The Original Know-Nothings

This book examines the quartering of British soldiers in North America in the eighteenth century, using ideas of place to understand the political and social history of quartering. In colonial America, quartering in houses was common, but this practice was challenged with the arrival of the British army during the French and Indian War. Eager to keep British regulars out of private homes, the colonists built barracks and planted military geography in the heart of their cities. The Quartering Act emerged after the war as an attempt to extend British rights and responsibilities to the colonies, but the size and diversity of British North America inhibited this effort and fractured the empire. As quartering in Canada and the backcountry diverged from that in the American colonies, friction emerged between the colonists and the British army. Following the Boston Massacre, quartering became a divisive issue that encouraged the Americans to contemplate forming their own nation.

Are American political parties really in decay? Have American voters really given up on the major parties? Taking issue with widely accepted theories of dealignment and party decay, Paulson argues that the most profound realignment in American history occurred in the 1960s, and he presents an alternative theory of realignment and party revival. In the 1964-1972 period, factional struggles within the major American political parties were resolved, with conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats emerging as the majority factions within their parties. The result was a critical realignment in Presidential elections, in which the decisive realignment involved the movement of white voters in the south toward the Republican coalition. The impression of dealignment came from the fact that electoral change in Congressional elections moved at a much slower rate. The south continued to vote Democratic for congress, usually for incumbent conservative Democrats. The result was an electoral environment which produced divided government. Secular realignment in congressional elections produced the Republican majorities of 1994. Now the conservative Democrats who were the swing voters since the 1960s, were voting Republican. The result is that the coalitions for yet another realignment are in place at the turn of the twenty-first century. After three decades in which the swing voters were relatively conservative, the new swing voter is a genuine centrist; an independent who is ideologically moderate. The coming realignment, Paulson asserts, will consummate the birth of a new, ideologically, polarized party system with a greater potential for party government, which would be a fundamental change for American democracy. A major resource for scholars, students, and other researchers interested in American parties and elections.

This book, first published in 1998, challenges traditional notions of American party politics and political culture. Usually, American politics is looked upon as relatively consensual and nonideological. Professor Gerring argues, instead, that the major parties have articulated views that were coherent, differentiated, and stable. American party history, and by extension American political history at-large, has been irreducibly ideological. The argument rests on evidence provided by election rhetoric - speeches, party platforms, and other campaign tracts disseminated by party leaders during presidential campaigns. With these texts Professor Gerring traces the values, beliefs, and issue-positions which have defined party life from the 1830s to the 1990s. Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 thus presents an historical synthesis of mainstream party politics from the birth of competitive parties to the present.

The political history of Utah during the period from 1900 to 1920 has been largely ignored by historians. Yet during that period occurred some of the most exciting political events of Utah's unique story. The opening decades of the twentieth century saw the rise to power of Senator Reed Smoot, whom many would call the most illustrious and at the same time most powerful politician Utah ever produced.

What should major parties out of power do to win elections? To answer that question, we need to understand what these parties do to recapture political ascendancy and whether their actual behaviour differs from their optimal behaviour. In this article, we propose a systematic, replicable method of identifying the competitive strategies that American parties out of power have adopted in their pursuit of the presidency. We present a taxonomy of party strategies, which we operationalize by comparison of utility functions for hypothetical voters. Using both directional and proximity models of issue voting, we compute these utility functions for each presidential election from 1852 to 1996, controlling for variables that systematically affect voting, including economic conditions and incumbency. These results suggest that, contrary to the views of many political scientists and party activists, there is no single optimal strategy through which parties out of power can regain it. Rather, several competitive strategies offer similar prospects for electoral success.

