to draw a simple line between the Populist Party and the New Deal, Cantrell notes the personal connections from Texas. A young Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, was a passionate New Dealer, while his grandfather, Sam Ealy Johnson Sr., was an early member of the Populist Party. In addition, while the reforming drive of the Texas Populists fell short when it came to racial and gender equity, here, too, their legacy survived, Cantrell suggests, since at its core the party “call[ed] into question the very foundations of the social and political order” (p. 259). Women and African American men were active within the party in the 1890s, and the Populists’ central principle of using the government as a “countervailing power” against oppression was at the heart of modern American liberalism through the 1900s (p. 15). Contemporary politics compels Cantrell to delineate his subjects from current discussions of “small-p populism” as a political style (p. 19). The ideological legacy of the Texas Populists is clearly visible in New Deal achievements such as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Social Security Act of 1935. That these laws countered “the captains of big business who could run roughshod over workers and consumers and [who] through their own power [could] corruptly manipulate the government to their own benefit” helps Cantrell draw a clear distinction between the party of the 1890s and the cynical populism of Donald J. Trump and his revanchist base (p. 13). Charles J. Holden St. Mary’s College of Maryland Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Africa Rising: a Pathway of Three Frontiers – Internet of Things, Population Growth and Free Trade Area

Abstract Africa rising is a raging discourse among policy wonks and African scholars. Some have questioned the veracity of this proposition, while others agree that indeed Africa’s prospects are incontrovertible. In this article, the author developed an exegesis to theorize that Africa’s future growth, at least for the next one century, shall depend on three praxes: internet of things, population growth and the eventual implementation of AfCFTA. Internet of things accentuated by increased internet connectivity is going to create prodigious solutions to African problems, especially in increasing financial inclusion, solving election malpractices through blockchain technology, raising income earnings for rural communities via the sharing economy and improving agribusiness productivity through smart farming. These solutions will mostly target small-holder business players and poor households in hinterland Africa, aiming to lift them from poverty and narrowing the inequality gap. Besides, Africa’s population growth is estimated to reach 2.4 billion by 2050 and theorized to create a market revolution punctuated by a demographic dividend of 15–64-year-olds. The youthful population shall be necessary for providing workforce and technological innovations for driving the wheels of growth in the continent. Moreover, AfCFTA shall be the largest Free Trade Area since the formation of WTO, providing a 1.2 billion people mass market (Signe, 2018: 3). In retrospect, the author intends to demonstrate that the three pathways – the internet of things, population growth and AfCFTA – shall be quintessential building blocks for actualizing the Africa Rising narrative.

Subsidizing extinction?

AbstractIn 2010 world governments agreed to eliminate, phase out or reform incentives that harm biodiversity by 2020. Yet few governments have even identified such incentives, never mind taking action on them. While some subsidies are well studied, such as in fisheries and fossil fuel production, there is an urgent need for the conservation community to study the potential effects a broader array of subsidies have on biodiversity. In addition, we need a better understanding of who benefits from these subsidies. We term this pursuit ‘subsidy accountability’, which is crucial but challenging work crossing disciplines and government ministries. It requires ecologists, forensic accountants, and policy wonks, calculating and forecasting the positive and negative effects of subsidies and their elimination on biodiversity and vulnerable human populations. The Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services recently concluded that action on biodiversity loss requires transformative economic change; true action on subsidies is one step towards such change.

Developing Music Education Policy Wonks: Preservice Music Education and Policy

The typical undergraduate music education student is focused on developing their musicianship and leadership abilities, professional education competencies, and specific pedagogical expertise. While these are desirable outcomes of a music education degree, music teachers must learn how to effectively interact with a range of policies that will influence how they navigate their professional and private lives. The purpose of this article is to outline and explore mechanisms to engage preservice teachers with educational policies and policy-related practices. We discuss resources for learning about federal and state policies related to education and music education and strategies for interfacing with policymakers. We suggest models that integrate policy topics into existing coursework and new curricular structures that may facilitate the development of “scholar-musicians.” Implications of music teacher educators bringing their role as politically active citizens into the classroom and adding political knowledge to the expectations placed on new teachers are considered.

Q&amp;A: A Physicist Dressed as a Policy Wonk

Q&amp;A: A Physicist Dressed as a Policy Wonk

On Leadership: To improve the curriculum, engage the whole system

Education policy wonks are shifting their attention from standards and accountability to curriculum. Joshua Starr warns that curriculum reform cannot be handed down from above. When reforming their curricula, school and district leaders must take into account the existing curriculum, school governance, resource allocation, tracking and differentiation, politics and community engagement, and teachers’ roles and responsibilities.

Building Internet policy on history: lessons of the forgotten 1981 network neutrality debate

ABSTRACTThe US-centric Internet history situates the start of the net neutrality debate around 2003, but a look at global Internet histories indicates otherwise. To wit: this case study of the forgotten net neutrality struggle that took place in France between 1979 and 1982. In 1978, the French PTT started “Minitel,” the world's first successful mass market online ecosystem. The Minitel experience prefigured most of the legal, economic, industrial, and other public policy issues we face today in cyberspace. The concept of network neutrality was explicitly debated by administrators and regulators – only to be rejected upon pressure from the incumbent print press industry, which foresaw its own impending demise and did all it could to hinder the development of open and neutral digital fora. Minitel has been derided by many scholars and policy wonks as the epitome of statism that precluded real and meaningful innovation from emerging from the edges. This article demonstrates instead that hindrances to net neutrality in France in the early 1980s were the result of private sector lobbying, not of PTT administrators. It provides a counter-narrative grounded in historical data, to fuel further thinking about what policies will better support private innovation over modern online platforms.

Human Voices Wake Us, Part I

Human Voices Wake Us, Part I

When Hyperbole Enters Politics: What Can Be Learned From Antiquity and Our Hyperbolist-In-Chief

When Hyperbole Enters Politics: What Can Be Learned From Antiquity and Our Hyperbolist-In-Chief W. ROBERT CONNOR introduction: an age of hyperbole Everywhere we turn these days we encounter hyperbole—in the colloquialisms of every day speech, advertising , salesmanship, letters of recommendation, sports-casting , and not least in political discourse. This may be a good moment, then, to open a conversation between ancient and modern understandings of verbal “over-shoot,” as the Greek term for exaggeration might be rendered in English. The evidence gathered in H. Lausberg’s Handbook of Literary Rhetoric1 shows that while ancient rhetoricians agreed that hyperbole should be counted among the “figures of speech,” they found much to argue about: was hyperbole a violation of the Aristotelian middle course, hence an extreme to be avoided, or was it a legitimate form of augmentation (auxēsis in Greek, amplificatio in Latin)? Could diminution (meiōsis ) also be regarded as a form of hyperbole? In the interpretation of texts hyperbole poses a further difficulty —unlike simile, alliteration or some other figures of speech, it is “unmarked,” that is, it has no linguistic sign to alert the reader to its presence. Hyperbole likes to disguise itself as if it were going to a masquerade ball, presenting itself as simile or wearing metaphorical dress, or appearing not infrequently as litotes. It can sneak up on you and take you by surprise. The critic Longinus in On the Sublime, ch. 38, and some rhetoricians noted that hyperbole could be most arion 26.3 winter 2019 powerful when least recognized. Many ancient rhetoricians and some modern critics, however, have followed Quintilian, who asserted that “expressions (often hyperbolic), such as “storms of public assemblies, thunderbolts of eloquence, are used merely for ornament” (Institutes 8.6.7). In this view hyperbole is a conspicuous ornament used to embellish speech and make it more elegant and attractive, but today it is more often treated either as an excuse for an outrageous statement (as when the CEO of Cambridge Analytica characterized as “a certain amount of hyperbole” his suggestion of using prostitutes to discredit a political opponent), or as a euphemism for a falsehood (as when a politician promises he will eliminate the national debt—$20 trillion—and his budget director shrugs the claim off as “hyperbole.”) The term seems to extinguish any feeling of embarrassment. None of these understandings of hyperbole is simply wrong, but together they eclipse an alternative view, grounded in one ancient understanding of language, and corroborated by modern experience. In this approach language in general and hyperbole in particular are not simply a set of signs whose meaning is arbitrarily determined by social convention . Instead, they have their own nature (physis, as Isocrates says in Panegyricus 8) and hence their own power to arouse and motivate listeners. Hyperbole, viewed in this light, is a force in its own right, with the ability to give voice to otherwise unarticulated emotions, to intensify them, to push aside doubts and hesitations, and then to turn feelings into action. Language is power, and hyperbole, as an extreme form of language, provides great power to those who use it skillfully. These need not be the docile students of the rhetoricians ; politicians sometimes seem to have an innate understanding of it. The extreme breed among them, the demagogues , are often the ones who know best how to put this extreme of language to use. True, you don’t have to be a politician to put hyperbole to work. It is a favorite mode of speech among lovers, poets, travellers. Holy Men use it, too: Jesus of Nazareth, for exam16 when hyperbole enters politics ple, proclaimed that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19.24). Almost everyone uses it at some point, except policy wonks whose soulless prose withers before its onslaughts. When people use hyperbole they may be neither lying nor embroidering the truth to make it more ornamental. They exalt and intensify what they see as truth, make it come alive, and thereby rouse their listeners from apathy and distraction . Ordinary people, too, use...

