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Social scientists and campaign strategists approach voting behavior from opposite poles. Reconciling these rival camps through a merger of precise statistics and hard-won election experience, The American Political Landscape presents a full-scale analysis of U.S. electoral politics over the past quarter-century. Byron Shafer and Richard Spady explain how factors not usually considered hard data, such as latent attitudes and personal preferences, interact to produce an indisputably solid result: the final tally of votes. Pundits and pollsters usually boil down U.S. elections to a stark choice between Democrat and Republican. Shafer and Spady explore the significance of a third possibility: not voting at all. Voters can and do form coalitions based on specific issues, so that simple party identification does not determine voter turnout or ballot choices. Deploying a new method that quantifiably maps the distribution of political attitudes in the voting population, the authors describe an American electoral landscape in flux during the period from 1984 to 2008. The old order, organized by economic values, ceded ground to a new one in which cultural and economic values enjoy equal prominence. This realignment yielded election outcomes that contradicted the prevailing wisdom about the importance of ideological centrism. Moderates have fared badly in recent contests as Republican and Democratic blocs have drifted further apart. Shafer and Spady find that persisting links between social backgrounds and political values tend to empty the ideological center while increasing the clout of the ideologically committed.
Whether considering the role of landscape in battle depictions; or investigating monumental figures from the Colossus of Rhodes to Mount Rushmore; or asking why gold backgrounds in paintings gave way to mountains topped with castles; Political Landscape reconfigures our idea of landscape, its significance, and its representations.
"This highly original and challenging book defies every easy form of classification. Ostensibly about early polities, its penetrating and erudite asides extend with equal facility into contemporary politics and the symmetrical deficiencies of modernism and postmodernism. To my knowledge, imaginative reflections of spatial representations have never previously found their way into the theoretical base of what has been thought of as an essentially materialistic archaeological science. It is a pleasure and a discovery to see the permanent and rightful place Adam Smith has now fashioned for them."—Robert McC. Adams, Secretary Emeritus, The Smithsonian Institution "If social theory in cultural anthropology was transformed in the last decades by a 'linguistic turn,' research by archaeologists into the development and practices of early states now seems to be undergoing a 'geographic turn.' Adam Smith's book, although drawing from modern currents in geography, anthropology, sociology, and political philosophy, brings original archaeological contributions to social theory by examining the making and re-making of landscapes in early complex polities (especially in Mesopotamian, Urartian, and Maya states). Smith observes these (and other) early states as 'political landscapes,' in which monuments come to constitute authority and shape memories. Smith's book represents a comprehensive turn from metahistorical reifications of the state to investigations of how the content of social roles was determined through the production of landscapes. The landscape of archaeology will be changed decisively by this book."—Norman Yoffee, Professor, Dept. of Near Eastern Studies and Dept. of Anthropology, University of Michigan. "This book emerges as both a remarkable scholarly achievement and something of a manifesto for contemporary political thinking and engagement."—Susan E. Alcock, author of Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories
In the past decade various studies have examined how political humor may influence various political attitudes and voting behavior; whether it affects learning, cognition and media literacy, how it might shape political participation; how people process different forms of political humor; and more. This book is devoted to anticipating and addressing where the field of political humor and its effects will move in the next generation of scholarship, exploring the continued evolution of the study of political humor as well as the normative implications of these developments. It includes research accounting for important changes and developments "on the ground" in the political humor landscape. These include the fact that the cadre of late-night television hosts have completely changed in the past 3 years; there are now more late night television choices; and many hosts have become more overtly political in their presentations. Recommended for scholars of communication, media studies, and political science.
One of the most substantial divides in American politics is the “God gap.” Religious voters tend to identify with and support the Republican Party, while secular voters generally support the Democratic Party. Conventional wisdom suggests that religious differences between Republicans and Democrats have produced this gap, with voters sorting themselves into the party that best represents their religious views. Michele F. Margolis offers a bold challenge to the conventional wisdom, arguing that the relationship between religion and politics is far from a one-way street that starts in the church and ends at the ballot box. Margolis contends that political identity has a profound effect on social identity, including religion. Whether a person chooses to identify as religious and the extent of their involvement in a religious community are, in part, a response to political surroundings. In today’s climate of political polarization, partisan actors also help reinforce the relationship between religion and politics, as Democratic and Republican elites stake out divergent positions on moral issues and use religious faith to varying degrees when reaching out to voters.
"Leading experts examine the prospects for democracy in the world's most populous nation and break down a number of issues in Chinese domestic politics, including changing leadership dynamics, the rise of business elites, increased demand for the rule of law, and shifting civil-military relations"--Provided by publisher.
Covering key issues ranging from education to political mobilization to racial stratification, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the Obama Presidency. President Barack Obama's election and subsequent reelection represent a critical paradigm shift in American political history. But are there lasting effects of the election of an African American to the highest office in the land in terms of the United States' economic, educational, political and social realities? A valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, state and federal policymakers, and general readers, this book poses critical questions and offers insightful answers from expert contributors, provides a balanced critique of President Obama's accomplishments and challenges, and considers the national and international impact President Obama's tenure had on politics. The numerous contributors to this book provide a range of perspectives on President Obama's presidency that question conventional thinking, covering key issues that include health care, education, political mobilization, gender, racial stratification, voting patterns, and criminal justice. Readers will come away with a heightened comprehension of the complex relationships between political structures, economic policies, and minority interests; how Congress, traditional and contemporary activists, and domestic and international issues all shaped the Obama Presidency; and how micro and macro issues such as voting rights, voting patterns, and Get Out the Vote (GOTV) initiatives are connected.
This text is an exploration of the origins and lasting influence of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, and, nature.
Revised and Expanded Edition Wait—what's wrong with rights? It is usually assumed that trans and gender nonconforming people should follow the civil rights and "equality" strategies of lesbian and gay rights organizations by agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee nondiscrimination and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the best way to address the poverty and criminalization that plague trans populations is to gain legal recognition and inclusion in the state's institutions. But is this strategy effective? In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that is raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. In the new afterword to this revised and expanded edition, Spade notes the rapid mainstreaming of trans politics and finds that his predictions that gaining legal recognition will fail to benefit trans populations are coming to fruition. Spade examines recent efforts by the Obama administration and trans equality advocates to "pinkwash" state violence by articulating the US military and prison systems as sites for trans inclusion reforms. In the context of recent increased mainstream visibility of trans people and trans politics, Spade continues to advocate for the dismantling of systems of state violence that shorten the lives of trans people. Now more than ever, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.
"A Sense of Place examines the vast Kantō region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment during the political and military turmoil of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Japan. Through analysis of memoirs, letters, chronicles, poetry, travelogues, lawsuits, land registers, and archeological reports, David Spafford explores the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited: he considers the region both as a whole, in its literary representations and political and administrative dimensions, and as an aggregation of discrete locales, where struggles over land rights played out alongside debates about the meaning of ties between families and their holdings. Spafford also provides the first historical account in English of medieval castle building and the castellan revolution of the late fifteenth century, which militarized the countryside and radically transformed the exercise of authority over territory. Simultaneously, the book reinforces a sense of the eastern elite’s anxieties and priorities, detailing how, in their relation to land and place, local elites displayed a preference for past precedent and inherited wisdom. Even amidst the changes wrought by war, this inclination, although quite at odds with their conventional reputation for ruthless pragmatism and forward thinking, prevailed."