The country is in the grip of a great financial crisis. People face record unemployment.Wall Street executives are described as geniuses who are fully worth the exorbitant salaries and bonuses they are paid, but those salaries are coming out of money that should rightfully go to their shareholders.

It was not all that long ago that the careful study of the interaction of public policy and politics was a somewhat moribund field in political science. What little work existed was, too often, not terribly useful for those of us—citizens, activists, statesmen—interested in improving the quality of governance.