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"The United States: Politicians, Partisans, and Military Professionals" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Professor-Politician challenges common depictions of politics as a constant struggle of good-versus-evil and heroes-versus-villains, with "dirty politics" usually winning. The truth is that good government can prevail in Montgomery and Washington. Journalist Geni Certain recounts Glen Browder's civic adventures as one of Alabama's prominent scholars and public officials over the past half-century. This is a story of practical and reform politics told by someone specially positioned to comment on Alabama government and American democracy. Certain interviewed knowledgeable people, researched public records, and scoured the Browder Collection at Jacksonville State University for this intriguing and inspiring biography of a civic-oriented leader."--Publisher's website

I am assigned as Military Faculty to the Naval Postgraduate School Computer Science Department and am simultaneously pursuing my doctorate. Among other things, my research concerns Software Engineering and Control Software for the NPS Phoenix robot minisubmarine.

In 1850 the future looked bleak to John Alexander Macdonald, then a rising young star on the political horizon of Canada West. As the year began he faced a series of crises which threatened to put an end to his ambitions for the years ahead. His career in politics seemed almost doomed and his law business was on the verge of failure. This state of affairs was complicated further when his invalid wife announced that she was expecting a child. The fortunes of the Conservative party in the province of Canada were seriously imperilled at the end of 1849. The Tories were an impotent minority in the legislative assembly of the province at a time when the traditional colonial system upon which they had relied seemed about to collapse. The repeal of the Corn Laws and Timber Duties removed Canada's exports from the preferential position they had occupied in imperial markets, and the British acceptance of the principle of free trade destroyed the old foundation of the colonial Tories' political supremacy. The passage of the Rebellion Losses Bill by the Canadian assembly, and Lord Elgin's assent to it, completed the ruin of the Tories' philosophy. With their faith and loyalties rattled, the Conservatives groped toward new policies and new principles. No one was more aware of the Conservative dilemma than John A. Macdonald, the Receiver-General in the last Conservative administration. Macdonald had entered public life in 1843 as an alderman in Kingston, and the next year had become that city's representative in the Legislative Assembly of the United Province of Canada. In three years on the back-bench he had gained recognition as a moderate and disciple of William Henry Draper, and in 1847 was elevated to the cabinet. With Draper's resignation, Macdonald remained the moderates' spokesman and undeclared candidate for the party's leadership. However, the victory of the Reformers in the 1848 election, and the subsequent passage of legislation anathema to traditionalist Tories, drove the Conservatives to desperation. The ...

AbstractSociologist Peter Berger once said that if India is the most religious country and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. In terms of use of religious rhetoric by politicians, however, the United States actually comes closer to being a nation of Indians ruled by Indians, while Australia a nation of Swedes ruled by "Swindians," and Canada a nation of "Swindians" ruled by Swedes. This article provides evidence for these claims and assesses theories as to what causes greater use of religious rhetoric by politicians. Size of the religious population and the rights revolution are not decisive in determining whether politicians heavily use religious rhetoric. The article argues that the politicization of religion is related to coalition-building incentives with Catholics.

Despite the central role of politicians in representative democracies, political science has largely ignored how who candidates for elected office are shape campaigns and elections. By communicating biographical details about their family, occupation, education, religion, and other background, political candidates attempt to build trust and alter how they will be evaluated by voters. Using systematized biographies of all US congressional candidates from 2008-2014, television advertising data from 2008-2012, and six survey experiments, including four panel experiments, I demonstrate that biographical presentation by candidates is ubiquitous, systematic, and effectual in shaping the opinion of voters.To assess biography's role in campaigns and candidate evaluation, I address and provide solutions to a number of theoretical and measurement problems in existing literature using a diverse set of methodological strategies. Grounded in literatures in both political science and psychology, I focus on the nexus between the strategic behavior of electoral candidates and voters' cognition. Because of the complexity of candidates' biographies, many scholars have often overlooked them in favor of more parsimonious measurement strategies, often overlooking critical variation in candidate backgrounds. Indeed, many of the interesting hypotheses and findings about the role of biography lie not in broad main effects – but in its interaction with other characteristics of candidates, elections, districts, or voters.I find that a diverse set of biographical attributes are associated with candidates' partisan affiliation and particular types of campaigns, and are also independently related to electoral success. Candidates strategically present themselves to voters through television advertising, highlighting advantageous characteristics while glossing over others. In realistic over-time conjoint-style experiments, I find that biographical factors independently affect evaluations of candidates alongside party and policy information. I also find that the role biography plays in voters' cognition is affected by its importance to voters, its memorability, its timing and order of presentation, and its conformance to party stereotypes.

Review.

Abstract There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous trends. To date, data-driven evidence regarding these questions is scarce, partly due to the difficulty of obtaining a comprehensive, longitudinal record of politicians' utterances. Here we apply psycholinguistic tools to a novel, comprehensive corpus of 24 million quotes from online news attributed to 18,627 US politicians in order to analyze how the tone of US politicians' language as reported in online media evolved between 2008 and 2020. We show that, whereas the frequency of negative emotion words had decreased continuously during Obama's tenure, it suddenly and lastingly increased with the 2016 primary campaigns, by 1.6 pre-campaign standard deviations, or 8% of the pre-campaign mean, in a pattern that emerges across parties. The effect size drops by 40% when omitting Trump's quotes, and by 50% when averaging over speakers rather than quotes, implying that prominent speakers, and Trump in particular, have disproportionately, though not exclusively, contributed to the rise in negative language. This work provides the first large-scale data-driven evidence of a drastic shift toward a more negative political tone following Trump's campaign start as a catalyst. The findings have important implications for the debate about the state of US politics.