Author: Manabu Saeki Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438459092 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
There is a widespread belief that American politics is becoming more polarized, in the sense that the Republican Party and electorate are becoming more conservative while the Democratic Party and electorate are becoming more liberal. But is this truly the case? The Phantom of a Polarized America places widely held scholarly assumptions about the "polarization" of American politics under the microscope and tests them to determine their veracity. In the case of Congress, Manabu Saeki reveals that contrary to popular beliefs, polarization is largely due to the rightward shift of Republican legislators without any corresponding leftward shift by Democratic legislators. The conservative shift of House Republican ideology has produced a rightward shift of Republican voters, and conservative voters in the Democratic Party have switched to the Republican Party, resulting in a more liberal Democratic Party overall. Saeki concludes that the so-called "polarization" of American politics is largely a phantom being; in truth, it is a neo-conservative movement led by House Republicans.
Author: Manabu Saeki Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438459092 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
There is a widespread belief that American politics is becoming more polarized, in the sense that the Republican Party and electorate are becoming more conservative while the Democratic Party and electorate are becoming more liberal. But is this truly the case? The Phantom of a Polarized America places widely held scholarly assumptions about the "polarization" of American politics under the microscope and tests them to determine their veracity. In the case of Congress, Manabu Saeki reveals that contrary to popular beliefs, polarization is largely due to the rightward shift of Republican legislators without any corresponding leftward shift by Democratic legislators. The conservative shift of House Republican ideology has produced a rightward shift of Republican voters, and conservative voters in the Democratic Party have switched to the Republican Party, resulting in a more liberal Democratic Party overall. Saeki concludes that the so-called "polarization" of American politics is largely a phantom being; in truth, it is a neo-conservative movement led by House Republicans.
Author: Dean Hammer Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009249592 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
Rome and America provides a timely exploration of the Roman and American founding myths in the cultural imagination. Defying the usual ideological categories, Dean Hammer argues for the exceptional nature of the myths as a journey of Strangers, but also traces the tensions created by the myths in attempts to answer the question of who We are. The wide-ranging chapters reassess both Roman antecedents and American expressions of the myth in some unexpected places: early American travelogues, westerns, bare-knuckle boxing, early American theater, government documents detailing Native American policy, and the writings of Noah Webster, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Charles Eastman. This innovative volume culminates in an interpretation of the current crisis of democracy as a reversion of the community back to Strangers, with suggestions of how the myth can recast a much-needed discussion of identity and belonging.
Author: Nolan McCarty Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262303272 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
The idea of America as politically polarized—that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states—has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes—most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality. Using NOMINATE (a quantitative procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records) to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion, census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, the authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.
Author: Nolan McCarty Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262334062 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
Updated analysis of how the increasing polarization of American politics has been accompanied and accelerated by greater income inequality. The idea of America as politically polarized—that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states—has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes—most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In this second edition of Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal use the latest data to examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces. They find that inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality. Paul Krugman called the first edition of Polarized America “Important.... Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what's happening to America.” The second edition has been thoroughly brought up to date. All statistical analyses, tables, and figures have been updated with data that run through 2012 or 2014, and the text has been revised to reflect the latest evidence. The chapter on campaign finance has been completely rewritten (with Adam Bonica as coauthor); the analysis shows that with so much “soft” money coming from very wealthy ideological extremists, there is even greater campaign contribution inequality than income inequality.
Author: Morris P. Fiorina Publisher: Addison-Wesley Longman ISBN: 9780205779888 Category : Culture conflict Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This text combines polling data with detailed narrative to debunk commonly-believed myths about American politics--particularly the claim that Americans are deeply divided in their fundamental political views.
Author: David C. Barker Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197578381 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
"Alan Levine provides a chronological road map to our disharmonious present moment while also complicating our understanding of "the politics of truth." His essay traces major conceptions of truth in Western philosophy from Socratic skepticism and medieval faith to enlightenment optimism and postmodern rejection, arguing that aspects of all these belief traditions are alive and kicking, forming in our polity a kind of "metaphysical pluralism." To navigate our current pluralist or fractured conceptions of truth, Levine argues that we should strive to avoid both excessive dogmatism and relativism"--
Author: James E. Campbell Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691180865 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
An eye-opening look at how and why America has become so politically polarized Many continue to believe that the United States is a nation of political moderates. In fact, it is a nation divided. It has been so for some time and has grown more so. This book provides a new and historically grounded perspective on the polarization of America, systematically documenting how and why it happened. Polarized presents commonsense benchmarks to measure polarization, draws data from a wide range of historical sources, and carefully assesses the quality of the evidence. Through an innovative and insightful use of circumstantial evidence, it provides a much-needed reality check to claims about polarization. This rigorous yet engaging and accessible book examines how polarization displaced pluralism and how this affected American democracy and civil society. Polarized challenges the widely held belief that polarization is the product of party and media elites, revealing instead how the American public in the 1960s set in motion the increase of polarization. American politics became highly polarized from the bottom up, not the top down, and this began much earlier than often thought. The Democrats and the Republicans are now ideologically distant from each other and about equally distant from the political center. Polarized also explains why the parties are polarized at all, despite their battle for the decisive median voter. No subject is more central to understanding American politics than political polarization, and no other book offers a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the subject than this one.
Author: Pietro S. Nivola Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0815760841 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
A Brookings Institution Press and the Hoover Institution publication Analysts and pundits increasingly perceive a widening gulf between "red states" and "blue states." Yet the research to support that perception is scattered and sometimes difficult to parse. America's polarized politics, it is said, poses fundamental dangers for democratic and accountable government. Heightened partisanship is thought to degrade deliberation in Congress and threaten the integrity of other institutions, from the courts to the media. But, how deep do the country's political divisions actually run? Are they truly wreaking havoc upon the social fabric? Has America become a house divided? This important new book, Red and Blue Nation?, gets to the bottom of this perplexing issue. The first of two volumes cosponsored by Brookings and the Hoover Institution carefully considers the extent to which polarized views among political leaders and activists are reflected in the population at large. It pays particular attention to factors such as the increased influence of religion and the changing nature of the media. The authors show that while the severity of the country's "culture wars" is often overstated, significant fissures have opened. In Red and Blue Nation? leading journalists and scholars combine their different insights to enrich our understanding of the issue, offering thoughtful analyses of the underlying problems. This comprehensive and accessible discussion of the polarization debate will be an essential resource for policymakers, scholars, and anyone interested in the health of American public discourse. Contributors include Alan I. Abramowitz (Emory University), David W. Brady (Hoover Institution), Peter Beinart (The New Republic), Sarah A. Binder (Brookings Institution), James Campbell (State University of New York at Buffalo), Carl Cannon (National Journal), E.J. Dionne, Jr. (Brookings Institution), Gregg Easterbrook (Brookings Institution), Thomas B. Edsall (Washington Post), Morris P. Fiorina (Hoover Institution), William A. Galston
Author: Richard M. Valelly Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191086975 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 801
Book Description
Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time - and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance? Featuring contributions from leading academics in the field, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development provides an authoritative and accessible analysis of the study of American political development.
Author: Manabu Saeki
Author: Dean Hammer
Author: Nolan McCarty
Author: Nolan McCarty
Author: Morris P. Fiorina
Author: David C. Barker
Author: James E. Campbell
Author: Pietro S. Nivola
Author: Richard M. Valelly