Lone Star Tarnished ― A Critical Look at Texas Politics and Public Policy

Texas pride, like everything else in the state, is larger than life. So, too, perhaps, are the state’s challenges. Lone Star Tarnished, Third Edition approaches public policy in the nation’s most populous "red state" from historical, comparative, and critical perspectives. The historical perspective provides the scope for asking how various policy domains have developed in Texas history, regularly reaching back to the state’s founding and with substantial data for the period 1950 to the present. In each chapter, Cal Jillson compares Texas public policy choices and results with those of other states and the United States in general. Finally, the critical perspective allows us to question the balance of benefits and costs attendant to what is often referred to as "the Texas way" or "the Texas model." This is used best as a supplementary text for instructors of a course on Texas Politics who want to stress history, political culture, and public policy.

Jillson delves deeply into eight substantive policy chapters, covering the most important policy areas in which state governments are active. The third edition includes completely rewritten first and second chapters, as well as updates throughout the book and revised figures and tables. Also new to the third edition is a completely new chapter on higher education in Texas. Through Jillson’s lively and lucid prose, students are well equipped to analyse how Texas has done and is doing compared to selected states and the national average over time and today. Readers will also come away with the necessary tools to assess the many claims of Texas’s exceptionalism.

New to the Third Edition

• Highlights major new actors in Texas politics, including Governor Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, George P. Bush, and a higher profile Ted Cruz.
• Notes key policy developments in education, health care, transportation, energy and more resulting from the 2015 and 2017 legislative sessions and the arrival of the new Republican Trump administration in Washington.

• Updates all tables and figures in the book, including a dozen new ones, assessing how Texas is doing in income, education, human services, transportation, energy, and the environment.
• Includes an entirely new chapter on "Higher Education in Texas."

Cal Jillson is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of American Government: Political Development and Institutional Change; Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State; Congressional Dynamics; Constitution-Making: Conflict and Consensus in the Federal Convention of 1787; and The American Dream in History, Politics, and Fiction.