The Social Roots of American Politics: A Widening Gyre?

A novel and powerful explanation of the social roots of American politics and the powerful forces in the background.\nThe usual approach to political conflict is to look at policy battles inside government, then trace them back to political parties and organized interests. Yet, in The Social Roots of American Politics, Regina L. Wagner and Byron E. Shafer begin at the opposite end of the causal chain by looking at the social roots of American political conflict, how these roots produce differing policy preferences in the general public, and how those preferences get transmitted into American government. Drawing from over a half-century of public surveys of American voters, they demonstrate that class, race, religion, and gender provide the roots of these conflicts across the four primary domains of policy conflict: social welfare, civil rights, foreign affairs, and cultural values. They also factor in how regional differences affect partisan attachment, focusing on the South in particular. By turning the focus to deep-rooted social cleavages, this book provides a novel and powerful explanation of the 
basic forces that shape the contours of conflict in American politics.

Politics & Social Sciences

Shafer, Byron E.

Wagner, Regina L.

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

Electoral realignment, referring originally to a major shift in party preferences within the general public, has been one of the most successful theories in modern social science. Since V. O. Key introduced the theory in his seminal articles in the 1950s, it has been the reigning explanation for patterns of electoral behavior in American history. As a concept, realignment has stimulated considerable scholarly output and permeated journalists’ interpretations of recent elections. Perhaps inevitably, it has also stimulated a great deal of debate. The End of Realignment provides a forum for differing viewpoints in this debate. In these unusually well-integrated, original essays, six distinguished political scientists and historians question whether the theory of realignment can explain electoral developments both of the post-1968 period and of earlier political eras. The essays alternately challenge and defend realignment. Some argue that the central notion, while historically useful, no longer explains contemporary electoral behavior. Others argue that the notion is based on comparatively recent history and has been misused to carve American history into grand political eras. Many in both camps agree that depending heavily on realignment to explain electoral politics obscures other influences at work in elections. Contributors are Byron E. Shafer, Joel H. Silbey, Everett Carl Ladd, Samuel T. McSeveney, Walter Dean Burnham, and Harold F. Bass, Jr. The provocative essay by volume editor Shafer offers an alternative explanation for the pattern of electoral outcomes that have characterized American politics since the late 1960s. Bass’s guide to the literature informing this debate and his comprehensive bibliography of literature on realignment and its alternatives contribute to making this an indispensable volume for anyone studying American electoral history. “A book that provides, as Shafer’s does, a skillfully constructed challenge to the reigning orthodoxy, and alternative explanation for electoral patterns since 1968, and an informed defense of realignment is a volume of unusual importance.”—John F. Bibby, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee “Of the various writers under review, Byron E. Shafer in his essay ‘The Notion of an Electoral Order,’ included in The End of Realignment?, comes closest to providing an explanation of the liberal dilemma: the failure of liberal Democrats to regain the presidency.”—Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New York Review of Books “[A] gem of a book, a must for every political scientist and student of the American party system.”—Choice

The End of Realignment?: Interpreting American Electoral Eras

History

Americas

University of Wisconsin Press

This concise, comparative history looks at politics in the nations collectively known as the Group of Seven—the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy—from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. Emphasizing political eras and political orders, editor Byron E. Shafer and the contributing authors use an identical framework for each nation as they consider its political evolution and the structures that shaped it. No other book offers this comparative reach or this common framework, making Postwar Politics in the G-7 useful for both students and sophisticated observers of international politics.    Postwar Politics in the G-7 provides a condensed introduction to the politics of each of the seven nations, focusing on the main political events of the last fifty years and the factors that shaped the ways each country handled those events. By presenting these accounts in a precisely parallel fashion, this volume highlights similarities and differences among the nations. Concluding chapters reassemble these comparisons for all seven of the nations together. Among the most interesting findings are the rise of an activist politics, the continuing influential role of electoral systems, and the presence of divided governance nearly everywhere. Such a carefully constructed interpretation of postwar politics highlights potentially critical elements and provides comparative insights that are essential for understanding the Group of Seven nations.

Postwar Politics In The G-7: Orders And Eras In Comparative Perspective

Politics & Government

This concise, comparative history looks at politics in the nations collectively known as the Group of Seven—the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy—from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. Emphasizing political eras and political orders, editor Byron E. Shafer and the contributing authors use an identical framework for each nation as they consider its political evolution and the structures that shaped it. No other book offers this comparative reach or this common framework, making Postwar Politics in the G-7 useful for both students and sophisticated observers of international politics. Postwar Politics in the G-7 provides a condensed introduction to the politics of each of the seven nations, focusing on the main political events of the last fifty years and the factors that shaped the ways each country handled those events. By presenting these accounts in a precisely parallel fashion, this volume highlights similarities and differences among the nations. Concluding chapters reassemble these comparisons for all seven of the nations together. Among the most interesting findings are the rise of an activist politics, the continuing influential role of electoral systems, and the presence of divided governance nearly everywhere. Such a carefully constructed interpretation of postwar politics highlights potentially critical elements and provides comparative insights that are essential for understanding the Group of Seven nations.

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

The transformation of Southern politics after World War II changed the political life not just of this distinctive region, but of the entire nation. Until now, the critical shift in Southern political allegiance from Democratic to Republican has been explained, by scholars and journalists, as a white backlash to the civil rights revolution. 
 In this myth-shattering book, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston refute that view, one stretching all the way back to V. O. Key in his classic book Southern Politics. The true story is instead one of dramatic class reversal, beginning in the 1950s and pulling everything else in its wake. Where once the poor voted Republican and the rich Democrat, that pattern reversed, as economic development became the engine of Republican gains. Racial desegregation, never far from the heart of the story, often applied the brakes to these gains rather than fueling them. 
 A book that is bound to shake up the study of Southern politics, this will also become required reading for pundits and political strategists, for all those who argue over what it takes to carry the South.

The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South

Business & Money

Johnston, Richard

Economics

Harvard University Press

The transformation of Southern politics after World War II changed the political life not just of this distinctive region, but of the entire nation. Until now, the critical shift in Southern political allegiance from Democratic to Republican has been explained, by scholars and journalists, as a white backlash to the civil rights revolution. 
In this myth-shattering book, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston refute that view, one stretching all the way back to V. O. Key in his classic book Southern Politics. The true story is instead one of dramatic class reversal, beginning in the 1950s and pulling everything else in its wake. Where once the poor voted Republican and the rich Democrat, that pattern reversed, as economic development became the engine of Republican gains. Racial desegregation, never far from the heart of the story, often applied the brakes to these gains rather than fueling them.
A book that is bound to shake up the study of Southern politics, this will also become required reading for pundits and political strategists, for all those who argue over what it takes to carry the South.

Social scientists and campaign strategists approach voting behavior from opposite poles. Reconciling these rival camps through a merger of precise statistics and hard-won election experience, The American Political Landscape presents a full-scale analysis of U.S. electoral politics over the past quarter-century. Byron Shafer and Richard Spady explain how factors not usually considered hard data, such as latent attitudes and personal preferences, interact to produce an indisputably solid result: the final tally of votes.
Pundits and pollsters usually boil down U.S. elections to a stark choice between Democrat and Republican. Shafer and Spady explore the significance of a third possibility: not voting at all. Voters can and do form coalitions based on specific issues, so that simple party identification does not determine voter turnout or ballot choices. Deploying a new method that quantifiably maps the distribution of political attitudes in the voting population, the authors describe an American electoral landscape in flux during the period from 1984 to 2008. The old order, organized by economic values, ceded ground to a new one in which cultural and economic values enjoy equal prominence.
This realignment yielded election outcomes that contradicted the prevailing wisdom about the importance of ideological centrism. Moderates have fared badly in recent contests as Republican and Democratic blocs have drifted further apart. Shafer and Spady find that persisting links between social backgrounds and political values tend to empty the ideological center while increasing the clout of the ideologically committed.

The American Political Landscape

Spady, Richard H.

Sociology

Even today, when it is often viewed as an institution in decline, the national party convention retains a certain raw, emotional, populist fascination. Bifurcated Politics is a portrait of the postwar convention as a changing institution--a changing institution that still confirms the single most important decision in American politics.  With the 1988 elections clearly in mind, Byron Shafer examines the status of the national party convention, which is created and dispersed within a handful of days but nevertheless becomes a self-contained world for participants, reporters, and observers alike. He analyzes such dramatic developments as the disappearance of the contest over the presidential nomination and its replacement by struggles over the publicizing of various campaigns, the decline of party officials and the rise of the organized interests, and the large and growing disjunction between what is happening at the convention hall and what the public sees--between the convention on site and the convention on screen. He argues that, despite its declining status, the postwar convention has attracted--and mirrored--most of the major developments in postwar politics: the nationalization of that politics and the spread of procedural reform, a changing connection between the general public and political institutions, even the coming of a new and different sort of American politics.  Bifurcated Politics tells the story of most of the postwar conventions, along with the nominating campaigns that preceded them. But it also develops a picture of the changing American politics around those stories. It will become the definitive study of the national party convention.

Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the National Party Convention

Where did the Era of Divided Government come from? What sustains split partisan control of the institutions of American national government year after year? Why can it shift so easily from Democratic or Republican presidencies, coupled with Republican or Democratic Congresses? How can the vast array of issues and personalities that have surfaced in American politics over the last forty years fit so neatly within - indeed, reinforce - the sustaining political pattern of our time? These big questions constitute the puzzle of modern American politics. The old answer - a majority and a minority party, plus dominant and recessive public issues - will not work in the Era of Divided Government. Byron Shafer provides a convincing new answer that has three major elements. These elements in combination, not "divided government" as a catch phrase, are the real story of politics in our time. The first element is comprised of two great sets of public preferences that manifest themselves at the ballot box as two majorities. The old cluster of economic and welfare issues has not so much been displaced as simply joined by a second cluster of cultural and national concerns. The second element can be seen in the behavior of political parties and party activists, whose own preferences don't match those of the general public. That public remains reliably left of the active Republican Party on economic and welfare issues and reliably right of the active Democratic Party on cultural and national concerns. The third crucial element is found in an institutional arrangement - the distinctively American matrix of governmental institutions, which converts those first two elements into a framework for policymaking, year in and year out. Shafer examines how dominant features of the Reagan, first Bush, Clinton, and second Bush administrations reflect the interplay of these three elements. He also ranges across time and nations to put these modern elements and their composite pattern into a much larger historical and institutional framework. In this light, modern American politics appears as a distinctive recombination of familiar elements of a political style, a political process, and a political conflict that has been with us for some time.

The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics

Univ Pr of Kansas

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Books by Shafer, Byron E.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shafer, Byron E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Social Roots of American Politics: A Widening Gyre?

The Social Roots of American Politics: A Widening Gyre?

The End of Realignment?: Interpreting American Electoral Eras

Postwar Politics In The G-7: Orders And Eras In Comparative Perspective

Postwar Politics In The G-7: Orders And Eras In Comparative Perspective

The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South

The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South

The American Political Landscape

Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the National Party Convention

The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics