reform

Review of Robert Putnam’s "The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again"

by Walter G. Moss

Robert Putnam's book on the "Great Divergence" toward economic inequality, political polarization and social fragmentation contains ample historical generalization, but asks big questions that it will be worth historians' time to engage. 

Cleaning House: Watergate and the Limits of Reform

by John A. Lawrence

The reform agenda of the "Watergate Babies" class elected to Congress in 1974 achieved important successes but failed to prevent either the rise of the imperial presidency or increased partisan polarization. 

The Constitution Needs Reform

by Sanford Levinson

The system is rigged, and it’s the Constitution that’s doing the rigging.

The Perils of Criminal Justice Reform

by Tony Platt

It will take nothing short of a broad-based movement, a revitalized imagination, and reckoning with a historical legacy that bleeds into the present to make the criminalized human again and end the tragedy of the carceral state. 

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: A Reformist Chinese Leader? Stop Fooling Yourself

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, an updated edition of which has just been published by Oxford University Press.For those of us who have tracked Chinese political trends since the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping came to power, reading the news about China these days can prove strangely disorienting. One week, we’ll be struck by a slew of stories, on everything from fast trains to record growth rates, which underscore how different China is than it was when Deng first launched his reforms. The next week, though, we’ll be struck just as powerfully by a sense of eerie familiarity. Headline after headline — about the intractability of corruption, the death of a watermelon vendor or a petitioner’s desperate attempt to draw attention to this plight by detonating an explosive device at a Beijing airport — seem just like those we came across a few years or even a couple of decades ago.