This chapter introduces the major themes of the book. Insurance practices and related metaphors began expanding rapidly from a European base some 500 years ago. The simultaneous emergence of the modern state was hardly coincidental. Increasingly complex societies energized by market economies required protection from risks of various kinds. This required mobilizing and organizing private capital to achieve common goals. The deepening of markets and development of financial technologies now increases demands for protection beyond conventional borders. But where the fiscal power of the modern state underpinned national insurance and reinsurance systems, the absence of a global fiscal authority is exposed by rising cross-border, systemic, and global risks. That the background condition for necessary innovation in governance is uncertainty has also become undeniable.

Global capitalism is in deep crisis. The current moment in world capitalism is defined by three key developments. First, the system has become universal through globalization processes that date to the late twentieth century. Second, the system is undergoing a new round of restructuring and transformation based on a much more advanced digitalization and financialization of the entire global economy and society. Third, the system faces an unprecedented and multidimensional crisis that points to the impending exhaustion of global capitalism's capacity for renewal. The crisis is economic or structural, one of overaccumulation and chronic stagnation. It is a crisis of social reproduction. It is political, a crisis of state legitimacy, capitalist hegemony, and geopolitical conflict. It is ecological, with the threat of the collapse of the biosphere. The ruling groups launched a vast counteroffensive from the 1970s and on against the working and popular classes to reconstitute the hegemony of capital as a transnational capitalist class emerged. The dialectical approach and radical political economy are the tools for analyzing and theorizing the crisis of global capitalism. The study points us in the direction of a renewal of Marxist crisis theory and offers a bold theory of global capitalist exhaustion.

This chapter lays out the book’s central thesis that Supreme Court decisions changing previously prevailing interpretations of a mostly unaltered written Constitution represent the historical norm, not an exception. The chapter begins by discussing the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016 and the changes in constitutional doctrine that Scalia, who had pioneered the interpretive methodologies of originalism and textualism, had helped to bring about. The chapter also highlights changes that Scalia had urged but could not persuade a majority of his colleagues to adopt. It describes the political machinations by a Republican Senate majority in the aftermath of Scalia’s death and the similarly partisan maneuvers that resulted in the swift confirmation of a successor to the iconic liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020. Together, these developments helped produce the Court’s current supermajority of six conservative justices (out of nine), including three appointed by Donald Trump, and inaugurated a new era in constitutional history. After sketching this background, the chapter preliminarily sketches some of the book’s most important themes, including that the Supreme Court is a lawmaking institution but one that is constrained by widely shared understandings of the judicial role in ways that legislative lawmakers are not.

Public schools exist to educate students. Local school districts are governed by elected school boards. But only adults vote in local school board elections. I argue that these three facts are the primary cause of low academic achievement in American public schools, particularly for the most disadvantaged students. The institutions of democratic control cause unacceptably poor performance because the main concerns of adults who vote in local school board elections are not aligned with the academic needs of students. Adult interests – organized around partisanship, identity politics, employment concerns, and property values – dictate what schools do, often at the expense of academic achievement. I also argue that the existing literature, focused on the debate about the role of money and teachers’ unions in education, overlooks other major problems with public education. Finally, I also anticipate the main counterarguments to my thesis and “prebunk” them by showing why they are wrong.

The Supreme Court has implemented a set of revolutionary changes in constitutional doctrine since the 1990s. It has developed a body of constitutional law that is rooted in a deep-seated mistrust of the People’s elected representatives. That body of law is one of several factors contributing to the problem of democratic decay in the United States. To reverse the process of democratic decay, the Court will need to repudiate much of the constitutional doctrine developed since World War II. In short, we need a Copernican revolution in constitutional law to revitalize popular control of the government. For far too long, the Court has placed itself at the center of our constitutional universe. Other actors in the system revolve around the Court, like planets revolving around the sun. To restore popular sovereignty and reverse the process of democratic decay, the Court must place We the People at the center of our constitutional universe, with other actors (including the Court) revolving around us.

