Legislative Oversight is Overrated? Coming to a Bookstore Near You

 Today, Dave, Phil, and I got the great news that Stanford University Press is going to publish our book:

Overseen or Overlooked?

Legislatures, Armed Forces and Democratic Accountability

 

Woot!  For those who follow this blog or me on social media, you have seen my talk about this book for a long, long time, as this book sets my personal record for length from start to finish: nine or ten years depending on how long it takes for our pals in Palo Alto to publish it. 

The book started by accident, as I was surprised by a response to a question I asked a member of Canada's House of Commons defence committee--that he didn't know what the rules were for Canadian troops as he didn't have a security clearance.  This is where being a foreigner pays off, because this flummoxed me.  When I had the chance to ask a former Prime Minister, Paul Martin, when I was interviewing him about Afghanistan, to ask about this, he said "don't compare us to the US, compare us to Australia and the UK."  Great idea!  But we went further, comparing 15 countries, pretty much evenly divided 5 a piece.  I asked Dave to join me as we had much success in the previous book and he has published much on the US Congress, which shapes much of my imagination about this stuff and also that case seems to shape the civ-mil convo, even though our new book demonstrates that it is an outlier, not the norm.  I asked Phil to join us as he is super sharp on Westminster countries and he also could do interviews en francais.  

It was the hardest book to write, partly because it doubled essentially the number of cases I had done in any of my other books, and partly because three is more than two, so managing to keep the three of us on the same page was a challenge, especially during a pandemic.  Luckily, we had done most of our fieldwork before the pandemic hit.  

We are very pleased to have Stanford UP publish it as it has published many excellent civ-mil books. I am currently reading Alice Hunt Friend's Mightier than the Sword, which is a sharp book about the civilian side of the civ-mil relationship.  Risa Brooks and Elizabeth Stanley published their great comparative civ-mil edited volume, Creating Military Power, there as well.  Glad to be in such terrific company.

No cover yet although I have many pics of me in front of legislative houses.

Of course, the key step for book promotion was to come up with a soundtrack to go along with the book, as has become my habit.

The TOC:

Chapter 1       Are Legislators Watching the Armed Forces?

Chapter 2       Explaining Legislative Oversight Over the Armed Forces

Chapter 3       Westminster in the Atlantic: the United Kingdom and Canada

Chapter 4        Westminster in Pacific: Australia, New Zealand, and Japan

Chapter 5        Consensus Democracies in the Heart of Europe: Germany and Belgium

Chapter 6        Consensual Democracies in the High North: Finland, Norway and Sweden

Chapter 7        Not All Congresses: Brazil, Chile, and South Korea 

Chapter 8       Older Presidential Systems: France and the United States

Chapter 9       Conclusion:  Comparisons, Implications, and Lessons

We have a lot of people and agencies to thank, and we will do so in our acknowledgement section, of course.  But thanks to all the folks who follow me here--the conversations online over the years greatly informed what we studied, how we studied it, who we talked to, what we asked, what we inferred, and then how we put it all together.  I am tempted to thank you in each of the languages of the cases we studied, but I am not sure how to spell some of them ;)