Rylie Oswald Al-Awhad
The University Press of Kansas has put together a reading list from our collection about political parties and movements. Join us as we count down the weeks to election day with “Election Season with UPK.” Thirteen weeks to go!
The Radical Mind by Chelsea Ebin
The Radical Mind analyzes the origins of the Christian Right, which is radically reshaping the landscape of American society. Scholars and the public alike have traditionally regarded the New Right and the Christian Right as separate movements. The New Right is supposedly a secular right-wing operation with purely political goals. The Christian Right is an evangelical Protestant movement largely motivated by religious convictions. Most view them as reactionary and driven by a culture-war backlash against liberal changes to society.
“A bold and compelling reinterpretation of the rise of the New Right that places religion at the heart of the movement. Ebin demonstrates that figures like Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell were not revivalists of tradition but political and theological innovators whose ideas bound together conservative Catholics and Protestants into a coalition that transformed American politics.”—Gene Zubovich, author of Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States
Commander in Chief by Casey B. K. Dominguez
The constitutional balance of war powers has shifted from Congress to the president over time. Today, presidents broadly define their constitutional authority as commander in chief. In the nineteenth century, however, Congress was the institution that claimed and defended expansive war power authority. This discrepancy raises important questions: How, specifically, did Congress define the boundaries between presidential and congressional war powers in the early republic? Did that definition change, and if so, when, how, and why did it do so?
“Dominguez has produced groundbreaking work on the changing relationship between the political branches in the realm of war. Using the unique prism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century congressional debates about the commander in chief clause, she demonstrates how members of Congress used to act as a constraint on executive war-making and this has given way to deference. Through her rigorous investigation we have clearer proof that presidents started collecting more power into their branch during the Spanish-American War.”—Sarah Burns, author of The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism
Grand Old Unraveling by John Kenneth White
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking. This includes a belief that lost elections were rigged. Republicans later won the White House and elevated their presidents to heroic status, posing a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened—not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a whole that led to the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and its aftermath.
“Grand Old Unraveling is a powerful warning of the dangers presented by Trumpist conspiracy-mongering and contempt for democratic norms. John Kenneth White contends that Trumpism has been germinating within the GOP for decades, and that Donald Trump is a ‘symptom, not a cause of our present-day dilemma.’ It is, in White’s retelling, ‘the culture within the Republican Party’ that made Trump possible. This book should be required reading for all Americans concerned about the fate of the republic in 2024 and beyond.”—Stephen F. Knott, author of The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline into Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal
American Political Parties by John Kenneth White and Matthew R. Kerbel
American Political Parties places the US party system into a framework designed around the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. White and Kerbel argue that the two-party system began with a common agreement on the key values of freedom, individual rights, and equality of opportunity. However, Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed—often vehemently—over how to translate these ideals into an acceptable form of governance.
“By attending closely to the historical variety of party formations in American politics, White and Kerbel incisively answer the three crucial questions laid out in their book’s subtitle. They root their analysis of parties’ functions and behavior in the messy contingencies of actual political history, connecting parties’ early republican origins to contemporary hyperpolarization in novel and effective ways.”—Sam Rosenfeld, author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era
Beyond Donkeys and Elephants by Richard Davis
Confronted with two historically unpopular presidential candidates, the American electorate in 2016 delivered a shock to the political system. Less noted, amid the drama of Donald Trump’s victory, was the substantial share of the vote won by minor parties and independent candidates. One of whom, Libertarian Gary Johnson, put in the best third-party performance since Ross Perot’s 1996 Reform Party bid. Even more surprising, at the state-level minor-party candidates made greater inroads, in some states combining to win over 10 percent of the vote. At a time of increasing dissatisfaction with a two-party system, this book provides a much-needed look at the current political party alternatives in the US. Beyond Donkeys and Elephants surveys the present political landscape and delves into the history of third parties. The book also considers their likely directions and prospects looking forward.
“Beyond Donkeys and Elephants casts a bright light on American politics ‘beyond’ the two major parties. For a variety of reasons, and with a variety of consequences, political activists have found it useful to organize outside the Democratic and Republican Parties. Our understanding of the two-party landscape is incomplete without this picture of the rest of the system.”—Hans Noel, author of Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America
The Idea of Presidential Representation by Jeremy D. Bailey
Does the president represent the entire nation? Or does he speak for core partisans and narrow constituencies? The Federalist Papers, the electoral college: both factor in theories of presidential representation, lending themselves to different interpretations. This back-and-forth, Jeremy D. Bailey contends, is a critical feature, not a flaw, in American politics. Bailey’s history offers an invaluable, remarkably relevant analysis of the intellectual underpinnings. Bailey also analyzes political usefulness and practical merits of contending ideas of presidential representation over time.
“This is an outstanding and important book. Professor Bailey challenges many of our conceptions of presidential representation. Taking his bearings from an intense engagement with history on its own terms, Bailey uncovers conceptions of presidential representation that are lost to us when we begin from our current account of it. Bailey combines political science with history to produce a truly magnificent book that will be of significant interest to historians, political scientists, and legal scholars.”—Benjamin A. Kleinerman, author of The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power
The American Political Pattern by Byron E. Shafer
Politicians are polarized. Public opinion is volatile. Government is gridlocked. Or so journalists and pundits constantly report. But where are we, really, in modern American politics, and how did we get there? Those are the questions that Byron E. Shafer aims to answer in The American Political Pattern. Looking at American politics over the past eighty years, the book draws a picture of our modern political system. It is a picture of political stability and political change that explains how shifting factors alter public policy and the character of American politicking.
“We have here an original ordering of American political history since 1932 that makes good sense. Shafer brings together evidence on election results, roll call voting, and party organization to craft his case. There is wealth of historical information presented with a deft touch.”—David R. Mayhew is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University
