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New Books in Public Policy: Daily Summaries Delivered
by New Books Network
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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- 5 days ago47 min
The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable with Justin de Benedictis-Kessner (U Chicago Press, 2026)
In the United States, hundreds of thousands of elected and appointed officials serve more than 50,000 subnational governments, making important decisions about services ranging from education to infrastructure to policing. The provision of critical city services shapes citizens’ everyday lives. Supposedly, local politicians are the elected representatives closest to the people they serve, but are they actually accountable to their constituents? Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that they are not: local elections routinely fail to punish bad politicians or reward strong performers. The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable argues that this is because urban politics is defined by minimally effective competition, complex institutions that confuse voters, and a lack of effective media coverage. These institutional features combine to stymie even well-intentioned voters and make accountability difficult. Fixing these problems is challenging, but, as de Benedictis-Kessner shows, change is possible if we can enable citizens to reclaim and assert their political power.Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances.Host Ursula Hackett is the Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her award-winning book, America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State is published with Cambridge University Press. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 1 weeks ago46 min
Carceral Utopia: A Global History of Model Prisons with Gregory Salle (Polity, 2026)
What underpins the legitimacy of the prison system in the twenty-first century? Despite numerous challenges and setbacks, there is still a widespread belief that prisons can be improved in a socially progressive way. Even today, 'model prisons' are being built that seek to fix the shortcomings and failures of their predecessors, as if past failures were due to a lack of imagination, determination, or resources.The aim of creating model prisons is not new: it dates back to the early nineteenth century. Ranging from England to Switzerland and Spain, from Russia to China and India, Carceral Utopia: A Global History of Modern Prisons (Polity, 2026) by Dr. Gregory Salle documents a rich, global history of ambitious efforts to create model prisons – places of confinement initially lauded for their progressive ideals but later revealed as fiascos.At the end of this journey through time and space, it will not suffice merely to highlight the gap between plans and realities, or even to dispel the illusion that model prisons could not live up to their claims. We need to ask why, despite so many failures, these institutions are still being built today. Might their many obvious shortcomings conceal a covert success?This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 1 weeks ago53 min
Outed: LBJ’s Confidant and the Arrest that Transformed a Presidency with Timothy Stewart-Winter (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Timothy Stewart-Winter joins Michael Stauch to discuss the arrest that transformed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. Drawing on Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath of his arrest from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, in Outed: LBJ's Confidant and the Arrest That Transformed a Presidency (U Chicago Press, 2026) Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.Highlights include: - A discussion of Jenkins’s career as LBJ’s closest aide at the intersection of the Lavender Scare, the urbanization of Washington DC, and the growth of the federal government after World War II;- How letters Jenkins received after his arrest reveal Americans’ changing views on sexuality and family life;- The effect that Jenkins’s public exile had on gay visibility just before the rise of gay liberation;- A tantalizing speculative reading of the effect that Jenkins’s exile from Washington, DC, had on the LBJ presidency and its most significant failure, the war in Vietnam;- How a bouquet of flowers from none other than J. Edgar Hoover helped rehabilitate Jenkins’s image after his arrest.Guest: Timothy Stewart-Winter is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. He is also the author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which won the John Boswell Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 1 weeks ago1h 0m
Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean with Tyler Priest (LSU Press, 2026)
Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean (LSU Press, 2026) tells the riveting story of the United States’ quest to secure the oil riches of the sea. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, Tyler Priest reveals how the offshore oil industry emerged from an ambitious project to incorporate the ocean’s submerged lands into the territory of the United States. These lands were frontier spaces, beyond traditional jurisdiction and control. Efforts to commandeer them for oil and gas extraction thus required new institutions of governance. From the titanic struggle over the tidelands starting in the 1930s to Project Independence in the 1970s, the process of establishing an offshore dominion of oil provoked intractable conflicts over money, values, and power. It pitted coastal states against their land-locked counterparts and captains of industry against federal civil servants and coastal communities. It stoked partisan and internecine warfare. It set off an international race to annex offshore territory, complicating U.S. foreign-policy objectives. It weighed on the minds of Supreme Court justices and troubled every occupant of the White House from Franklin Roosevelt forward. The modern environmental movement was born in opposition to offshore oil just as the 1970s energy crisis compelled the acceleration of drilling in the ocean. Creating and governing an offshore oildom involved nothing less than redrawing the territorial borders of the nation, rebuilding the political foundations of the U.S. energy system, and testing the environmental limits of resource extraction. This history is essential to understanding the tension between energy security and environmental protection in modern America.Tyler Priest is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of the award-winning book The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America and has published in the Journal of American History, Environmental History, Enterprise & Society, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Science. In 2010 he served as a senior policy analyst on the President’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.Filippo De Chirico is a PhD candidate in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy). His research focuses on the history of the natural gas sector in Italy. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 1 weeks ago54 min
Disability: A History of Resistance with David Turner (Random House, 2026)
