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The National Political Science Review is the official publication of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. This new volume, Contemporary Patterns of Politics, Praxis, and Culture reflects major research focuses across religion, race, gender, culture, and of course, politics. Themes that engage a community of scholars also engage them in praxis as individual citizens and practitioners in a democratic society, and collectively as member-participants in a changing culture. Two themes, religion and culture are relatively new areas of intellectual curiosity for political scientists. Articles in this volume extend the beachheads already established by African-American political scientists in studies that guage the significance and influence of religion in both individual and group behavior. They chart religion's inevitable move onto the center stage of U.S. public affairs. The study of culture has essentially languished for almost a generation within political science, especially with regard to the study of American politics and society. During this time the emphasis has also shifted significantly from an almost exclusive focus on civic culture to an expanding focus on the broad expanse of popular culture in the contemporary period. Culture is the crucible within which politics, race, religion, and gender both foment and ferment, and artistic products of the culture are manifestations and mirrors of how we envision and construct a changing reality. Issues of race, religion, gender and culture are all dimensions of individual and group identity. The dynamics of changing individual and group identities change the underlying cultural canvas against which identity is displayed and politics is acted out. The concept of praxis is relatively new to the lexicon of political science. However, engagement in the practice of politics is not a new idea for African-American social scientists. Indeed, particularly for this group, and clearly for many others,
Even though the majority of Americans hold moderate views on issues such as abortion, homosexual rights, funding for the arts and public broadcasting, and multicultural education, extremists tend to dominate public debate. James Davidson Hunter explained this polarization of American politics and political discourse and popularized the term culture wars in his best-selling book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. The eleven contributors to The American Culture Wars analyse these and other heatedly contested issues. In addition, they examine new developments in the culture wars. Together the chapters of this book illuminate current cultural conflicts and offer clues as to where the next American culture wars may be waged.
A fully revised edition of the seminal classic This classic study was originally written by Edward Stewart in 1972 and has become a seminal work in the field of intercultural relations. In this edition, Stewart and Milton J. Bennett have greatly expanded the analysis of American cultural patterns by introducing new cross-cultural comparisons and drawing on recent reseach on value systems, perception psychology, cultural anthropology, and intercultural communication. Beginning with a discussion of the issues relative to contact between people of different cultures, the authors examine the nature of cultural assumptions and values as a framework for cross-cultural analysis. They then analyze the human perceptual process, consider the influence of language on culture, and discuss nonverbal behavior. Central to the book is an analysis of American culture constructed along four dimentions: form of activity, form of social relations, perceptions of the world, and perception of the self. American cultural traits are isolated out, analyzed, and compared with parallel characteristics of other cultures. Finally, the cultural dimentions of communication and their implications for cross-cultural interaction are examined.
Where did the Era of Divided Government come from? What sustains split partisan control of the institutions of American national government year after year? Why can it shift so easily from Democratic or Republican presidencies, coupled with Republican or Democratic Congresses? How can the vast array of issues and personalities that have surfaced in American politics over the last forty years fit so neatly within-indeed, reinforce-the sustaining political pattern of our time? These big questions constitute the puzzle of modern American politics. The old answer—a majority and a minority party, plus dominant and recessive public issues—will not work in the Era of Divided Government. Byron Shafer, a political scientist who is regarded as one of the most comprehensive and original thinkers on American politics, provides a convincing new answer that has three major elements. These elements in combination, not "divided government" as a catch phrase, are the real story of politics in our time. The first element is comprised of two great sets of public preferences that manifest themselves at the ballot box as two majorities. The old cluster of economic and welfare issues has not so much been displaced as simply joined by a second cluster of cultural and national concerns. The second element can be seen in the behavior of political parties and party activists, whose own preferences don't match those of the general public. That public remains reliably left of the active Republican Party on economic and welfare issues and reliably right of the active Democratic Party on cultural and national concerns. The third crucial element is found in an institutional arrangement—the distinctively American matrix of governmental institutions, which converts those first two elements into a framework for policymaking, year in and year out. In the first half of the book, Shafer examines how dominant features of the Reagan, first Bush, Clinton, and second Bush administrations reflect the interplay of these three elements. Recent policy conflicts and institutional combatants, in Shafer's analysis, illuminate this new pattern of American politics. In the second half, he ranges across time and nations to put these modern elements and their composite pattern into a much larger historical and institutional framework. In this light, modern American politics appears not so much as new and different, but as a distinctive recombination of familiar elements of a political style, a political process, and a political conflict that has been running for a much, much longer time.
Wray argues that understanding the cultural context behind American politics enhances the understanding of politics as part of society.
These boldly argued essays describe and analyze key developments in American politics and government in an era when political parties commanded mass loyalties and wielded unprecedented power over government affairs. McCormick follows the major parties from their emergence in the 1820s and1830s to their transformation almost a century later, discussing the nature of governance, clarifying economic policies of promotion, distribution, and (later) regulation that characterized government functions at every level, and sorting out the complex relationships between politics and policyduring the "party period."