A likely Islamic Salvation Front win in Algeria's legislative elections of December 1991 led to the cancellation of the results. In November 1995 relatively free presidential elections were held in Algeria as the process of democratisation re‐started. Since the democratic process was brought to an abrupt halt in Algeria in January 1992, the country experienced its first ever plural presidential election. General Zeroual, appointed in January 1994, promised presidential elections would take place before the end of 1995. The news was received with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the idea was dismissed by the main opposition parties, as elections would only serve to legitimise Zeroual's system, and thus they called for it to be boycotted. On the other hand, it represented the only way for further political reforms. A mandate from the people is what a new head of state needs which can only be achieved through the ballot box. Whatever the arguments, this presidential election represents a milestone in Algeria's political history. Its significance lies in the fact that it is the first ever multi‐party presidential election. In this article I shall analyse the background, preparations, events and outcomes of this election with particular emphasis on the following questions: was the contest open and did the major actors have equal opportunities to participate? Were there any irregularities in the voting procedures that could question thé validity of the results? Was access to the media given equally to all candidates? Was enough information made available about the candidates? Would the ‘majority’ of the electorate obey the call to boycott the election? Finally, what do the results of the election mean for the future of the Algerian political system?

This collection of essays examines the political transitions of the 1980s and 1990s in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Mexico, focusing on parties and elections. In the opening chapter, Fernando López-Alves presents a useful inventory of transition studies and locates the present volume within the vast literature on the topic. In contrast to the bulk of transition studies, the case studies in this book take a long view of recent changes by grounding themselves in the party and electoral patterns of the pre-dictatorial political systems or, in the case of Mexico, in the era of uncontested PRI supremacy.César Tcach finds that Argentina’s transition was completed by 1990, after (1) the country’s first presidential election (1989) in which the incumbent ceded power to a candidate of an opposition party and (2) the effective subordination of the military to civilian authority. An essential part of the transition was the resurrection and strengthening of the historic Peronist Party and the Unión Cívica Radical. Rachel Meneguello examines the 1985 and 1989 Brazilian presidential elections and the emerging party configuration against the backdrop of Brazil’s republican history in which parties came and went as instruments of populist leaders and/or the state. Drawing on the 1988 plebiscite and 1989 and 1993 presidential and congressional elections in Chile, Carlos Huneeus finds that, despite changes in leadership and names, the pre-1973 party constellations re-emerged. But he also notes the decline in party activism in Chile and other Latin American countries that followed the euphoria of the earliest post-dictatorial elections.Víctor Reynoso dissects the 1988 and 1994 presidential and the 1991 congressional elections in Mexico to gauge the direction and extent of the country’s unique transition toward a multiparty democracy. Silvia Dutrénit examines the Uruguayan elections of 1984 and 1989, including the plebiscite on prosecutions of human rights violators under the military regime. These reveal a marked evolution in Uruguay’s party system, with the decline of the Colorado/Nacional two-party system and the rise of Frente Amplio—a trend dramatically confirmed in the 1999 election. In the concluding chapter, Gonzalo Varela extracts the common threads from the five countries’ transitions. The enhancement of parties’ roles in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil and the resuscitation of traditionally powerful parties in Chile and Uruguay form part of a broader trend toward strong party systems throughout Latin America after the passing of populism, statism, and dictatorship.Without breaking new theoretical ground, these case studies are well argued, thoroughly documented, and endowed with a wealth of detail, much of which is presented in numerous tables and graphs. Although published in 1998, the book does not cover some of the more recent elections, such as the 1997 Mexican and Chilean congressional elections, which were pivotal points in those countries’ recent political history. Nonetheless, this book will serve well as a source for historians of contemporary Latin American politics.

Includes all relevant information on national elections held in Lebanon since its independence in 1941. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of Lebanon's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections, the electoral participation of political parties, the distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

