Sprague Library Exhibits

Voting rights are a perennial topic in American politics. Recent elections and the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down key enforcement provisions in the Voting Rights Act (VRA), have only placed further emphasis on the debate over voter disenfranchaisement. Ballot Blocked shows how the divergent trajectories of legislation, administration, and judicial interpretation in voting rights policymaking derive largely from efforts by conservative politicians to narrow the scope of federal enforcement while at the same time preserving their public reputations as supporters of racial equality and minority voting rights.

Candidates and Voters extends our understanding of voting, elections, and representation by elaborating a simple theory of voting choice based on voters' interest in policy and in the suitability of candidates to hold elective office ('leadership valence').

Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided.

The updated edition of this book describes the role of gender in the American electoral process through the 2008 elections. It strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2008 elections and providing a deeper analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape electoral politics in the United States.

Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed.Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history,

An elderly African American woman, en route to vote, remembers her family's tumultuous voting history in this picture book publishing in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It happens in America every four decades and it is about to happen again. America's demand for change in the 2008 election will cause another of our country's periodic political makeovers. This realignment, like all others before it, will result from the coming of age of a new generation of young Americans--the Millennial Generation--and the full emergence of the Internet-based communications technology that this generation uses so well.

Which get-out-the-vote efforts actually succeed in ethnoracial communities--and why? Analyzing the results from hundreds of original experiments, the authors of this book offer a persuasive new theory to explain why some methods work while others don't.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were two heroic women who vastly bettered the lives of a majority of American citizens. For more than fifty years they led the public battle to secure for women the most basic civil rights and helped establish a movement that would revolutionize American society. Yet despite the importance of their work and they impact they made on our history, a century and a half later, they have been almost forgotten.

"The work of David J. Garrow is more than a day-by-day account of how the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 came into being. It is also a skillful analysis of the dynamics of protest activity and more particularly of the ways in which successful protesters deliberately use the mass media to influence uninvolved audiences."

Examines how uncertainty regarding changing economic conditions, dramatic national events, and U.S. international interventions influences people's decisions whether to vote or not. Using rigorous statistical tools and rich historical stories, the authors test this theory on aggregate nonvoting patterns in the US across presidential and midterm elections from 1920 to 2012. They challenge the stereotype of nonvoters as poor, uneducated and apathetic and show that nonvoters are, by and large, as politically knowledgeable as voters, but see no difference between candidates or view them negatively.

Ruthless gerrymandering has given the GOP a long-term grip on Congress. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws, boosting candidates backed by big money. As reporter Zachary Roth reveals, a growing number of Republicans distrust the very idea of democracy-and they're doing everything they can to limit it. Roth unearths the deep historical roots of this anti-egalitarian worldview, and introduces us to its modern-day proponents- The GOP officials pushing to make it harder to cast a ballot. He travels from Rust Belt cities to southern towns to show us how these efforts are hurting the most vulnerable Americans and preventing progress on pressing issues.

The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more "dispassionate" notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists--and Democratic campaign strategists.

Most Americans take for granted their right to vote, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But the history of suffrage in the U.S. is, in fact,the story of a struggle to achieve this right by our society's marginalized groups. In The Right to Vote, Duke historian Alexander Keyssar explores the evolution of suffrage over the course of the nation's history.

A thorough examination of the people, forces, and events that have shaped the right, opportunity, and value of the vote in America from 1715 to the present. * Tables include data on voter turnouts for presidential primaries from 1972 to 2000, voter turnouts for presidential elections from 1924 to 2000, and comparisons (in numbers) of voters and nonvoters by election years from 1924 to 2000

Explores and documents the causes and effects of the long history of vote denial on American politics, culture, law, and society. * A timeline giving the history of voting rights from 1619, when Virginia planters voted for the first time, to 2000, when the Supreme Court invalidated Florida's recount process, which ultimately determined the outcome of the election * Excerpts of key legal documents including Reynolds v. Sims (one person, one vote) and Bush v. Gore (debate over nationalization of voting rights)

Provides an authoritative assessment of how immigration is reshaping the politics of the nation. Using an array of data and analysis, the authors show that fears about immigration fundamentally influence white Americans' core political identities, policy preferences, and electoral choices, and that these concerns are at the heart of a large-scale defection of whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party. They demonstrate that this political backlash has disquieting implications for the future of race relations in America. White Americans' concerns about Latinos and immigration have led to support for policies that are less generous and more punitive and that conflict with the preferences of much of the immigrant population. Racial divisions in partisanship and voting, as the authors indicate, now outweigh divisions by class, age, gender, and other demographic measures.