Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Political Process - Campaigns & Elections

An intriguing phenomenon in American electoral politics is the loss of seats by the president's party in midterm congressional elections. Between 1862 and 1990, the president's party lost seats in the House of Representatives in 32 of the 33 midterm elections. In his new study, James Campbell examines explanations for these midterm losses and explores how presidential elections influence congressional elections.

After reviewing the two major theories of midterm electoral change-the "surge and decline" theory and the theory of midterms as referenda on presidential performance Campbell...

Commentators, especially since the Democratic party reforms following 1968, have expressed serious concerns about the role of party activists in the American political system. Have they become so concerned with ideological purity that they are unable to nominate strong candidates? Are activists loyal only to particular interest groups, with little concern for the parties as institutions? Are the reformed nominating procedures open to takeover by new activists, who exit the party immediately after the presidential nominations fight? With such an unrepresentative set of activists, can...

Super Tuesday 1988 was the first successful attempt to get several states in one region to hold their presidential primaries on the same day. Its success -- or lack thereof -- will affect the way presidents are elected for many years to come.

Reaching beyond Super Tuesday and the nominations of George Bush and Michael Dukakis, Barbara Norrander's book presents the nation's first regional primary as the latest chapter in the ever-changing system through which U.S. political parties choose their presidential candidates. Norrander's research details how changes in technology, candidate...

As the racial and ethnic minority populations of the United States grow past 30 percent, candidates cannot afford to ignore the minority vote. The studies collected in Diversity and Democracy show that political scientists, too, must fully recognize the significance of minority-representation studies for our understanding of the electoral process in general.

If anything has limited such inquiry in the past, it has been the tendency for researchers to address only a single group or problem, yielding little that can be applied to other contexts. Diversity in Democracy avoids this...

Paperback Edition: Updated and with a New Foreword

The nation will not soon forget the drama of the 2000 presidential election. For five weeks we were transfixed by the legal clashes that enveloped the country from election night to the Gore concession. It was instant history, and will be studied by historians, lawyers, political scientists, media critics and others for years to come.

Even for those who followed the events most closely, the legal twists and turns of the post-election struggles seemed at times bewildering. We witnessed manual recounts of...

Paperback Edition: Updated and with a New Foreword

The nation will not soon forget the drama of the 2000 presidential election. For five weeks we were transfixed by the legal clashes that enveloped the country from election night to the Gore concession. It was instant history, and will be studied by historians, lawyers, political scientists, media critics and others for years to come.

Even for those who followed the events most closely, the legal twists and turns of the post-election struggles seemed at times bewildering. We witnessed manual recounts of election ballots,...

Public involvement in the electoral process has all but disappeared. Not since World War I has even half the electorate cast ballots in an off-year election. Even at the presidential level, voting has plummeted dismally. Nonvoting is, quite simply, systemic in American politics.

It was not always this way. With the integration of America's mass electorate into the electoral system in the 1830s, eligible voters were intensely participatory and remained highly mobilized throughout the nineteenth century. The turning point in American politics came during the first two decades of this...

Many have argued that soft money and special interests are destroying the American electoral system. And yet the clarion call for campaign finance reform only touches on the more general belief that money and economic power have a disastrous impact on both free expression and American democracy. The nation's primary sources of communication, the argument goes, are increasingly controlled by vast corporate empires whose primary, or even exclusive motive is the maximization of profit. And these conglomerates should simply not be granted the same constitutional protection as, say, an...