What is the political value of time, and where does that value reside? Should politics place its hope in future possibility, or does that simply defer action in the present? Can the present ground a vision of change, or is it too circumscribed by the status quo? In Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time, Mitchum Huehls contends that conventional treatments of time's relationship to politics are limited by a focus on real-world experiences of time. By contrast, the innovative literary forms developed by authors in direct response to political events such as the Cold War, globalization, the emergence of identity politics, and 9/11 offer readers uniquely literary experiences of time. And it is in these literary experiences of time that Qualified Hope identifies more complicated--and thus more productive--ways to think about the time-politics relationship. Qualified Hope challenges the conventional characterization of postmodernism as a period in which authors reject time in favor of space as the primary category for organizing experience and knowledge. And by identifying a common commitment to time at the heart of postmodern literature, Huehls suggests that the period-defining divide between multiculturalism and theory is not as stark as previously thought.

Ohio Government and Politics provides a thorough, highly readable overview of the history, processes, and institutions of the state’s government and politics. In a country increasingly divided into blue and red states, Ohio is “purple” – one of the few states that is not dominated by a single political party. Covering the crucial strategies of both the republicans and democrats as they vie for power in Ohio, authors Paul Sracic and William Binning demonstrate the “nationalizing” of Ohio politics. However, contemporary issues specific to Ohio politics are not neglected; coverage of important issues such charter reform in Cuyahoga County and the controversies over the regulation of "fracking" is included.

The advantage incumbent members of Congress hold over their opponents in campaigns for office has steadily grown over the past five decades. While students of congressional politics have analyzed the effect of this advantage on members' behavior in office, little is known of its effect on their opponents. Sitting members of the House frequently face underfinanced and obscure challengers. Conventional theories of electoral competition assume that the only hope those candidates have of even coming close to making such an election competitive is to align their policy positions as closely as possible to those of the median voter. Yet challengers to incumbents often run on quite extreme position platforms. In the majority of these uncompetitive races, Robert G. Boatright explains, a new type of politics is emerging--a politics of expressive campaigning, where challengers seek to use their campaigns as a platform for their own views and as a means of helping their party achieve goals other than winning the election at hand. This research makes two types of contributions to existing political science literature. On a theoretical level, it argues for a reconceptualization of the motives of candidates and parties in rational choice analysis. On a practical level, it seeks to enrich our understanding of the role that challengers play in American elections and of the reason why different types of challengers emerge in different types of elections. Boatright argues that the role of challengers in the American electoral process can be understood only if we broaden our theories about rational candidate behavior.

Over the course of the last century, political scientists have been moved by two principal purposes. First, they have sought to understand and explain political phenomena in a way that is both theoretically and empirically grounded. Second, they have analyzed matters of enduring public interest, whether in terms of public policy and political action, fidelity between principle and practice in the organization and conduct of government, or the conditions of freedom, whether of citizens or of states. Many of the central advances made in the field have been prompted by a desire to improve both the quality and our understanding of political life. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in research on comparative politics and international relations, fields in which concerns for the public interest have stimulated various important insights. This volume systematically analyzes the major developments within the fields of comparative politics and international relations over the past three decades. Each chapter is composed of a core paper that addresses the major puzzles, conversations, and debates that have attended major areas of concern and inquiry within the discipline. These papers examine and evaluate the intellectual evolution and natural history of major areas of political inquiry and chart particularly promising trajectories, puzzles, and concerns for future work. Each core paper is accompanied by a set of shorter commentaries that engage the issues it takes up, thus contributing to an ongoing and lively dialogue among key figures in the field.

The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions is the first book-length study to approach contemporary issues of racialized visibility and privacy through narrative form. Using a formal maneuver, narrative privacy, Colleen G. Eils analyzes how writers of contemporary metafictions explicitly withhold stories from readers to illuminate and theorize the politics of privacy in a post-9/11 US context. As a formal device and reading strategy, narrative privacy has two primary critical interests: affirming the historically political nature of visibility, particularly for people of color and indigenous people, and theorizing privacy as a political assertion of power over representation and material vulnerability. Eils breaks strict disciplinary silos by putting visibility/surveillance studies, ethnic studies, and narrative studies in conversation with one another. Eils also puts texts in the Native, Latinx, and Asian American literary canon in conversation with each other. She focuses on texts by Viet Thanh Nguyen, David Treuer, Monique Truong, Rigoberto González, Nam Le, and Stephen Graham Jones that call into question our positions as readers and critics. In deliberately and self-consciously evading readers through the form of their fiction, these writers seize privacy as a political tool for claiming and wielding power in both representational and material registers.

Every four years, Ohio finds itself in the thick of the presidential race. What about the Buckeye State makes it so special?

Buckeye Battleground is the result of a decade's worth of research at the Bliss Institute on elections in Ohio, with special emphasis on the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, and the 2006 gubernatorial campaign. This book seeks to explain why Ohio is, and has been, at the center of American elections. Using historical analysis, demographic data, and public opinion surveys, the authors demonstrate Ohio's role as the quintessential "battleground" state in American elections. This title is unique in its approach and coverage.