Bøger af Frank R. Baumgartner

Spanish politics has been transformed. Using new techniques, this book looks at 30 years of Spanish political history to understand party competition, the impact of the EU, media-government relations, aspirations for independence in Catalonia and the Basque region, and the declining role of religion.

How does the government decide what's a problem and what isn't? In this title, the authors focuses to the problem-detection process itself, showing how the growth or contraction of government is closely related to how it searches for information and how, as an organization, it analyzes its findings.

Illuminates the workings of democracies beyond the United States. This book presents an account of how policy issues rise and fall on the national agenda. It offers a different interpretation by taking the long view of several issues - including nuclear energy, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety.

Since 1996, death sentences in America have declined by more than 60 percent, reversing a generation-long trend toward greater acceptance of capital punishment. In theory, most Americans continue to support the death penalty. But it is no longer seen as a theoretical matter. Prosecutors, judges, and juries across the country have moved in large numbers to give much greater credence to the possibility of mistakes - mistakes that in this arena are potentially fatal. The discovery of innocence, documented in this book through painstaking analyses of media coverage and with newly developed methods, has led to historic shifts in public opinion and to a sharp decline in use of the death penalty by juries across the country. A social cascade, starting with legal clinics and innocence projects, has snowballed into a national phenomenon that may spell the end of the death penalty in America.

A generation ago, scholars saw interest groups as the single most important element in the American political system. Today, political scientists are more likely to see groups as a marginal influence compared to institutions such as Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary. Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leech show that scholars have veered from one extreme to another not because of changes in the political system, but because of changes in political science. They review hundreds of books and articles about interest groups from the 1940s to today; examine the methodological and conceptual problems that have beset the field; and suggest research strategies to return interest-group studies to a position of greater relevance. The authors begin by explaining how the group approach to politics became dominant forty years ago in reaction to the constitutional-legal approach that preceded it. They show how it fell into decline in the 1970s as scholars ignored the impact of groups on government to focus on more quantifiable but narrower subjects, such as collective-action dilemmas and the dynamics of recruitment. As a result, despite intense research activity, we still know very little about how groups influence day-to-day governing. Baumgartner and Leech argue that scholars need to develop a more coherent set of research questions, focus on large-scale studies, and pay more attention to the context of group behavior. Their book will give new impetus and direction to a field that has been in the academic wilderness too long.

What causes stability or change in the political system? What role do political institutions play in this process? To investigate these questions 'Policy dynamics' draws on extensive data compiled for policy issues in the US, spanning the past half-century.

During the 2008 election season, politicians from both sides of the aisle promised to rid government of lobbyists' undue influence. Based on a comprehensive examination of ninety-eight issues, this title demonstrates that sixty per cent of the lobbying campaigns failed to change policy despite millions of dollars spent trying.