In the Current Issue

Volume 137 - Number 2 - Summer 2022

Articles

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19
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NICHOLAS F. JACOBS, DESMOND KING, and Sidney M. Milkis look at the final year of the Donald Trump presidency, and the administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They argue that Trump’s actions fit a rationale, partisan strategy endemic to executive-centered partisanship. Consequently, Trump and the Republican Party failed to suffer the repudiation that punished previous presidents when adjudged failed crisis leaders.

Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis
James L. Gibson and MICHAEL J. NELSON examine the role of state high courts in producing, maintaining, or ameliorating political, legal, economic, and social inequality over the period from 1990 to 2015.

Legal Claims and Compensation in Climate-Related Disasters
Susan M. Sterett and Laura K. Mateczun argue that courts are significant in governance in climate-related disasters. Complaints about the immediate harm from fires and floods expand the range of climate-related litigation beyond landmark environmental pursuits concerning greenhouse gas emissions. They do not argue that these cases solve the problems, but that the broadened scope of cases expands the actors, timeline, and institutions identified as contributing to problems with climate-related disasters.

Thinking about Groups in Political Science: A Case for Bringing the Meso Level Back In
LOUBNA EL AMINE and KEVIN MAZUR discuss the study of groups in comparative politics and political theory. They argue for focusing on the meso-level, which comprises families, neighborhoods, and localities, and which shows groups to be neither bounded and fixed nor ever-changing and completely malleable.

The President and the Supreme Court: The Effect of the Prospect of Non-Implementation on Government Success in the Court
GORDON D. BALLINGRUD examines judicial decision-making under conditions of political pressure given through ideological hostility from other federal institutions. He finds that in case outcomes and majority opinion writing, the Court’s behavior changes when other institutions are ideologically distant from the Court’s center.

Review Essay: Pity the Poor Autocrat: Vladimir Putin, Russia's “Weak Strongman”
KATHRYN STONER assesses Timothy Frye’s Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia within the context of an emergent comparative political science literature on rising authoritarianism and democratic recession.

Review Essay: Making America Great Again? Individualism, Community, and Enlightened Self-Interest in the United States
Michael X. Delli Carpini reviews Robert Putnam’s The Upswing. He finds Putnam’s argument—that American democracy requires a balance between individualism and communitarianism—and his evidence that this balance produced positive effects through the first 60 years of the twentieth century, insightful and convincing, but raises concerns that this “data driven narrative” silos issues of race and gender, overstates the negative consequences of the political and cultural movements of the 1960s, and downplays the importance of political struggle and power in both the “upswings” and the downswings” that Putnam documents.

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