Best political leadership books according to redditors

I'm a democratic campaign manager who doesn't know Mook at all, but it seems like he did a pretty great job. 8 years ago, and indeed as recently as Secretary Clinton's tenure at the State Department, you got pretty regular stories in the press about the dysfunction of Clinton world. To my knowledge, you didn't have a single story about infighting and dysfunction, and in any presidential campaign that's huge. Doubly so for a Clinton operation. It seems like Mook played a role in making sure infighting didn't dominate coverage like it did the first time she ran.

Hindsight is also 20/20. A lot of people ask now why Clinton didn't go after Trump like Obama went after Romney, but if she had I imagine the press would've been brutal on her for trying the same old playbook against Trump when he's such a uniquely unqualified candidate.

My book goes a bit more into how powerful a campaign manager really is: amazon.com/dp/B01KED1OAM/

Other people have addressed the EU question, so I'll focus more on politics in general. There's some decent BBC media which covers current politics, it can sometimes be a bit tedious, some shows are better than others, and I certainly wouldn't recommend rigorously following all of them, but it's pretty good for familiarising yourself with the current state of affairs. Some TV and radio shows to follow -

Daily Politics - daily show analysing politics, which often gets high profile politicians on.

This Week - weekly show, airing after Question time, with a slightly comedic approach to political analysis.

Andrew Marr Show - weekly show, the one which senior ministers (the prime minister, the chancellor, the home secretary, etc) are most likely to appear on.

Question Time - weekly topical debate program, with questions from the audience directed towards politicians.

Any Questions - radio version of Question Time. Often not quite as annoying as Question time.

Today in Parliament - daily radio show covering news from parliament.

 

Parliament.uk and gov.uk are both great resources for learning how parliament and government functions, and learning about legislation. If you'd prefer a less fragmented read, such as a book, then Exploring British Politics by Garnett and Lynch seems like a good introductory source, though I will add the disclaimer that I've only used it occasionally as a reference book, and it is fairly pricey.

 

It can sometimes be difficult to understand the significance of things in politics without a basic grounding in the historical context, so I will recommend some more books to help with that (although much of the info can be found online). Two of the most important figures in recent British political history are Thatcher, and Blair. Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One is a good book for starting to understand the political context of the Thatcher era, although it is obviously quite biographical too, and being the first volume it only covers roughly the first third of her time in government. The comprehensive tome on Blair and his wide-ranging effect on the functioning of british politics is surely Seldon's Blair's Britain, 1997-2007, although I will warn you that is it most definitely a tome - incredibly thorough and a bit of a slog. The best way to approach this is probably to read the sections on things you are interested in, like the NHS, and leave the rest until you feel you want to learn about them. Sections of Seldon's Cameron at 10 are definitely worth a read if you want some more insight into the first Cameron ministry, and the coalition years.

 

I can't really recommend any comprehensive histories on the political parties (although what I've read of Tim Bale's The Conservatives Since 1945 is pretty good). One I would recommend is Goodwin's Revolt on the Right, which offers a fairly original analysis of the phenomenon that is UKIP. There's a more up-to-date follow-up to that, (UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics), which I imagine is also pretty good, but I haven't read it. Familiarising yourself with general political ideologies (to rattle off an incomplete list: one nation conservatism, high toryism, classical liberalism, social liberalism, libertarianism, social democracy, democratic socialism, etc), how these relate to each other, and how they have manifested in the various 3 main parties over time is a must for understanding the parties and the political tensions within them. Wikipedia should suffice in filling in the details there (and in other places), for now.

https://www.amazon.com/Out-Mogadishu-Memoir-Civil-1991/dp/0692610561/ref=mp_s_a_1_14?keywords=somalia+civil+war&qid=1555963648&s=books&sr=1-14

So, watch the movie the Corruptor, awesome villain!

Also, you can read something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Most-Evil-Dictators-History/dp/184317071X

Which outline how real bad guys did things.

Are you fucking high?

https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Trump-Encounter-Broadsides-ebook/dp/B016HBYVCS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501431349&sr=8-1&keywords=kevin+williamson+against+trump

[Yeah, I accept that definition.] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis)

[This book] (https://www.amazon.com.au/Gough-Whitlam-His-Time-Updated-ebook/dp/B00PRQ5L8S/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=Jenny+Hocking&qid=1565141365&s=digital-text&sr=1-1) and [this book] (http://www.amazon.com.au/Dismissal-Dossier-Updated-Everything-November-ebook/dp/B01HB7R0IY) go into further details about it and reveals the relatively recently released information on the dismissal and combines it with what was already known.

The Author of both books was Whitlam's official biographer; Whitlam found out that the Governor General (the Queen's representative and the highest office in Australia) was actively involved with the CIA months before his death. Apparently Whitlam just stared out the window and cried, repeating to himself "What can you do?"

Worst part? Whitlam was probably our best Prime Minister.

The Political Ladder: Insider Tips On Getting A Job In Politics by Alexandra Acker-Lyons

Getting a Job in Politics, and Keeping it by Ben Wetmore

I read both shortly after graduating from college and early on in my career, and they do good job of conveying the the high level of competition for these jobs, they steps you'll need to take, and the sacrifices you'll likely have to make if this is something you're really serious about.

Imma stay positive on this:

I run a small music label called Extablisment. Why? I love to produce music, and I love to do the artwork, and I love to write songs and lyrics. And I love making videos. And I love writing and publishing stuff on music. And writing my own fiction. And writing my own non-fiction. And I love building a business and creating content.

But I can't get the same PR as this criminal because I guess I have too much class to go around abusing children: https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/8095125/kodak-black-arrested-police-raid

Yet this gets him free PR and a write-up in Billboard and he's called an "artist" ha ha ha. As if that isn't an insult to any and all actual artists on planet earth past, present and future. Seriously. How much work do I have to do to get the same PR as some criminal child abuser? Literally, a child abuser. For fuck's sake.

I think we can do better. I run a label that has issued over 30 albums. I produced over 200 music videos for the label. I wrote, performed and produced over 1000 songs for the label. The label has albums from Chinese guys (FAZI), dreampop (Silphium), Punk Funk (The Undertoad), Prog Rock (The Research Chymicals), my own solo album (Kevin James Salveson) and a slew of others. The label publishes novels like my book Salvation Road. I even wrote a funny takedown of Trump and published it.

Me website #1: www.extablisment.com
Me website #2: www.ideasmilliondollar.com
Me website #3: www.fazimusic.com
My video channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEH5602BQjk&list=PLYDmrvYZ7Cv_o-Cv3AFJJnmZBf8pTRz2z
My book #1: https://www.amazon.com/Trumpocalypse-Not-Kevin-James-Salveson/dp/0999405403

Hope you all enjoy the fruits of my labor!! :)

Could you link the original studies here? I'd love to take a look since I spent a ton of my undergrad researching this exact topic. One variable I noticed that was interesting was education (I.e. eurosceptic in France for example were overwhelmingly the most educated (Masters/Phd's by in large. I also would reccomend these two books, i've read both and while they are focused primarily on Britain and UKIP the first is a good primer while the second is riddled with data, graphs, number sets, trends, and scatter graphs!

1)Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Extremism and Democracy)Mar 18, 2014
by Robert Ford and Matthew J Goodwin

http://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Right-Explaining-Extremism-Democracy/dp/0415661501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462988605&sr=8-1&keywords=revolt+on+the+right

2) UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics 1st Edition
by Matthew Goodwin (Author), Caitlin Milazzo (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/UKIP-Inside-Campaign-British-Politics/dp/0198736118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462988668&sr=8-1&keywords=ukip

questo libro