Interpreting ISIS: Four Recent Works on the History and Strategy of the Islamic State

Since Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri, under his nom de guere Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the establishment of a worldwide caliphate on 29 June 2014 from the Nur al-Din Zenki Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, dozens of books have been written seeking to explain the rapid rise and breathtaking brutality of the Islamic State group. There is a certain “all hands on deck” feel to the flood of commentary on ISIS—journalists, academics, policy wonks, military figures, analysts, and politicians all have had their say. The visibility of the group, augmented by the rhetorical use to which they have been put by unrelated political debates, have perhaps made this inevitable. The four books reviewed here are part of this trend, and their collective strength is in their breadth and factual detail. There is information aplenty, and all the books included in this review do an admirable job, each in its own way, of detailing the history of the organization. The Islamic State group's deft use of online propaganda, its place in the post-9/11 jihadi landscape, its territorial gains and losses, and its prodigious ability, until recently, to draw large numbers of recruits into Syria or online support roles, have all received detailed treatment.

Opinion will be divided on NMC plans, which is why yours counts.

Would you say that nursing is in control of its own destiny? Recent evidence would suggest otherwise, with politicians, policy wonks and general managers having a greater say than nurses themselves about the profession's future.

How to be heard.

Paul Cairney, a political scientist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom, has a message for those who want facts and research findings to guide policy. 9Evidence based policy making9 is a good political slogan, but not a good description of the policy process, he writes on his blog, which has become a popular read for policy wonks (paulcairney.wordpress.com). If you expect to see it, you will be disappointed. It9s a typically blunt assessment from Cairney, who last year published a well-received book entitled The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making . But his goal isn9t to discourage efforts to inject evidence into statecraft; rather, he aims to arm scientists with some nuggets of political theory and psychology that might help them do better. In a recent interview, Cairney offered some do9s and don9ts for getting involved.

Political economy of the West: Populists versus policy wonks

An attempt is made to understand the political upheaval in the West following the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and the emergence of populist patriotic parties throughout Europe, and why much of the anger is directed at economists and other experts. One possibility is that migration, international trade, technological advances, the introduction of the Euro and climate policy hurt the working and much of the middle classes without them being properly compensated. Part of the anger is directed at new people who seem to be able to jump the queue and at the rich who seem to get richer why wages for the poor remain stagnant.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign memoirs: A study in contrasting identities

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the rhetorical identities of Hillary Clinton’s two political memoirs—Living History and Hard Choices. The first spanned her childhood through her years as first lady. The second recounted her tenure as secretary of state. Though both memoirs were written with a past orientation, they also sought to keep alive a future run for the presidency. Situating the two Clinton memoirs in the history of biography, we employ corpus rhetorical methods from the digital humanities to establish that Hard Choices featured a policy wonk identity compared to Living History’s more personal storyteller identity. This result is not surprising in light of the different segments of life each memoir covered. Adding surprise and insight is the discovery that both memoirs also feature additional Clinton identities that shed light on her strategies for a future presidential run and revealed the identity problems she faced as a woman vying for the presidency.