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Politically, the mid-term election of 2022 not only switched partisan control of one of the major branches of American national government but shifted party balance within that government as a whole. Yet analytically, this resulted from a shift in the House of Representatives so minute – 9 seats changed hands in a body of 435 members – that many of the usual tools for dissecting American elections had nothing to say. Which means at a minimum that analysis of this particular contest requires some larger, nested framework for its interpretation. This paper is an attempt to provide one such framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A familiar framework for interpreting the politics of presidential nomination, built on an accumulating body of social science research plus the extended observations of experienced commentators, received remarkably little use in the day-to-day reportage of the Democratic and Republican contests of 2016 and 2020 as they unfolded. So this paper begins by sketching out the factional structure of the modern Democratic and Republican parties, along with the bandwagon dynamic that recurrently resolves their factional disputes. It then applies these foundational interpretive factors to the two most recent pairs of nominating contests. What results are four orthodox and recurrent stories that stand in sharp contrast to media narratives that were all too frequently a mix of incomplete basic understandings plus wildly overemphasized idiosyncrasies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At bottom, the election of 2018 produced one more iteration of an electoral order dominating American politics since 1992. So the main task of this paper is to elicit the structure of that order, drop the results of 2018 into it, and see how well those results fit. The key micro-analytic tools for approaching any election did work well in 2018, but cannot distinguish this election from other recent contests. The common journalistic focus on idiosyncratic elements of stability but especially change provides no real means of analyzing either. With the result that a focus on the structure of the modern American political world has to provide the tools for unpacking what proves to be an impressively stable electoral pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presidential nominating contests of 2016 were extremely fertile ground for hypothesizing by media analysts about alternative outcomes. Lacking much theoretical grounding, most of these were almost destined to be embarrassed by actual events—and 2016 proved extremely good at that. Yet the practical collapse of these journalistic hypotheticals does raise insistent theoretical questions, most of which are variants of one central puzzle: Were the nominating dynamics of 2016 ever very different from those of previous years? If so, how? If not, why not? There is in fact an established theoretical approach in political science with which to frame some answers. This article sets out to embed those answers within that established wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byron E. Sharer, Oxford University Both of these books begin with the same basic puzzle. What is it that changed in American electoral politicking as the New Deal era ebbed, [...]

Byron E. Sharer, Oxford University Both of these books begin with the same basic puzzle. What is it that changed in American electoral politicking as the New Deal era ebbed, [...]

On the morning after, the aggregate story of the American elections of 2016 was one of surprise. Professional pundits - not to mention the pollsters, those masters of disaggregation - had been rather strikingly wrong. So, one of the major products of the elections of 2016 was a major research project for these professional disaggregators. But can those who treat elections as aggregate phenomena -as patterned wins and losses across time - fit these results into an ongoing pattern? Within this pattern, what looks familiar and what looks anomalous? Or, said the other way around, when does a recognizable "modern world" begin, and what are its contours? And in the end, even if 2016 proves to have more similarities than differences to some (surely not all) of its predecessors, what would have to happen in order for its anomalies to become the shape of a successor world, making 2016 look like the beginning of something seriously new? Those are the questions that motivate this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparisons across even the longest time-span cannot foretell the future. What they can do is generate the available analogies to what has just happened, isolate the patterned outcomes that have preceded it over time, and locate the current outcome in the most recent sequence of results. Accordingly, this article begins with the contests that received the most attention in 2014 - and were consensually regarded as the most consequential - namely those in the Senate. It moves to corresponding contests in the House, considering Senate and House together, as Congress. And it finishes with the composite picture for the elective institutions of American national government, namely Senate, House, and Presidency. Some automatic future does not thereby appear, but various analogies become untenable, various alleged patterns can be dismissed as irrelevant, and the new political world can be much more richly described. Still, what ultimately results is an insistent puzzle about a modern world beginning around 1980 and differing consequentially from everything that went before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A newly created dataset makes it possible to go looking for the mass ideologies most common in American politics across the postwar years. For this purpose, it is necessary to distinguish five great ideological groups: Liberals, Conservatives, Populists, Libertarians, and Moderates. These prove to have distinct voting behaviors, not just in the ballot for President but also in the propensity and manner by which they split their tickets. They have distinct perceptions of the main organizational referents in politics, both political parties and organized interests, while the distinction between objectively measured versus self-identified ideologies proves to be consequential as well. Finally, these ideological groups do not just evolve differently across the postwar years; they alter the substantive content of major-party coalitions at both the rank-and-file and the activist levels while doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper goes in search of the contribution of the five major religious families in American society to the ideological landscape for electoral conflict. Taking advantage of new methodological opportunities and a rich but underutilized dataset, it considers the distribution of political values within denominations, the link between these values and voting behavior, and the strategic landscape - plus strategic dilemmas - that results from that link. By considering these across the most recent quarter-century, it isolates an older world sometimes characterized as 'the Protestant nation,' where Catholics offered additionally distinctive political behavior, and a new world in which the great denominations behave very differently, but where changes in Catholic behavior are arguably most critical to this change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linkages between political elites and their ostensible rank and files are central concerns of democratic theory, and central considerations in the empirical analysis of democratic politics. Yet in a world of burgeoning surveys of public opinion generally, there remains a desperate shortage of ways to tap the opinion of national elites. This piece (re)introduces political scientists and practicing journalists to one device for adding elite opinions to their tool-kits, by way of the Insiders Polls that were created and sustained within National Journal, a magazine of political analysis. Examples are offered of major differences between partisan elites, of concerns where experience trumps partisanship in shaping elite opinion, of the use of these Polls in following both electoral campaigns and conflicts over public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various articles in the journal on the topics of partisanship and independent voters in U.S. politics as of 2012.

The politics of presidential selection in 2008 reinvigorated an old argument from democratic theory about the relationship between nominating politics and the general election. Now that the latter is over, it is possible to return to these debates and ask how candidate fortunes at the nominating stage were linked to performances in November. For 2008, the strongest of these relationships proved to be perverse, with nominees performing best in states that they would cede to their opponent in the general election. Other relationships, however, as with improving or impairing results in individual states, achieved a more straightforward character, especially when institutional structure and temporal order were taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1992 Republican Convention took place in Houston. The convention focussed on themes such as foreign policy and family values, rather than on actually nominating a candidate. Television coverage was cut down to a couple of hours each evening. The result will be in the hands of the 'Reagan Democrats' who have been floating voters in the past few presidential elections.

Deals with a study which examined the political system in the United States. Definition of the exceptionalism phenomenon; Conceptual issues in practical politics; Argument on the use of exceptionalism.