Frank R. Baumgartner is Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Conflict and Rhetoric in French Policymaking and coauthor (with Bryan Jones) of Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Beth L. Leech is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Texas A&M. A generation ago, scholars saw interest groups as the single most important element in the American political system. Today, political scientists are more...

"Kay Lehman Schlozman, Winner of the 2018 Warren Miller Award, Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association" Kay Lehman Schlozman is the J. Joseph Moakley Endowed Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Henry E. Brady is dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley....

Analyzes long-term interest group/party alliances, with a focus on the part played by federal advisory committees. This book sheds light on the dealings between special interests and political parties by challenging three long-standing assumptions: that transactions between interest groups and parties are quid pro quo exchanges, such as the buying and selling of legislation; that the interrelationship between bureaucrats and interest groups is accommodating...

"Winner of the 1999 Victoria Schuck Award, American Political Science Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1999" Mary Fainsod Katzenstein is a professor of government and a member of the faculty of the Women's Studies Program at Cornell University. She is the author of Ethnicity and Equality: The Shiv Sena Party and Preferential Policies in Bombay and has cowritten and coedited several books, including, with Carol McClurg...

"In recent years, gender-variant people--including those we now call transgender people--have won public policy victories that had previously seemed unwinnable: the American Psychiatric Association replaced the term "gender identity disorder" with "gender dysphoria" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Department of Justice announced that discrimination on the basis of gender identity constituted sex discrimination, and...

Examines the limitations of rights-based mobilization and litigation for advancing the interests of trans individuals in the contemporary United States. While the growing attention to trans rights and the development of trans-specific interest groups suggest that the time is right for a trans rights movement akin to prior civil rights movements, The Politics of Right Sex explores the limitations of rights-based mobilization and litigation for advancing...

"The story of the dramatic postwar struggle over the proper role of citizens and government in American society. In the 1960s and 70s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America, built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Ralph Nader, and others crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government....

"An inside look at the secretive world of elite philanthropists--and how they're quietly wielding ever more power to shape American life in ways both good bad"-- Provided by publisher.