Despite there being more than 16 million disabled people in the UK today, disability rarely features in mainstream accounts of our past. That absence is not down to a lack of evidence: it is a forgotten, suppressed history – the result of deliberate choices about whose histories matter. This remarkable book rectifies this.Disability: A History of Resistance (Random House, 2026) is a story of resistance and ingenuity, full of people who refused to be silenced or pitied. We meet the labourer who fights accusations in court that he’s faking his disability, and wins; the painter who signs her royalty miniatures ‘without hands’; and the one-armed textile worker who turned his injury into reform. We see how disabled people have rallied together to demand equality – fighting for their right to lead ordinary lives like everybody else.This is a story not of progress led by doctors or philanthropists, but an extraordinary ground-up history of ordinary people demanding dignity and justice. By putting disabled people back into our national story, David Turner reveals a fuller and richer history of modern Britain than ever before. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 1 weeks ago53 min
Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives with Kathleen Bawn and Knox Brown (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a study of political parties and party nominations for the House of Representatives in 55 winnable open-seat nominations in the 2013-14 electoral cycle. Based on a combination of field interviews, fundraising and spending data from the Federal Election Commission, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and exit polls of voters in four contests, it argues that the most important actors in most nominations are those who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These "policy demanders," as the study calls them, consist mainly of standard interest group actors - business, labor, agriculture, professionals - but include faith-based activists and Tea Partiers as leading actors in some nominations. Among the study's main arguments are that policy demanders care more about their particular interests and values than general ideology, put serious effort into vetting candidates before supporting them, and often either work through local parties or coordinate among themselves. The study analyzes the competition between establishment and insurgent candidates in the Republican Party in terms of its general arguments. Progressive reformers sought the adoption of primary elections to empower voters to control the direction of their parties, but this study finds that most primary electorates pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity.Professor Kathleen Bawn is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published her work in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science.Professor John Zaller is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His other books include The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.Host Dr Ursula Hackett is Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the University of Oxford. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State and a forthcoming book on redistricting. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 1 weeks ago50 min
Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block with Talitha LeFlouria (Beacon Press, 2022)
In Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (Beacon Press, 2022), historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core of a fresh argument: that the system of mass incarceration was established as protection for the institution of slavery and the profits of enslavers and that this legacy continues today.For centuries, Black women in America have experienced extreme rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the nation’s jails and prisons, yet their experiences have often been overlooked in favor of Black men’s.Arguing that the merger between profit and punishment continues to keep Black people bound, LeFlouria traces the connection between enslavement and incarceration, revealing how they have always been intertwined—from the domestic slave trade of 1810-1865, when an estimated one million people were incarcerated in privately owned slave jails, to the post-Civil War era when Black people were enslaved through new systems of state-sponsored mass incarceration, and through to today.Talitha L. LeFlouria is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the history of Black women, mass incarceration, and the legacies of American slavery. She is an associate professor of history, and the Mastin Gentry White Fellow in Southern History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the multi-award-winning book, Chained in Silence. Dr. LeFlouria has received numerous awards for her research, including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, and her work has been featured in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, The Root, and Vox. You can find her on her website.Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 2 weeks ago51 min
Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream with Dixie Dillon Lane (Eerdmans, 2026)
Discover the untold story of why homeschooling moved from the margins to the mainstream of American education. In this groundbreaking study Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream ( William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2026), historian Dixie Dillon Lane traces the rise of homeschooling in the United States, from the modern movement's beginnings in the 1950s as a fringe activity to its current status as a widely accepted educational choice. Through compelling nationwide data and vivid case studies from Los Angeles County, Lane uncovers a powerful truth: homeschooling taps into long-held American beliefs in local control and parental rights that have shaped our nation's schools for generations. Writing in an engaging, accessible style, Lane demonstrates how homeschooling's rise reflects Americans' response to the increasing centralization of public education. As public schools have shifted toward consolidation and away from local oversight, parents have rediscovered their voice, choosing homeschooling as an innovative way to renew parental influence in education. Unlike most authors writing on this topic, Lane writes as both a credentialed historian and an experienced homeschooling parent. As such, she offers an honest, balanced view that acknowledges the homeschooling movement's challenges as well as its strengths. Skipping School will be of interest to parents, historians, educators, policymakers, and anyone seeking a fuller understanding of American education.Dixie Dillon Lane holds a PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame and is a homeschooling mother of four (who writes at The Bad Homeschool Moms substack). She serves as an associate editor of Hearth & Field and a contributing editor of Front Porch Republic. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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About New Books in Public Policy
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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