Faculty Publications and Research

In Defense of Plural Marriage
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015
Den Otter, Ronald

With over half of Americans now in favor of marriage equality, it is clear that societal norms of marriage are being quickly redefined. The growing belief that the state may not discriminate against gays and lesbians calls into question whether the state may limit other types of marital unions, including plural marriage. While much has been written about same-sex marriage, as of yet there has been no book-length legal treatment of unions among three or more individuals.

The first major study on plural marriage and the law, In Defense of Plural Marriage begins to fill this lacuna in the scholarly literature. Ronald C. Den Otter shows how the constitutional arguments that support the option of plural marriage are stronger than those against. Ultimately, he proposes a new semi-contractual marital model that would provide legal recognition for a wide range of intimate relationships.

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Hybrid Rule and State Formation:
Public-Private Power in the Twenty-First Century
New York and London: Routledge, May 2015
Hurt, Shelley, and Ronnie D. Lipschutz

Neoliberalism has been the reigning ideology of our era. For the past four decades, almost every real-world event of any consequence has been traced to the supposedly omnipresent influence of neoliberalism. Instead, this book argues that states across the world have actually grown in scope and reach.

The authors in this volume contest the view that the past three decades have been marked by the diminution of the state in the face of neoliberalism. They argue instead that we are witnessing a new phase of state formation, which revolves around hybrid rule—that is, a more expansive form of state formation that works through privatization and seeks pacification and depoliticization as instrumental to enhancing state power. Contributors argue that that the process of hybridization, and hybrid rule point towards a convergence on a more authoritarian capitalist regime type, possibly, but not necessarily, more closely aligned with the Beijing model—one toward which even the United States, with its penchant for surveillance and discipline, appears to be moving.

This volume will shed new light on evolving public-private relations, and the changing nature of power and political authority in the 21^st century and will be of interest to students and scholars of IPE, international relations and political theory.

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Book chapter: "Incentives for collaboration: State-level brownfield remediation and redevelopment programs,"
in Richard C. Hula, Laura A. Reese and Cynthia Jackson-Elmoore, eds.,
Reclaiming Brownfields: A Comparative Analysis of Adaptive Reuse of Contaminated Properties(London: Ashgate, 2012).
Lowham, Elizabeth

The environmental legacy of past industrial and agricultural development can simultaneously pose serious threats to human health and impede reuse of contaminated land. The urban landscape around the world is littered with sites contaminated with a variety of toxins produced by past use. Both public and private sector actors are often reluctant to make significant investments in properties that simultaneously pose significant potential human health issues, and may demand complex and very expensive cleanups. The chapters in this volume recognize that land and water contamination are now almost universally acknowledged to be key social, economic, and political issues. How multiple societies have attempted to craft and implement public policy to deal with these issues provides the central focus of the book. The volume is unique in that it provides a global comparative perspective on brownfield policy and examples of its use in a variety of countries.

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Agenda Setting in the U.S. Senate
Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (May 16, 2011)
Den Hartog, Chris, Dr. Nathan W. Monroe

This book proposes a new theory of Senate agenda setting that reconciles a divide in literature between the conventional wisdom - in which party power is thought to be mostly, if not completely, undermined by Senate procedures and norms - and the apparent partisan bias in Senate decisions noted in recent empirical studies. Chris Den Hartog and Nathan W. Monroe's theory revolves around a "costly consideration" framework for thinking about agenda setting, where moving proposals forward through the legislative process is seen as requiring scarce resources. To establish that the majority party pays lower agenda consideration costs through various procedural advantages, the book features a number of chapters examining partisan influence at several stages of the legislative process, including committee reports, filibusters and cloture, floor scheduling, and floor amendments. Not only do the results strongly support the book's theoretical assumption and key hypotheses, but they shed new light on virtually every major step in the Senate's legislative process.

