Perspectives on Politics

by Martin Gilens In “Relative Policy Support and Coincidental Representation,” Peter Enns (2015) focuses on a crucially important question: Given the large disparities in political influence of more and less well-off Americans, “why don’t those in […]

Can the people deliberate to set the agenda for direct democracy in large scale states? How might such an institution work? The 2011 California Deliberative Poll piloted a solution to this problem helping to produce […]

by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Philip Edward Jones, Hye Young You, Traci Burch, Sidney Verba and Henry E. Brady This article documents the prevalence in organized interest politics in the United States of organizations—for example, corporations, think tanks, universities, or hospitals—that have […]

Historical institutionalism challenged older forms of comparative historical analysis by moving away from purely structural explanations of historical outcomes. Instead it posited that there were critical junctures in which actors chose between institutional alternatives, which […]

                      I propose the concept of “ignoring” to capture situations in which government officials appear dismissive (either through inaction or contempt) of popular mobilization. The […]