Though Donald Trump popularized the phrase “Build the Wall” during the 2016 presidential election, Sarah R. Coleman's The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America reminds us that immigration has historically taken the forefront of political campaigns, especially during the second half of the twentieth century. Asserting that immigration scholars have primarily focused on external (international) borders, Coleman turns to internal domestic borders to examine federal, state, and local policies that sought to restrict non-citizen rights. Coleman argues, “With the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 and the corresponding shifts in immigration patterns, efforts to restrict immigrants’ access to social welfare programs began to solidify during the 1970s” (p. 106). In this vein, the author sets out to trace the “struggle of politicians, interest groups, courts, activists, and communities to define the rights of immigrants in the United States after the passage of the historic Hart-Celler Act of 1965” (p. 2). Coleman focuses on immigrants’ access to education, employment, and welfare to examine the nation's internal borders.This political history is organized into an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. The first chapter, “The Rose's Sharp Thorn: Texas and the Rise of Unauthorized Immigrant Education,” traces the 1982 landmark Supreme court case Plyler v. Doe, which decided that a Texas statute that charged tuition to non-citizen students violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Chapter 2, “‘A Subclass of Illiterates’: The Presidential Politics of Unauthorized Immigrant Education,” successfully demonstrates how pressures of an impending presidential election influenced the Carter administration's lack of response to Plyler v. Doe and Governor Ronald Reagan's pressure to woo Texas voters.Coleman then examines employment issues in the third chapter, “‘Heading into Uncharted Waters’: Congress, Employer Sanctions, and Labor Rights,” through which she explores how political alliances and parties became divided over employer sanctions. Chapter 4, “‘A Riverboat Gamble’: The Passage of Employer Sanctions,” relies on the passage of employer sanctions to emphasize one of Coleman's core arguments: “policies emerged not out of clear, ideologically coherent policy positions, but instead through tangled political compromises, sometimes crafted to address complex policy questions and, at other times, merely for the sake of incremental political gains” (p. 82).Following conservative fears that immigrants would soon have access to all civic liberties, Coleman examines welfare rights in the fifth chapter, “‘To Reward the Wrong Way Is Not the American Way’: Welfare and the Battle Over Immigrants’ Benefits.” This chapter effectively demonstrates another central premise of the book: “the removal of authorized immigrants from welfare is significant as it highlights the hardening of citizenship as the essential element in determining the relationship between the individual and the welfare state” (p. 108). In this chapter, Coleman most clearly outlines the origins of present-day local and state immigration policy. In regard to the monumental transfer of immigration authority from federal to state, Coleman argues, “Beyond the immediate restrictions, the changes made in the 1990s established a new policy framework that would ultimately reshape immigration policy over the next two decades,” (p. 141). Further illuminating the origins of today's immigration restrictions, Chapter 6, “From the Border to the Heartland: Local Immigration Enforcement and Immigrants’ Rights,” relies on an Iowa court case and the implementation of the 287(g) program to demonstrate how “federal inability to address some of the complicated issues of immigration control opened the window for state efforts at policymaking” (p. 142).The book's strengths lie in effectively detailing how political figures, institutions, grassroots organizations, and federal and state governments treated each court case as a high-stakes entryway into allowing non-citizens access to other civil liberties. Coleman convincingly traces and demonstrates how landmark immigration court cases are never treated as stand-alone issues; politicians are particularly concerned about how one policy could affect others or how their approval for a policy could alienate key constituencies. Sources are another strength, as Coleman balances materials from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, as well as immigration and civil rights organizations. Although the reliance on a wide array of polls is informative, Coleman does not address pollsters’ demographics. Details such as pollsters’ national origins and socio-economic statuses could strengthen Coleman's argument. The first and last chapters that rely primarily on one court case could be strengthened by further discussing other cases that are mentioned but not used to complicate the evidence.Coleman set out to accomplish the significant feat of detailing restrictions imposed on non-citizens in the United States. The book successfully contributes to the field of immigration studies through its focus on internal borders. Audiences that would benefit from The Walls Within include those seeking to learn about the legislative policy process through history. Coleman puts it best: “This study looks at the entire scale of policymaking that is pertinent to immigrants, showing how local, state, and federal actions shaped policy implementation and politics in distinct ways” (p. 5).

