Background reading: why street protests matter + free ebook from UCP: Lincoln's Constitution

[tanaqui]

Two items with a historical perspective that I thought members might find interesting. (Thanks to members of my DW rlist for both links.)

Does Street Protest Matter?

[R]epresentatives of districts with just the occasional protest weren’t likely to be swayed. But, in places where there were 50 protests over the course of two years, the typical representative became 5 percent more likely to take liberal positions on civil rights issues. If there were 100 protests in a district, the representative became 10 times more likely to take those positions.

(You can get to a PDF of the full paper without a JStor subscription by following the link in the article.)

Free ebook of the month from University of Chicago Press: Lincoln’s Constitution by Daniel Farber.

From UCP's email notification:

What are the limits of presidential power? One way to address that question is through history, as Daniel Farber does in our free e-book for March, Lincoln’s Constitution. Farber examines the greatest constitutional crisis in American history and explores the legality of Lincoln’s response to it. Out of that dark time, emerge insights for our own era, and for issues such as state sovereignty, executive power, and limitations on civil liberties in the name of national security.