The Long War over Party Structure: Democratic Representation and Policy Responsiveness in American Politics - Hardcover

Shafer, Byron E.; Wagner, Regina L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1108484913 ISBN 13: 9781108484916

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2019

Synopsis

A long-standing debate in American politics is about the proper structure for political parties and the relative power that should be afforded to party professionals versus issue activists. In this book, Byron E. Shafer and Regina L. Wagner draw systematically on new data and indexes to evaluate the extent to which party structure changed from the 1950s on, and what the consequences have been for policy responsiveness, democratic representation, and party alignment across different issue domains. They argue that the reputed triumph of volunteer parties since the 1970s has been less comprehensive than the orthodox narrative assumes, but that the balance of power did shift, with unintended and sometimes perverse consequences. In the process of evaluating its central questions, this book gives an account of how partisan alignments evolved with newly empowered issue activists and major post-war developments from the civil rights movement to the culture wars.

About this title

About the Authors

Byron E. Shafer is Hawkins Chair of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was formerly Mellon Professor of American Politics at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2001. He has written on numerous aspects of the structure of American politics, and he has attended all national party conventions for both parties from 1980 onward.

Regina L. Wagner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Her work focuses on political representation, gender and politics, legislative politics, and political parties. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2018.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108484913
• ISBN 13: 9781108484916
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 205