In The Political Power of Bad Ideas, Mark Lawrence Schrad looks on an oddity of modern history--the broad diffusion of temperance legislation in the early twentieth century--to make a broad argument about how bad policy ideas achieve international success. His root question is this: how could a bad policy idea--one that was widely recognized by experts as bad before adoption, and which ultimately failed everywhere--come to be adopted throughout the world? To answer it, Schrad uses an institutionalist approach, and focuses in particular on the US, Russia/USSR (ironically, one of the only laws t