Long regarded as the “gold standard” of political parties texts, this new, nineteenth edition of Party Politics in America brings its comprehensive and authoritative coverage of party politics into an age of heightened partisan conflict; threats to the acceptance of democratic institutions; changes in the balance of power among the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court, and judicial rulings that upend long-established precedents. Marjorie Hershey and Barry Burden build on the book’s t...

Political scholars examine the dynamic evolution of laws over time in a volume that "pushes the frontiers of knowledge about lawmaking in the US" ( Choice).Politics is at its most dramatic during debates over important pieces of legislation. And while debates over legislative measures can rage for years or even decades before an item is enacted, they also endure long afterward, when the political legacy of a law eventually comes into focus. With a diverse ...

In Why Americans Split Their Tickets, Barry C. Burden and David C. Kimball argue that divided government is produced unintentionally. Using a new quantitative method to analyze voting in presidential, House, and Senate elections from 1952 to 1996, they reject the dominant explanation for divided government, that ticket splitting is done to balance parties that are far from the center. The ideological positions of candidates do not matter in American elections, but voters favor cen...

In this idiosyncratic study I imagine the scientific enterprise to be an edifice of reasoning and experimentation that we share with every animal all the way back to the protozoa. Only recently, in geological terms, did we choose to indulge in fantasies and stories, and although they served to entertain us through the dark nights, and could be used as memetic tools, they sometimes confounded us when confronting real threats. The river is not coming after us to demand prayer, the water is n...

Policymaking in the realm of elections is too often grounded in anecdotes and opinions, rather than in good data and scientific research. To remedy this, The Measure of American Elections brings together a dozen leading scholars to examine the performance of elections across the United States, using a data-driven perspective. This book represents a transformation in debates about election reform, away from partisan and ideological posturing, toward using scientific analysis to evaluate the...