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“In explaining ‘corruption as a permanent, institutionalized feature of our government,’ Jay Cost has made a major contribution to American history and political science. His narrative is detailed and lively, accessible to citizens and scholars alike. And he makes a case for reform while suggesting its limits. A real tour de force.”

—WILLIAM KRISTOL, editor of The Weekly Standard

“In a democracy, politics is an openly, indeed exuberantly transactional business: If you elect me, I will do this and that for you. Hence the perennial problem of navigating the vast gray area between licit and illicit promises and promise-keeping. Jay Cost provides a map to the moral geography of modern government. The moral of this dismaying story is that as government becomes bigger, so does the number of transactions that look a lot like corruption.”

—GEORGE F. WILL

“Jay Cost makes a strong case that corruption is a systemic and dangerous feature of modern government. His argument, based extensively on the thinking of James Madison, cuts across ideological boundaries. His book is accessible to liberals and conservatives who share an interest in governance for the public good.”

—THOMAS B. EDSALL, online political columnist for The New York Times

“Corruption, argues political scientist Jay Cost, is ‘a permanent, institutionalized feature of our government.’ The Constitution, he argues, creates a limited government that is incapable of exercising the wide economic powers officeholders have embraced since the 1790s without rewarding well-placed insiders and auctioning off favors. It’s an original thesis—and a disturbing one.”

—MICHAEL BARONE, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics

“Jay Cost . . . seems to have read everything about federal corruption from the early republic to the corporate-friendly ‘Mickey Mouse Protection Act’ of 1998. With A Republic No More he provides a definitive account of Jacksonian grift, Gilded Age graft and 20th-century government giveaways.”

—DEIRDRE N. MC CLOSKEY, The Wall Street Journal

“Mr. Cost exhaustively documents the way the American political system, in a repudiation of Madison’s vision for democracy, has fallen prey to a culture of self-interest that distributes resources ‘in ways that run contrary to the public interest.’ ”

—DAVID WILEZOL, The Washington Times

“What Jay Cost describes so well about the erosion of the common good is the underlying explanation of why 75% of Americans say that corruption is widespread in government.”

—NEWT GINGRICH