Showing titles in Elections & Political Process

A close look at the contest of 1880 reveals that Garfield's victory could have been the start of a period of greater civil rights legislation, a continuation of Lincoln's vision. This was the choice made by the American people - and, as The Last Lincoln Republican makes poignantly clear, the great opportunity forever lost when Garfield was assassinated just a few months into his term. 

For almost a decade, journalists and pundits have been asking why we don't see successful examples of political satire from conservatives or of opinion talk radio from liberals. This book turns that question on its head to argue that opinion talk is the political satire of the right and political satire is the opinion programming of the left. 

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. 

The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex. In How We Vote, Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown explore how election officials work, how ballots are cast and counted, and how jurisdictions try to innovate while also protecting the security of the voting process. 

A firsthand account of Ronald Reagan's leadership style, with personal insight and practical application.  

With the rise of Jimmy Carter, the 1976 presidential election proved a transformative moment in US history, heralding a change in terms of how candidates run for public office and how the news media cover their campaigns. 

Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.  

Presidential Leadership in Political Time has greatly expanded our understanding of and debates over the politics of leadership. It clarifies the typical political problems that presidents confront in political time, as well as the likely effects of their working through them, and considers contemporary innovations in our political system that bear on the leadership patterns from the more distant past. 

In this book, Cedric de Leon analyzes two pivotal crises in the American two-party system: the first resulting in the demise of the Whig party and secession of 11 southern states in 1861, and the present crisis splintering the Democratic and Republican parties and leading to the election of Donald Trump. Recasting these stories through the actions of political parties, de Leon draws unsettling parallels in the political maneuvering that ultimately causes once-dominant political parties to lose the people's consent to rule.

The Electoral College that governs America has been with us since 1804, when Thomas Jefferson's supporters redesigned it for his re-election. The Jeffersonians were motivated by the principle of majority rule. Gone were the days when a president would be elected by acclamation, as George Washington had been. Instead, given the emergence of intense two-party competition, the Jeffersonians wanted to make sure that the Electoral College awarded the presidency to the candidate of the majority, rather than minority, party. 

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges - from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s.

In Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know Nolan McCarty takes listeners through what scholars know and don't know about the origins, development, and implications of our rising political conflicts, delving into social, economic, and geographic determinants of polarization in the United States. While the current political climate seems to suggest that extreme views are becoming more popular, McCarty also argues that, contrary to popular belief, the 2016 election was a natural outgrowth of 40 years of polarized politics, rather than a significant break with the past. 

At the same time that the Civil Rights Movement brought increasing opportunities for blacks, the United States liberalized its immigration policy. While the broadening of the United States's borders to non-European immigrants fits with a black political agenda of social justice, recent waves of immigration have presented a dilemma for blacks, prompting ambivalent or even negative attitudes toward migrants. What has an expanded immigration regime meant for how blacks express national attachment?

In Crackup, Samuel L. Popkin tells the story of how the Republican Party fractured into uncompromising groups with irreconcilable demands. Changes in campaign finance laws and the proliferation of mass media opened the way for newly energized groups to split the party. The 2002 "McCain-Feingold" campaign finance reform bill aimed to weaken the power of big corporations and strengthen political parties by ending corporate donations to the parties. Instead, it weakened legislative leaders and made bipartisanship toxic.

Great powers have attempted for centuries to intervene in elections occurring in other states through various covert and overt methods, with the American intervention in the 2013 Kenyan elections and the Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections being just two recent examples. Indeed, the Americans and the Soviets/Russians intervened in one out of every nine national-level executive elections between 1946 and 2000. 

Based on extensive interviews with conservative opponents of the president, Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles reveal why such a wide range of committed partisans chose to break with their longtime comrades in arms. 

While the major media were spinning their collective fairy tale about the Obama presidency, the alternative conservative media - America's "samizdat" - were telling the truth. 

American democracy is at an impasse. After years of zero-sum partisan trench warfare, our political institutions are deteriorating. Our norms are collapsing. Democrats and Republicans no longer merely argue; they cut off contact with each other. In short, the two-party system is breaking our democracy, and driving us all crazy.

Progressive upper-middle-class urbanites are deserting expensive liberal meccas like New York and San Francisco and flocking to traditionally red states like Colorado, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Texas. The result is a sudden, confusing purpling of small-town America. School boards and local governments are being reorganized around the progressive agendas of pushy transplants. Neighborhoods are becoming unrecognizable. And the implications for future Congressional and presidential elections are staggering.

Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet.