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Author: Renée M. Lamis
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 430
ISBN-13: 027103419X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Explores electoral changes in Pennsylvania since 1960, finding that the recent "culture-wars realignment" has significantly altered the old New Deal party system, especially since the early 1990s. Contains illustrations plotting political alignment of Pennsylvania counties"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Thomas J. Baldino
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2024-03-12
Total Pages: 259
ISBN-13: 0271098910
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book provides a comprehensive examination of the Keystone State’s formal and informal political institutions and players, past and present, and elucidates the place each holds in governing the commonwealth today. Covering a period of more than three hundred years, this volume presents a clear and succinct overview of • the commonwealth’s political history, culture, and geography; • interactions between office holders, civil servants, special interest groups, and the media; • policy development and implementation; • how laws are created, enacted, and enforced; • hierarchy and interaction among state, county, local, and special district government bodies and officials; • tax collection and disbursement; and • the political upheaval in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. Featuring practical appendixes and interviews with current and past office holders, bureaucrats, party leaders, and political journalists, this astute and informative book is an indispensable tool for understanding politics in the Keystone State.
Author: Robert O. Self
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2012-09-18
Total Pages: 535
ISBN-13: 1429955562
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA “brilliant” history of American beliefs about the family, and how those ideas have affected our politics since the 1960s (Washington Monthly). In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty promised an array of federal programs to assist working-class families. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan declared the GOP the party of “family values” and promised to keep government out of Americans’ lives. Again and again, historians have sought to explain the nation’s profound political realignment from the 1960s to the 2000s, five decades that witnessed the fracturing of liberalism and the rise of the conservative right. The award-winning historian Robert O. Self is the first to argue that the separate threads of that realignment—from civil rights to women’s rights, from the antiwar movement to Nixon’s “silent majority,” from the abortion wars to gay marriage, from the welfare state to neoliberal economic policies—all ran through the politicized American family. Based on an astonishing range of sources, All in the Family rethinks an entire era, from the Great Society’s default assumption of a white heterosexual man at the head of each household to the quests for equal rights and opportunities for a broader range of citizens and a more inclusive idea of the American family. He discusses the Roe v. Wade decision and antidiscrimination protections in the workplace, and the furious conservative backlash that began in the 1970s as figures such as George Wallace, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and Jerry Falwell built a political movement based on the perceived moral threat to the traditional family. Self writes that “family values” conservatives in fact paved the way for fiscal conservatives, and that Reagan’s presidency united the two constituencies—which remained for decades the base of the Republican Party. This is a “powerful, well-researched account of how the efforts of marginalized groups to assert their rights as citizens ran up against the resistance of entrenched privilege, setting the stage for the polarization that grips US politics today. . . [Self] reminds us that our democracy is an imperfect thing, only as noble as the people who constitute it” (The Boston Globe).
Author: John J. Kennedy
Publisher: University Press of America
Published: 2014-08-20
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 0761864431
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPennsylvania Elections provides a systematic and thorough analysis of every statewide election in Pennsylvania since 1950. The five chapters are divided between U.S. Senate elections, gubernatorial contests, statewide row offices, and presidential campaigns. Each of the 106 elections that have taken place since 1950 is analyzed within the context of the 67 counties in the Commonwealth and John J. Kennedy discusses the candidates and issues which have shaped Pennsylvania for more than a half-century. By combining quantitative political science, political history, and political geography, this book will both pique the interest of those interested in the state’s politics and serve as a reference source for future scholars.
Author: Stacie Taranto
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2017-03-16
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 0812293851
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMost histories of modern American politics tell a similar story: that the Sunbelt, with its business friendly environment, right-to-work laws, and fierce spirit of frontier individualism, provided the seedbed for popular conservatism. Stacie Taranto challenges this narrative by positioning New York State as a central battleground. In 1970, under the governorship of Republican Nelson Rockefeller, New York became one of the first states to legalize abortion. By 1980, however, conservative, antifeminist Republicans with broad suburban appeal—symbolized by figures such as Ronald Reagan—had usurped power from these so-called Rockefeller Republicans. What happened during the intervening decade? In Kitchen Table Politics, Taranto investigates the role that middle-class, mostly Catholic women played both in the development of conservatism in New York State and in the national shift toward a conservative politics of "family values." Far from Albany, a short train ride away from the feminist activity in New York City, white, Catholic homemakers on Long Island and in surrounding suburban counties saw the legalization of abortion in the state in 1970 as a threat to their hard-won version of the American dream. Borrowing tactics from church groups and parent-teacher associations, these women created the New York State Right to Life Party and organized against several feminist initiatives, including defeating an effort to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution in 1975. These self-described "average housewives," Taranto argues, were more than just conservative shock troops; instead, they were inventing a new, politically viable conservatism centered on the heterosexual traditional nuclear family that the GOP's right wing used to broaden its electoral base. Figures such as activist Phyllis Schlafly, New York senator Al D'Amato, and presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan viewed the Right to Life Party's activism as offering a viable model to defeat feminist initiatives and win family values votes nationwide. Taranto gathers archival evidence and oral histories to piece together the story of these homemakers, whose grassroots organizing would shape the course of modern American conservatism.
Author: Bruce A. Campbell
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014-07-03
Total Pages: 365
ISBN-13: 0292771509
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTo have a voice in shaping government policy has been a goal of the American people since the nation's founding. Yet, government seems even less accessible now than in the past. An increasing rate of incumbency in Congress, the unwieldy committee system that controls legislation, and the decline of political parties have all weakened representation and alienated Americans from the seat of power. The one remaining way to produce major and coherent change in national policy is through partisan realignment—a sharp, enduring shift in voter support of the two major parties. This book is about the phenomenon of realignment in American politics. It not only brings together and assesses previous work in the area but also breaks new ground in the analysis of the effects of realignment on political elites and public policy. In addition, it is the first study to present an integrated theory of realignment that can be applied to the understanding of mass, elite, and policy change in times of social crisis. Contributors include Lawrence McMichael, David Nexon, Louis Seagull, Robert Lehnen, Philip Converse, Gregory Markus, Lester Seligman, Michael King, David Brady, Kenneth Meier, Kenneth Kramer, David Adamany, Charles Stewart, Susan Hansen, and the editors.Bruce A. Campbell taught political science at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The American Electorate.
Author: Natasha Zaretsky
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-02-13
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 0231542488
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn March 28, 1979, the worst nuclear reactor accident in U.S. history occurred at the Three Mile Island power plant in Central Pennsylvania. Radiation Nation tells the story of what happened that day and in the months and years that followed, as local residents tried to make sense of the emergency. The near-meltdown occurred at a pivotal moment when the New Deal coalition was unraveling, trust in government was eroding, conservatives were consolidating their power, and the political left was becoming marginalized. Using the accident to explore this turning point, Natasha Zaretsky provides a fresh interpretation of the era by disclosing how atomic and ecological imaginaries shaped the conservative ascendancy. Drawing on the testimony of the men and women who lived in the shadow of the reactor, Radiation Nation shows that the region's citizens, especially its mothers, grew convinced that they had sustained radiological injuries that threatened their reproductive futures. Taking inspiration from the antiwar, environmental, and feminist movements, women at Three Mile Island crafted a homegrown ecological politics that wove together concerns over radiological threats to the body, the struggle over abortion and reproductive rights, and eroding trust in authority. This politics was shaped above all by what Zaretsky calls "biotic nationalism," a new body-centered nationalism that imagined the nation as a living, mortal being and portrayed sickened Americans as evidence of betrayal. The first cultural history of the accident, Radiation Nation reveals the surprising ecological dimensions of post-Vietnam conservatism while showing how growing anxieties surrounding bodily illness infused the political realignment of the 1970s in ways that blurred any easy distinction between left and right.
Author: Donald Richard Deskins
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 614
ISBN-13: 0472116975
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom Washington to Obama, the single best source on U.S. presidential elections
Author: Christopher Baylor
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 0812249631
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat determines the interests, ideologies, and alliances that make up political parties? In its entire history, the United States has had only a handful of party transformations. First to the Party concludes that groups like unions and churches, not voters or politicians, are the most consistent influences on party transformation.
Author: John B. Judis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2004-02-10
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 0743254783
DOWNLOAD EBOOKONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND A WINNER OF THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S ANNUAL POLITICAL BOOK AWARD Political experts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira convincingly use hard data -- demographic, geographic, economic, and political -- to forecast the dawn of a new progressive era. In the 1960s, Kevin Phillips, battling conventional wisdom, correctly foretold the dawn of a new conservative era. His book, The Emerging Republican Majority, became an indispensable guide for all those attempting to understand political change through the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the country in Republican hands, The Emerging Democratic Majority is the indispensable guide to this era. In five well-researched chapters and a new afterword covering the 2002 elections, Judis and Teixeira show how the most dynamic and fastest-growing areas of the country are cultivating a new wave of Democratic voters who embrace what the authors call "progressive centrism" and take umbrage at Republican demands to privatize social security, ban abortion, and cut back environmental regulations. As the GOP continues to be dominated by neoconservatives, the religious right, and corporate influence, this is an essential volume for all those discontented with their narrow agenda -- and a clarion call for a new political order.
