[PDF] Racial Realignment eBook

Author : Eric Schickler
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 17,25 MB
Release : 2016-04-26
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0691153884

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Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites—such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades. Schickler reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand. Presenting original ideas about political change, Racial Realignment sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.

Author : Eric Schickler
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 379 pages
File Size : 47,52 MB
Release : 2016-04-26
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1400880971

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Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites—such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades. Schickler reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand. Presenting original ideas about political change, Racial Realignment sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.

Author : Alan I. Abramowitz
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 27,55 MB
Release : 2018-06-19
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0300235127

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Alan I. Abramowitz has emerged as a leading spokesman for the view that our current political divide is not confined to a small group of elites and activists but a key feature of the American social and cultural landscape. The polarization of the political and media elites, he argues, arose and persists because it accurately reflects the state of American society. Here, he goes further: the polarization is unique in modern U.S. history. Today’s party divide reflects an unprecedented alignment of many different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and geographic. Abramowitz shows how the partisan alignment arose out of the breakup of the old New Deal coalition; introduces the most important difference between our current era and past eras, the rise of “negative partisanship”; explains how this phenomenon paved the way for the Trump presidency; and examines why our polarization could even grow deeper. This statistically based analysis shows that racial anxiety is by far a better predictor of support for Donald Trump than any other factor, including economic discontent.

Author : Sara Marie Butler
Publisher :
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 28,17 MB
Release : 2015
Category :
ISBN :

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In the twentieth century, the Democratic and Republican Parties shifted their race views and adopted polarizing positions on civil rights. This phenomenon--the racial realignment of the parties--has been a topic of recent debate. The assumption has been that the parties followed similar paths and realigned at the same time. Further, recent work has investigated the realignment at either the national or state level. This one-pathway/one-site focus has narrowed the lens through which researchers have explained the realignment of race and party. This project takes a more comprehensive view by examining mass, state, and national actors, in addition to policy demanders, through the use of election returns, survey and roll call data, and archival materials. Considering multiple sources and different party actors allows me to determine how racial realignment unfolded across the state and federal governments. I use California as my state of interest because the narrative of racial realignment at the national level is so intimately tied to the political history of California. I argue that war mobilization and rapid demographic changes led to a push for economic civil rights by policy demanders in the 1940s. I find that California and national Democrats were active in pushing race liberal policies in the 1940s, with only tepid backing from the party's rank-and-file supporters. On the Republican side, it was the voters who united on race conservative principles in the 1940s, only to be joined by California and national leaders in later decades. It would not be until the Republican Party was purged of race moderates--beginning with the state parties in the 1950s and then the national parties in the 1960s--that race conservative voters would become Republicans, leaving behind a much more race liberal Democratic Party by the early 1970s. This study reveals that the voters and elected officials were responding not only to changing dynamics within their own parties, but also to developments within the opposing party.

Author : George R. Goethals
Publisher : Emerald Group Publishing
Page : 205 pages
File Size : 38,33 MB
Release : 2018-04-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1787437922

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Goethals explores the place of racial dynamics in American politics from President Lincoln to Donald Trump to explain the way the politics of racial justice and needs for positive social identity have led to different regions in the United States changing party affiliation.

Author : David R. Mayhew
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 27,56 MB
Release : 2008-10-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0300130031

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The study of electoral realignments is one of the most influential and intellectually stimulating enterprises undertaken by American political scientists. Realignment theory has been seen as a science able to predict changes, and generations of students, journalists, pundits, and political scientists have been trained to be on the lookout for “signs” of new electoral realignments. Now a major political scientist argues that the essential claims of realignment theory are wrong—that American elections, parties, and policymaking are not (and never were) reconfigured according to the realignment calendar. David Mayhew examines fifteen key empirical claims of realignment theory in detail and shows us why each in turn does not hold up under scrutiny. It is time, he insists, to open the field to new ideas. We might, for example, adopt a more nominalistic, skeptical way of thinking about American elections that highlights contingency, short-term election strategies, and valence issues. Or we might examine such broad topics as bellicosity in early American history, or racial questions in much of our electoral history. But we must move on from an old orthodoxy and failed model of illumination.

Author : James M. Glaser
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 17,10 MB
Release : 1998-09-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300077230

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Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while Republican candidates have carried the South in presidential elections, the Democratic Party has persisted in winning southern congressional elections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, this text examines this political phenomenon.

Author : Neil A. O'Brian
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 36,45 MB
Release : 2024-09-25
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0226834557

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A deeply researched account of how battles over civil rights in the 1960s shaped today’s partisan culture wars. In the late twentieth century, gay rights, immigration, gun control, and abortion debates all burst onto the political scene, scrambling the parties and polarizing the electorate. Neil A. O’Brian traces the origins of today’s political divide on these issues to the 1960s when Democrats and Republicans split over civil rights. It was this partisan polarization over race, he argues, that subsequently shaped partisan fault lines on other culture war issues that persist to this day. Using public opinion data dating to the 1930s, O’Brian shows that attitudes about civil rights were already linked with a range of other culture war beliefs decades before the parties split on these issues—and much earlier than previous scholarship realized. Challenging a common understanding of partisan polarization as an elite-led phenomenon, The Roots of Polarization argues politicians and interest groups, jockeying for power in the changing party system, seized on these preexisting connections in the mass public to build the parties’ contemporary coalitions.

Author : Eric Schickler
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 33,1 MB
Release : 2011-06-27
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1400824257

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From the 1910 overthrow of "Czar" Joseph Cannon to the reforms enacted when Republicans took over the House in 1995, institutional change within the U.S. Congress has been both a product and a shaper of congressional politics. For several decades, scholars have explained this process in terms of a particular collective interest shared by members, be it partisanship, reelection worries, or policy motivations. Eric Schickler makes the case that it is actually interplay among multiple interests that determines institutional change. In the process, he explains how congressional institutions have proved remarkably adaptable and yet consistently frustrating for members and outside observers alike. Analyzing leadership, committee, and procedural restructuring in four periods (1890-1910, 1919-1932, 1937-1952, and 1970-1989), Schickler argues that coalitions promoting a wide range of member interests drive change in both the House and Senate. He shows that multiple interests determine institutional innovation within a period; that different interests are important in different periods; and, more broadly, that changes in the salient collective interests across time do not follow a simple logical or developmental sequence. Institutional development appears disjointed, as new arrangements are layered on preexisting structures intended to serve competing interests. An epilogue assesses the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich in light of these findings. Schickler's model of "disjointed pluralism" integrates rational choice theory with historical institutionalist approaches. It both complicates and advances efforts at theoretical synthesis by proposing a fuller, more nuanced understanding of institutional innovation--and thus of American political development and history.