Reform and retrenchment a century of efforts to fix primary elections
"This book explores changes in primary election laws from approximately 1928 through the 1970s. It evaluates four different arguments about how and why primary election laws changed: the decline of the Progressive movement; the rise of nonparty groups seeking a "hostile takeover" of t...
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| Format: | UnknownFormat |
| Sprache: | eng |
| Veröffentlicht: |
New York, NY
Oxford University Press
2024
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Tag hinzufügen | Zusammenfassung: | "This book explores changes in primary election laws from approximately 1928 through the 1970s. It evaluates four different arguments about how and why primary election laws changed: the decline of the Progressive movement; the rise of nonparty groups seeking a "hostile takeover" of the parties through primaries; defects in the primary laws themselves; and the rise of two-party competition in much of America following the Great Depression and, subsequently, the decline of Democratic dominance in the South. My exploration of these theories shows that the introduction of the direct primary created far more chaos in American elections than most scholars realize, as political parties party factions, and reform groups across the country jockeyed for advantage by making slight modifications to their states' primary laws. This history has implications for contemporary politics. Today there is widespread dissatisfaction with primary elections, and we are again in a period of experimentation with the primary. I end the book with a note of caution - most primary reforms have been relatively ineffective, suggesting that for all of its flaws, there is likely little that can be done to improve primaries, and those who would seek to change American politics are best off exploring reforms to other areas of elections and governance. This book makes two major contributions to the literature on American elections. Although there are many books about the introduction of the direct primary, this is the first book to provide a detailed history of primary elections throughout the country following their implementation. I offer a newly created dataset of all primary law changes during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and I supplement these data with archival information on primaries taken from library collections across the country. [...]" |
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| Beschreibung: | xii, 326 Seiten Diagramme 25 cm |
| ISBN: | 9780197774083 978-0-19-777408-3 |