New Books In Law

Political Scientists Alison Gash and Dan Tichenor have a new book, Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency (Oxford UP, 2022), that centers children and young people within the study of democratic politics, filling in a bit of a gap in the literature, especially in political science literature. Gash and Tichenor note in their research that young people are central in so many policy areas but are often not integrated into the policy discussions or applications. As sketched out in Democracy’s Child, young people are often leveraged within our politics and our political discourse. They have been used as symbols and positioned as in need of protection—or at least some of them have been presented as being in need of protection. Tichenor and Gash dive into the idea of childhood itself, which is a more recent concept—developing over the past 150 years—and how this contextualization of young people is a significant point of political conflict. It is difficult to clearly define