The United States, virtually alone in the capitalist world, never used labor courts during the Interwar period; existing accounts incompletely explain why US labor policy design diverged here. In the early 1920s, the weak labor policy and incoherent labor law of the United States was a widely recognized, urgent problem. The US government was newly strong and economically interventionist. There was ideological consensus on the basic features of an acceptable labor policy, but owing in part to political support for several plausible models, and unsettled partisan and intellectual alignments, the US did not make progress on labor policy in these first post-War years. Controversy over the KCIR, founded as a provocation in this debate, helps make sense of these patterns. The intellectual, legal, and political effects of the KCIR’s failure extinguished American interest in labor courts generally. Position-taking, especially reaction against the KCIR, reveals the emerging alignments that were to be crucial to the design and political realization of the unique labor policy of the New Deal.

This chapter lays out the central puzzle – the reversal of the fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) during the Republican Era. I contend that the emergence of a dominant leader aided the CCP’s ascension, whereas the contested leadership undermined the KMT. I first position the puzzling political development of the CCP and KMT within the framework of prevailing arguments in studies of authoritarian parties and Chinese politics, revealing that they are inadequate to explain the rise of the CCP and the demise of the KMT. I then succinctly recapitulate the key arguments of Domination and Mobilization, underscoring its unique contributions to three strands of scholarly discourse: the genesis of authoritarian parties, party-building by political organizations aims to seize power through nonelectoral means, and the rise of Communist movement in China. I conclude the chapter by outlining the plan for the book.

This chapter introduces the concept of punctuated equilibrium from paleontology, showing that contrary to Darwin’s theory, the history of biological evolution tends to be characterized by fits and starts, protracted periods of seeming stasis to be followed by sudden, large leaps of transformation. This process characterizes many other aspects of the natural and physical world as well as human affairs.

The Introduction introduces the central research questions of the study and summarizes the main arguments. It also lays out the research design and discusses the key concepts and how it measures them. Finally, it provides summaries of all of the chapters in the book.

The introduction provides an overview of the book, presents the core arguments, highlights the contribution to current literature, explains the book’s methods and sources, and outlines the structure of the book. The overarching argument of the book is that intelligence cooperation was so beneficial for all parties that European authorities therefore let Mossad carry out its operation and tolerated the use of its intelligence to kill Palestinians. Hence, the book demonstrates that the extensive advantages that European agencies gained through Club de Berne intelligence-sharing led them to turn a blind eye towards, or even tacitly support, Israeli covert actions on their respective territories.

This chapter introduces the main argument, situates it in a broader literature, and offers a glimpse into the evidence that will be consulted in the ensuing chapters.

Are non-judicial approaches to remedying business-related human rights violations a good use of the resources invested in them, or a counterproductive distraction from alternative legal or activist pathways to remedy? This chapter outlines the book’s approach to exploring this divisive question, drawing on field-work intensive case studies of human rights grievances across three industrial sectors in Indonesia and India. This introductory chapter launches the book’s argument that while NJMs are seriously limited in their ability to deliver adequate human rights redress, NJMs can nonetheless make small but useful contributions to broader struggles for human rights remedy, never by substituting for binding state-led regulatory and redress processes, but rather by providing entry points through which workers and communities can sometimes mobilise additional resources or sources of leverage in support of their struggles for redress. These findings imply the need for a responsive approach to NJM institutional design and regulatory strategy, in which NJMs are mobilised more explicitly as part of a wider field of struggle to counterbalance some of the entrenched inequalities that buttress recurring patterns of human rights grievances around the world.

Why do some citizens of electoral autocracies choose to support the ruling party while others support the opposition? Chapter 1 explains the puzzle of partisanship under dictatorship, presents existing theories to understand public opinion in such regimes, and briefly summarizes the argument of the book and the data and methods used to test it. It concludes by discussing what we gain by understanding partisanship as a social identity as opposed to a materialist response to regime strategies.

The book opens with some compelling examples of puzzling episodes in recent trade policy negotiations. I question why Americans were largely unaware of TTIP, while the TPP became a lightning rod for controversy and went down in flames on day one of the Trump presidency. I also discuss the dramatic rise in firm-level lobbying over these and other trade agreements, despite the IPE literature’s longstanding assumption that firms primarily engage in trade politics collectively via industry associations or class-based coalitions. Then I briefly introduce my theoretical story, which makes sense of these and other puzzles. I discuss the state of our understanding of trade politics in developed democracies before presenting the plan of the book to follow.

