The Politics of Realignment

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Notes

1. Lester G. Seligman and Cary R. Covington, The Coalitional Presidency (Chicago: Dorsey, 1989).

2. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections: The Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971). See also, John Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); V.O. Key, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics 17 (1955): 3–18; David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment in the Political Parties in the United States, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1983).

3. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991).

4. An argument can be made for 1964 as the beginning of the end for the Democrats, thus marking the rise of the Republican Party. See Earl Black and Merle Black, The Vital South: How Presidents are Elected (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

5. This is most obvious in the support of those like Pennsylvania's Governor, Edward G. Rendell.

6. For an astute analysis of this possibility, see Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

7. According to USA Today, Democrats are still avoiding the word “liberal,” preferring “progressive” as less likely to deter moderate voters. See http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2007-11-12-liberal-conservative_N.htm (accessed 29 February 2008).

8. It is true that during the George W. Bush administration, significant changes have been made to the federal bureaucracy. Those enacted through the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act have been especially important in expanding the power and reach of the federal government. Without discounting the immense importance of these actions, they expanded existing structures, but they have not fundamentally altered the way the federal government does business. Such change is normally associated with realignments. For more detail on such changes, see Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make.

9. B.B. Kymlicka and Jean V. Matthews, ed., The Reagan Revolution? (Chicago: Dorsey, 1988).

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Notes on contributors

Mary E. Stuckey

Mary Stuckey is Professor of Communication and Political Science at Georgia State University. She is interested in how political power is constructed and communicated and her research has been supported by NASA, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, the Gerald R. Ford Library, and CSPAN. She would like to thank Doug Barthlow, Barbara Biesecker, and David Cheshier for their help with this essay