David A. Schultz Libri

"The Politics of Civil Service Reform" is a concise exploration of the development and politics of federal civil service reform in the United States from President Washington to President Clinton. The authors situate those reforms in the context of competing political struggles between Congress, the president, and the federal courts to control the federal bureaucracy and define its organization and values. Students and specialists in the field of public administration and American politics will find "The Politics of Civil Service Reform" informative and insightful.

It’s Show Time! Media, Politics, and Popular Culture is an exciting collection of original essays introducing undergraduate students and interested readers to the important role that the media and popular culture have in shaping their lives and views on politics. Written by both political scientists and journalists, this book looks at the diverse ways television, movies, the internet, and even soap operas mold public opinion and define how we view political reality. However, as these essays will reveal, this socialization is not all benign. Instead, this book reveals a corporate media increasingly trapped by the demands to inform, entertain, and make a profit – often at times distorting reality by transforming criminals into heroes, assassination theories into fact, and participatory government into a spectator sport. Overall, It’s Show Time ! explores the limits and possibilities of the media and emerging information technologies as they shape political perceptions and politics into the twenty-first century.

Leveraging the Law is an important and timely collection of essays by noted political scientists and legal scholars who critically explore the relationship between the courts, political mobilization, and social change. Employing a wide variety of methodological perspectives and drawing upon numerous case studies, the authors demonstrate how and under what conditions the courts can be an important force for political change and social reform. While in some situations the judiciary is politically impotent or irrelevant, Leveraging the Law shows that courts do matter and that litigants can use the judiciary to secure numerous goals.

Political scientists investigate the impact that political advertisements have on political campaigns and elections. They use case studies, interviews, and analysis of specific campaigns and ads--mostly in the US but also in Canada--to explain how ads are constructed, why some work and some fail, and the factors about political ads that allow them