Includes all relevant information on national elections held in Kiribati since its independence in 1979. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of Kiribati's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections and referendums, the electoral participation of political parties, the distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

South-East Asia is suffering a rapid deterioration of the free press and Freedom of expression. According to the last report of Freedom in the World 2021, in the last few years, almost all the South-East Asian countries have experienced a reduction in Freedom of expression, and in certain cases, their rights have been restricted. What kind of effects do the media have on public opinion? How can disinformation, censorship, and media control manipulate public opinion? Is social media promoting the anti-democracy establishment? Does social media reduce the democratic quality of a country by limiting its expression through control? This paper is based on desk-based research, where literature on political history and the political history of using media has been reviewed and analyzed—with a comparative analysis, focusing on the data available on the three countries of interest: Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, taking a comparative study the last election in 2019 in those countries. As a method, this study conducts a critical literature review with a historical approach. This study found that all the countries analyzed utilized the media to spread disinformation, war propaganda, and control. Borrowing from the Gramscian theory of hegemony, the paper argues that the theory of media and control can be used as a theoretical framework to examine the rule of media to manipulate and control the opinion public.

TH TOW do regional differences influence national politics in the United States? To politicians regionalism seems a potent force. Presidential nominating conventions often witness acrimonious sectional struggles that have been traditionally resolved by geographically balanced party tickets. Presidential candidates, knowing that their appeal varies widely among regions, concentrate campaign expenditures and appearances in especially receptive and marginal states. On the other hand, several authorities contend that regionalism is ebbing in all phases of American life. Geographical differences, they argue, are blurring under the impact of frequent migration, broad exposure to the mass media, the mushrooming growth of nationwide corporations and labor markets, the homogenization of consumer goods, and the expansion of programs by the federal government.' Waning territorial distinctiveness should imply far-reaching consequences for American government and political parties, both of which are organized as hierarchies of spatial units. Despite their interest and sophistication in regional analysis, geographers have virtually ignored regional aspects of American national politics.2 Geographical studies of politics in cities, states, and individual regions demonstrate the value of adopting a spatial perspective in the interpretation of political behavior.3 The stimulating work of European scholars and American political scientists shows that important aspects of national politics in the United States can be analyzed geographically.4

The chapter introduces the history of electoral politics in Malawi, as well as the country’s institutions and electoral geography. It uses constituency-level election data from presidential elections since to the 1990s. The chapter shows that Malawian political competition has been strongly characterized by regionalism and that this regionalism may not be reduced simply to ethnic voting. Malawian national electoral majorities have generally been won based on a strong presence in one of the country’s three regions. In particular, this chapter will show the strong dominance of Southern Region in Malawian multiparty politics. However, with high levels of electoral volatility, parties have competed intensely to mobilize regional cleavages. This competition has been the foundation of territorial electoral strategies.

