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Suburbanization is often blamed for a loss of civic engagement in contemporary America. How justified is this claim? Just what is a suburb? How do social environments shape civic life? Looking beyond popular stereotypes, Democracy in Suburbia answers these questions by examining how suburbs influence citizen participation in community and public affairs. Eric Oliver offers a rich, engaging account of what suburbia means for American democracy and, in doing so, speaks to the heart of widespread debate on the health of our civil society. Applying an innovative, unusually rigorous mode of statistical analysis to a wealth of unique survey and census data, Oliver argues that suburbs, by institutionalizing class and racial differences with municipal boundaries, transform social conflicts between citizens into ones between political institutions. In reducing the incentives for individual political participation, suburbanization has negated the benefits of ''small town'' government and deprived metropolitan areas of valuable civic capacity. This ultimately increases prospects of serious social conflict. Oliver concludes that we must reconfigure suburban governments to allow seemingly intractable issues of common metropolitan concern to surface in local politics rather than be ignored as cross-jurisdictional. And he believes this is possible without sacrifice of local government's advantages. Scholars and students of political science, sociology, and urban affairs will prize this book for its striking findings, its revealing scrutiny of the commonplace, and its insights into how the pursuit of the American dream may be imperiling American democracy

Place and the future of American race relations -- Why place is so important for race -- Racial attitudes among Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans -- Neighborhood- and metropolitan-level differences in racial attitudes -- Geographic self-sorting and racial attitudes -- Interracial civic and social contact in multiethnic America -- The civic and social paradoxes of neighborhood racial integration -- On segregation and multiculturalism.

Publisher description for Fat politics : the real story behind America's obesity epidemic / J. Eric Oliver. "Our government is telling us that obesity is a major health crisis, that sixty percent of Americans are "overweight," and that one in four is obese. But how true are these claims? In Fat Politics, Eric Oliver unearths the real story behind America's "obesity epidemic." Oliver shows how a handful of doctors, government bureaucrats, and health researchers, with financial backing from the drug and weight-loss industry, have campaigned to misclassify more than sixty million Americans as "overweight," to inflate the health risks of being fat, and to promote the idea that obesity is a killer disease. In reviewing the scientific evidence, Oliver shows there is little proof either that obesity causes so many diseases and deaths or that losing weight makes people any healthier. Our concern with obesity is fueled more by social prejudice, bureaucratic politics, and industry profit than by scientific fact. Such misinformation, Oliver argues, is the true problem with obesity in America. By telling us we need to be thin, the proponents of the "obesity epidemic" are pushing millions of Americans towards dangerous surgeries, crash diets, and harmful diet drugs. Oliver goes on to examine the surprising reasons why we hate fatness and why we are gaining weight, and also the real threats to our health that are being displaced by our fat obsession. Fat Politics not only topples our most basic assumptions about obesity and health, it highlights frightening dangers caused by making our weight a scapegoat for our real problems."

Like most fields of knowledge, political science tends to progress incrementally. Typically, a political scientist develops a model about a prominent institution or common behavior and that model becomes the starting point for understanding all its other permutations. This is especially the case in studies of American state and local government, which tend to follow theories of national politics. Scholars of state legislatures typically begin their analysis by using studies of the U.S. Congress, analysts of local elections start with presidential vote models, and so on. But, as Elaine Sharp reminds us in Does Local Government Matter?, we should not be so quick to assume that models or theories about national-level politics translate easily to the local level. In fact, local politics may operate under logics all their own.

Rather than a rebuttal, I offer a confession. Mostly this is because Elaine B. Sharp's assessment is both fair and precise. As she notes, there is a big gulf between our book's rather grandiose theory of electoral politics and its subsequent empirical tests. After making some sweeping hypotheses about the role of size, scope, and bias as the primary determinants of electoral politics across all types of democracies, our empirical analysis tested only a limited range of values and cases. While my colleagues and I hope that our theoretical framework will prove useful for future comparative electoral studies, our book does not provide a definitive test.

Many critics argue that America's suburbs foster depression and mental distress, but researchers have not sufficiently tested whether the characteristics that actually distinguish metropolitan places (both cities and suburbs) correspond to any differences in psychological well-being. Looking beyond inaccurate city-suburb dichotomies, the author examines the relationship between six characteristics of metropolitan places (population size, density, racial composition, affluence, age, and land use) and a variety of indicators of mental health, including depression, life satisfaction, self-efficacy, and esteem. Findings from multilevel data constructed from the Americans' Changing Lives Survey and the census indicate that two characteristics of metropolitan places relate to psychological health: population density and affluence. Residents of denser places are more likely to report depressed mood and dissatisfaction with their neighborhoods; those in more affluent places are more likely to be depressed, be less satisfied with life, and feel lower levels of self-efficacy and esteem.

Explores effects of size and citizen participation in four local civic activities using 1990 data; finds that people in larger cities are much less likely to participate in municipal affairs; US.

Given the coincidence between America's recent migration to smaller, suburban cities and declines in civic participation, Dahl's speculations on the ideal-sized democratic polity have gained more pertinence. I explore the effects of city size on participation in four local civic activities using 1990 data. Controlling for both individual- and city-level characteristics, I find people in larger cities are much less likely to contact officials, attend community or organizational meetings, or vote in local elections. Lower civic participation is attributable partly to differences in social relations and psychological orientation between residents of larger and smaller places. People in big cities are less likely to be recruited for political activity by neighbors and are less interested in local affairs. These differences occur irrespective of the size of the surrounding metropolitan area and demonstrate the importance of municipal institutions for fostering civil society. The implications for studies of participation, suburbanization, and democratic political theory are discussed.