Reading Public Opinion: Political Actors View the Democratic Process. Susan Herbst (University of Chicago, 1998). This book describes the ways in which policy managers, journalists and political activists conceptualize relationships among public opinion, mass media, and legislative action. It is aimed at broadening the study of public opinion and political cognition, which often fail to address matters of political culture and occupational context. Among its major findings is that legislative staffers, reporters, and party activists all see a complex fusion between media content, interest group communications, and the content of public opinion. These insights and evidence along these lines have significant theoretical and methodological consequences for studying policymaking processes.
Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue. James S. Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser (Columbia University Press, 1998). Based on in-depth interviews with prize-winning investigative reporters, the authors offer a rich portrait of the investigative craft but probe below the surface to examine how these journalists negotiate the tensions between a moral obligation to unearth and document social injustice and professional obligations to maintain objectivity.
Social Cleavages and Political Change: U.S. Politics Since the 1950s. Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 1999). Which social groups support which political party and how that support has changed over time are central questions in the sociology of political behaviour. This systematic reassessment and restatement of the sociological approach to American politics challenges widespread arguments that the importance of social cleavages has declined precipitously in recent years in the face of post-industrial social and economic changes. It reconceptualizes the concept of social cleavages by focusing on four major cleavages in American society: class, religion, gender, and race. The authors argue that a number of important changes have occurred in the alignments of the groups making up these four cleavages. They analyze the implications of these changes for both Democratic and Republican parties and examine each party's electoral coalition. Their findings are considered in light of the central dilemmas facing the two major parties in the contemporary political environment.
On the Beat: Policing and Community Problem-Solving. Wesley G. Skogan, Susan Hartnett, et al. (Oxford University Press, 1999). This book examines how Chicago's ambitious plan to remake its police department actually worked in the field. It describes how the city developed its model for problem-solving and went about training police and neighborhood residents to implement it. It follows the key players into the field and describes how, in partnership, they attempted to tackle chronic problems in 15 neighborhoods representing Chicago's diverse ethnic and class makeup. The areas faced varied problems and had varied capacity to deal with them. The book analyzes the extent to which the police and municipal agencies aided the neighborhoods, including several that were poor, racially diverse, and very much in need of police support. Based on extensive data gleaned from residents, officers, and official records, it examines police leadership in focused problem-solving and offers recommendations to improve the ability of police to make community policing work in areas that need it most.
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest. Wendy Espeland (University of Chicago, 1998). The Bureau of Reclamation's controversial decision to develop the Orme Dam in Arizona forms the backdrop of this book. Espeland uses the Bureau's long and bitter dispute with the Yavapai Indians, who fought being driven from their ancestral home, to examine both the underpinnings of rationality and its link to commensuration. She explains how rationality became the terrain for struggle over powerful material and ideal interests, and how, once the conflict was cast in these terms, the interests and identities of participants were renegotiated.