The English-speaking world, which determined more than 30 years ago that political history was passé, instead focused primarily on the social, culture, gender, and other “sophisticated” topics. Scholarly literature in the Romance languages and German, on the other hand, has reexamined political institutions, politics, and political processes — or “the political,” as the nouvelle histoire politique calls it. Moreover, it has focused on the elite as well as the subalterns. The new political history written in those languages during the last three decades has transformed our understanding of the process of independence and the formation of new nations in Latin America.El temor a las multitudes, written by a young Spanish historian, is an excellent example of this new work. Her study examines the political transition of New Spain to the republic of Mexico. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the minutes of the Mexican congresses as well as the newspapers and pamphlets from 1820 to 1834 that published political debates and opinions, her work presents a new interpretation of the politics of those decades as well as a subtle analysis of the development of conservative thought. Indirectly, Mirian Galante demonstrates that neither patriotic heroes nor caudillos dominated Mexican politics. Instead, men well versed in Western culture, from the ancient classical world to the emergence of liberalism in the Cortes of Cádiz and the Constitution of 1812, forged the new nation. Initially, all the leaders were liberals who believed that the fundamental principles of representative government derived from the historic institutions of Castile and the Constitution of Cádiz. They favored a monarchy because they believed that a hereditary ruler would serve as the unifying element of the diverse regions of Mexico. After their elected emperor Agustín de Iturbide failed (1823), the constitution became a symbol of national unity.The constitutional congress (1823–1824) faced an entirely different situation than the earlier legislatures. As Galante demonstrates, the principal question was where sovereignty resided. The moderates, who believed that sovereignty resided in the legislature, desired a strong central government because they feared that federalism might result in the country's fragmentation. They also believed that the people could be tyrannical, and therefore they sought to eliminate the participation of the “multitude,” which the Constitution of Cádiz had granted. The liberals favored a system of shared sovereignty between the states and the national government. The radicals, extreme defenders of local rights, argued that only the provinces possessed sovereignty, a portion of which they collectively ceded to the union to form a national government. Neither the advocates of states' rights nor the proponents of centralized authority triumphed. Instead, a compromise emerged: shared sovereignty. Nevertheless, the balance of power shifted toward the states. They gained considerable powers of taxation at the expense of the federal government, which lost approximately half the revenue collected by the viceregal administration. In addition, Congress established a weak executive, which further crippled the national government.Since the Constitution of 1824 was essentially a confederalist charter, the national government had limited authority. As Galante demonstrates, a weak executive could not control the conflicting factions in the states or in Congress. As a result, the escosés and yorkino Masonic lodges became the centers of political power. Their views were forcefully expressed in the newspapers and the pamphlets that circulated widely in the country. While a number of questions, from national finances to international relations, concerned politicians, they were rapidly enveloped by the radicalism of the states and by mass politics. Two matters most preoccupied the public: the status of the Spaniards and church-state relations. Demands for control of the church and the expulsion of Spaniards began in the states and soon spread to Congress.A political crisis erupted in January 1827 when the Spanish friar Joaquín Arenas was discovered plotting to return Spain to power in Mexico. The conspiracy created a national scandal, leading to the expulsion of Spaniards from the country as well as to state and national political victories for the radical yorkinos. Fearful of the growing power of the Left, prominent escoseses mounted an unsuccessful rebellion in December 1827. The presidential elections of 1828 occurred in the midst of a political and constitutional crisis. After a heated campaign in which secret societies played a leading role, the moderate Manuel Gómez Pedraza won. Unwilling to accept the results, the radicals aroused popular sentiments. There were demonstrations throughout the country demanding that the election be annulled. When Vicente Guerrero, the runner-up, joined the movement, President-elect Gómez Pedraza resigned and fled the country to forestall civil war. Mass demonstrations continued in the capital, however, ultimately resulting in a riot that destroyed the Parían, the city's principal market. As a result, Congress, dominated by radicals, elected Guerrero president.In Galante's view, these events convinced many moderates to become conservatives favoring limited representation and a strong national government. After years of struggle between conservatives and radicals, the federal system collapsed in 1835. It was succeeded by a centralist regime, which in turn was followed by a federal republic in 1842. Although Mexico retains a federal republic, conservatives have not disappeared. El temor a las multitudes offers an excellent explanation of the emergence of conservative thought in Mexico. Galante's cogent analysis will influence our understanding of the difficulties the nation faced and, indeed, faces today in maintaining stability and prosperity.

This study examines how intraparty polarization within the U.S. Democratic Party over the Vietnam War contributed to its defeat in the 1968 presidential election. Although existing literature extensively explores the societal and geopolitical ramifications of the Vietnam War, few quantitative and theoretical analyses have focused on the ideological divide between "Doves" and "Hawks" within the Democratic Party and how it eroded the party’s electoral viability. This paper argues that the party’s internal schism, exacerbated by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ambiguous war strategy, military setbacks such as the Tet Offensive, and a shifting balance of power in Congress, undermined unity, public trust, and electoral cohesion. By analyzing congressional voting data, elite decision - making, and electoral outcomes, this study demonstrates that the Democratic Party’s failure to reconcile its internal conflicts over Vietnam directly contributed to Richard Nixon’s Republican victory, marking a pivotal realignment in U.S. political history.