The above quote is from Baluta by Daya Pawar, arguably one of the first Dalit autobiographies in Marathi. Pawar recalls his childhood memories, remembering how his mother would forage in the jungle for food, often after paying off the forest guards, and how people from his community were forced to survive on whatever they found edible in the forests or even on the grains left behind in the fields after harvest. Pawar's powerful narrative is a testament to Dalit lives and how they relate to their environment.

Meanings of and attitudes to nature, animals and the environment vary across communities and cultures. They also generate different ideas and feelings depending on the condition of the humans that relate to them. Human relations with animals have always been multifaceted; animals are worshipped, considered kin and also slaughtered as spiritual offerings.2 Even more complex is our relations with animals in the contemporary world, where animals may be employed as performers in circuses, displayed in zoological parks, recruited as research subjects in laboratories and kept as companions and pets in homes. Ideas of morality are often attached to some animals, which are idealised, venerated and ‘used as models of order and morality’.

Our main concern is to understand Senate party development. What are the problems that individual legislators encounter in the absence of leadership? How do they set out to solve problems of coordination and collective action? Our answer, and our central argument, focuses on three factors: party competition, factionalism, and entrepreneurs. In the Senate, where leadership and institutional organization rest in the two parties rather than in the presiding officer, members adopt innovative structures when parties are most closely balanced. With this book, we look at the rise of party organization and leadership in the Senate throughout its history—showing the origins of the Senate caucus in the 1840s, the Republican steering committee in the 1880s and early 1890s, and Senate floor leadership in 1890, and then analyzing the maturation and development of party leadership and organization in the twentiethth and twenty-first centuries. We focus on five main features of Senate leadership: party organization management, floor management, service as intermediary with the president, party spokespersonship, and coalition building.

Following democracy’s global advance in the late twentieth century, recent patterns of democratic “backsliding” have generated extensive scholarly debate. Since backsliding towards autocracy is often the work of elected leaders operating within democratic institutions, it challenges conventional thinking about democratic consolidation, the enforcement of institutional checks and balances, and the reproduction of democratic norms. Drawing insights from classic literature on democratic transitions and consolidation, this volume examines the nature of contemporary threats to democracy, recognizing that the central challenge is not always to induce the compliance of those who lose elections, but rather those who emerge victorious and turn the institutional leverage of incumbency into a source of ongoing competitive advantage. There is, then, both a “loser’s dilemma” and a “winner’s dilemma” embedded in the study of democratic resiliency. Patterns of backsliding have revealed the contingent and potentially contested underpinnings of democratic institutions in any political order, given the presence (whether latent or active) of authoritarian political and cultural currents. Democracy is, therefore, best understood not as a standardized regime template or a static endpoint of political development, but rather as a dialectical frontier that advances ‒ and sometimes recedes ‒ according to the dynamic interplay countervailing forces.

This chapter asks the question: Where did Black individuals' desire for community commitment come from? The answer this, I draw on numerous primary and secondary sources starting in the Reconstruction era to show where Black voters' expectations of those representing them came from and how they shifted over time. The latter part of the chapter focuses on the Civil Rights Movement out of which many Black voters received the right to engage in politics. I contend that these new rights and those who helped acquire them for the Black community created the lens through which most Black people see effective leadership today, and solidified the desire for representatives willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of the racial group's progress.

The introduction chapter critically reviews the existing literature and introduces a theory of mediated threat, which explains how perceived threats to civic freedoms and institutional autonomy can motivate the masses and reshape the relational structure of the democratic opposition. Our basic proposition is that threats do not instantaneously provoke protests; rather, they require perception and socialization among citizens to potentially trigger mobilization. Different groups of citizens may perceive the same threat in disparate ways, leading not only to varied mobilizational responses but also the formation of new organizations and groups. This alters the relational dynamics of the opposition through which new threats are assessed.

This chapter introduces the regulation of prostitution in China as a case study of law in everyday life. It presents China’s three tiers of sex workers, the state’s interests in the sex industry, and patterns of prostitution policy implementation. It shows how the study of prostitution and its regulation in China expands our understanding of state–society relations, and of sex work and its regulation across space and time.