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Book chapter: "The Military's Hidden Hand: Examining the Dual-Use Origins of Biotechnology in the American Context, 1969-1972,"
in Fred Block and Matthew Keller, eds., State of Innovation: The U.S. Government's Role in Technology Development (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2011): 31-56. 
Hurt, Shelley L.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, American politics has been dominated by the idea that free markets are the most effective way to organize economic activity. Private firms, disciplined by the competitive rigors of the market, are forced to innovate, adapt, and become more efficient in order to outpace rivals, continuously satisfy consumers, and meet new demands. Government, in this view, is the problem : regulation, taxation, and policy interventions disrupt open competition, stifle innovation, and breed inefficiency. But the dirty secret behind the façade of the Washington consensus is that over the last four decades, government programs and policies have quietly become ever more central to the American economy. From basic research to commercialization, the fingerprints of government can be found in virtually every major industrial success story of the late 20th and early 21st century. This volume provides the first comprehensive account of the depth, magnitude, and structure of the U.S. government s role in the innovation economy. A cross-disciplinary group of authors collectively document, theorize, and evaluate the decentralized set of agencies, programs, and policies at the core of the collaborative linkages between public agencies and the private industries at the forefront of the U.S. economy. Equally important, as the U.S. seeks to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the volume addresses issues critical to the construction of newly responsible, forward-looking public policies: how can we forge an innovation policy that is at once flexible, effective and efficient, as well as transparent and accountable?

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The Other World (9th Edition)
Longman; 9th Edition, 2010
Arceneaux, Craig D., Evens, Emmit, Long, Dianne

Accessible and interdisciplinary, this text offers political, economic, social, and historical analysis plus case studies on Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Central Asia and the Southern Near Abroad, and Asia. Highlighting similarities and differences among these regions and focusing on enduring problems, The Other World is a practical look at the issues affecting the majority of the world’s population.

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"Political Theory Today: Results of a National Survey"
PS: Political Science & Politics, Volume 43, Issue 02, April 2010
Moore, Matthew

Judicial Review in an Age of Moral Pluralism
Cambridge University Press, 2009
Den Otter, Ronald

Americans cannot live with judicial review, but they cannot live without it. There is something characteristically American about turning the most divisive political questions - like freedom of religion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and abortion - into legal questions with the hope that courts can answer them. In Judicial Review in an Age of Moral Pluralism Ronald C. Den Otter addresses how judicial review can be improved to strike the appropriate balance between legislative and judicial power under conditions of moral pluralism. His defense of judicial review is predicated on the imperative of ensuring that the reasons that the state offers on behalf of its most important laws are consistent with the freedom and equality of all persons. Den Otter ties this defense to a theory of constitutional adjudication based on John Rawls's idea of public reason and argues that a law that is not sufficiently publicly justified is unconstitutional, thus addressing when courts should invalidate laws and when they should uphold them even in the midst of reasonable disagreement about the correct outcome in particular constitutional controversies.

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Shaping German Foreign Policy: History, Memory and National Interest
First Forum Press; Lynne Rienner, 2008
Leithner, Anika

Reconciling the imperatives of Germany s national identity and its national interest has been a challenge for the country s policymakers since the end of the Cold War. Anika Leithner explores how (and how much) the past continues to shape Germany s foreign policy behavior in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Leithner argues that, while German foreign policy is still heavily influenced by the memory of World War II, the exact nature of that memory is slowly changing as the lessons of history are being reinterpreted. Focusing on the military interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she deftly illustrates the ways in which the lessons of history have been manipulated in the pursuit of an assertive foreign policy one that can appease audiences at home while securing a leadership role for Germany in Europe and beyond.

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The Politics of Virginity:  Abstinence in Sex Education
Praeger Publisher
Williams, Jean

Abstinence is currently taught as the only form of sex education in a third of public schools. Although most Americans oppose federal funding for abstinence-only education, the federal government has spent more than $1 billion on Title V and community-group programs that promote abstinence before marriage as the sole healthy and moral choice. Studies show that students in abstinence-only programs are no more likely to abstain from sex than their peers who are in comprehensive sex education programs. Moreover, argue Doan and Williams, abstinence-only programs perpetuate gender stereotypes that disproportionately constrain women, retail medical disinformation, and violate the separation of church and state.

Doan and Williams detail what abstinence programs teach students, expose the political and religious agendas behind them, and analyze the damaging effects to women of the resurrection of the chastity belt: including sexual disempowerment, distorted power dynamics in relationships, increased vulnerability to sexual assault, increased emotional vulnerability, increased risk of unintended pregnancy, and STD/HIV infection. By focusing on the marriage of morality politics with gender politics and of ignorance with chastity that underlies abstinence-only education, the authors fill a major gap in the literature of reproductive politics and policy.

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