Writing in the May issue of Contemporary Sociology, Lisa D. Brush calls our book They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back! an "informative, persuasive, compulsively readable book that is an essential resource for students, scholars, political junkies, and activists interested in states and social policies." Published in 2011, They Say Cut Back uses in-depth case studies of campaigns in Wisconsin and California to examine how welfare recipients and their allies contested welfare reform from the bottom-up.

In her review, Brush says author Ellen Reese makes two main contributions to current research on social movements and social policies:

First, Reese shows the myriad ways that policy implementation is policymaking, when grassroots activists and advocates who lose federal legislative battles struggle with governors, state legislators, city council members, and street-level bureaucrats over the nitty-gritty of governance...Her comparison of Los Angeles and Milwaukee shows how different institutional, economic, and political contexts--including different systems of state and local governance, racial-ethnic demographics and political culture, and labor market characteristics and labor relations regimes--interact with social movement strategies to produce specific outcomes.

[...] Reese's second major contribution is how she demonstrates the importance of cross-issue coalitions for social movements in abeyance or under attack, as the welfare rights movement has been in recent decades. In her exemplary intersectional account, Reese helps readers to understand the complex links between dynamics of coalition-building across substantive political issues on the one hand, and cross-cutting dynamics of gender, race, and class on the other hand.

Read the full review here. You can read the first chapter of Reese's volume for free