What's Next for the Democratic Party?

This thesis examines the issue of Texas annexation from the viewpoints of two southern cities: Richmond, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana. It looks primarily at four major newspapers, two in each city: the Richmond Enquirer and the Richmond Whig; and the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the New Orleans Whig. These four newspapers were examined thoroughly from January 1844 to July 1845. In addition to the above newspapers, the Congressional Globe and national voting patterns on Texas annexation were examined. Analysis of the editorial articles in the above newspapers offers the best possibility of understanding public sentiment toward Texas annexation and the presidential election of 1844. The evidence examined in this study indicates that Texas annexation became a decisive issue in the presidential election of 1844. It also shows that, although the press and elements within both Democratic and Whig parties were aware that the slavery question was intricately linked to the Texas annexation issue, slavery and sectional politics were not the primary factors influencing annexation. Ultimately, fundamental concerns regarding western expansion in general, especially for the Whigs, and political party loyalty proved the decisive factors in the presidential election of 1844 and Texas annexation. The evidence gathered in this study indicates that Texas annexation deliberately became an issue in the presidential election by the Democratic party. It also shows that although consideration was given to the slavery question by elements of both the Whig and Democratic parties, sectional politics did not enter into play concerning the annexation of Texas.

Through an examination of key historical documents, this book chronicles the Democratic Party's complete transformation from the small-government, Jeffersonian party to a party of activist government and social progressivism during the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. What are the objectives of today's Democratic Party, and what historic events have guided its evolution from a decidedly different ideological starting point more than 200 years ago? The Democratic Party: Documents Decoded supplies a thorough historical examination of the Democratic Party from its distant origins in George Washington's administration to the two-term administration of Barack Obama. Told through key documents and speeches, this history comes alive in the words and thoughts of those who built, sustained, and transformed the Democratic Party. No other book uses documents in this way to tell a comprehensive history of this party. The book utilizes primary documents to investigate a breadth of topics such as the Democratic party's positions on civil rights, discrimination, voting rights, taxation, representation, immigration, primary elections, caucuses, the Republican opposition, relations between church and state, the role of government, and foreign policy. The scholarly commentary provides essential context that bridges the gaps between documents and insightful explanations and clarifications of specific passages or terms to ensure reader comprehension. A work unlike any other on the history of the Democratic Party, this book will serve advanced high school students in government and history classes as well as undergraduate students taking courses in political science and history.

Ahead of the general election campaign in the autumn of 2018, the main Luxembourg parties (Democratic Party, Christian Social People’s Party, Socialist Workers Party, Alternative Democratic Reform Party and The Greens) publicly signed an agreement to restrict the number of promotional campaign giveaways and campaign posters for the sake of environmental protection. At first sight insignificant, this agreement nevertheless demonstrates a certain degree of ecological awareness across party lines and attests to a level of interest in environmental issues among voters.

This paper argues that African-American House legislators have become less radical, engaging in less forceful ideological battles with the Democratic Party over its policy leadership. They have become simultaneously more prone to support policy leadership from Democratic presidents as well. This argument is based on a study of floor votes by black legislators on budget resolutions in the Carter and Clinton administrations, as well as an analysis of presidential support and party unity scores from 1977 to 2008 in CQ Almanacs. Since the 1990s, based on a number of factors, black House members are less likely to challenge Democratic presidential and party leadership as radical voices on the political left. This decline in black radicalism, I contend, has implications for the concept of African-American politics as an organized challenge to the racial status of blacks.

The Great Migration fundamentally reshaped Northern electorates. Millions of Black voters, who had been unable to vote in the South, became eligible to vote through their resettlement in the North. In many instances, parties and politicians believed that Black voters were the balance of power in elections. This belief led them to change their approaches and make specific appeals to Black voters in an effort to win their support. Although scholars of American politics have revised the dominant narrative about the development of the Democratic Party on issues related to race, they fail to account for the role of Black voters in contributing to the Party’s change. The goal of this work is to describe how the Great Migration influenced Democratic Party interactions with Black voters in presidential elections from 1948–1960. I argue that increasing competition between the Democratic and Republican Parties, coupled with Black migrants’ location in electorally important states, made Black voters an important target of presidential campaign strategy in the post-war era.

Significance The Democratic Party of Japan was ejected from government by Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party in 2012, and has suffered resounding electoral defeats ever since. Its absorption in March this year of the smaller Japan Innovation Party and its name-change to 'the Democratic Party' failed to refresh its image. The new leader faces the challenge of giving voters a credible and compelling centre-left alternative to Abe. Impacts The issue of her hereditary Chinese/Taiwanese nationality could still cause problems for the frontrunner, Renho. Renho, if elected leader, could rally and capitalise on popular anxieties about militarisation. Seiji Maehara, a more hawkish and conservative candidate, would be more receptive to Abe's agenda for constitution revision. Renho might prove a more convincing champion of feminism than Abe, depriving him of this particular banner. Whoever wins, the DP will oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, but lacks the numbers in parliament to block it.

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War Walter L. Buenger The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War. By Wallace Hettle. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. 240. Cloth $50.00.) Wallace Hettle offers a useful corrective to the tendency to break analysis of Southern politics in 1861, to focus on explaining secession to the neglect of understanding Civil War politics. Combining social and cultural history with a sure understanding of state level politics, Hettle focuses on the region's dominant Democratic party. He argues that the Democrats, especially their leaders, were torn between the egalitarian roots of the party and the reality that it functioned in a hierarchical slave society. For Hettle, "equal participation in a system characterized by inequalities is not possible" (4). During a war that demanded an enormous sacrifice from common people, from nonslaveholding whites, the gulf between the ordinary citizen and the slaveholding leadership widened. As a result, "the South increasingly lacked a popular foundation for the struggle" (10). Hettle stops short of insisting that the South lost the Civil War because of politics but argues that the increasingly high desertion rates and the lack of will to continue the fighting in 1865 derived in part from a political system that could no longer balance defending slavery and individual rights. Every chapter deals in one way or another with "the complexity of the interaction between planters and yeoman in the Civil War era" (39). Hettle begins with an extended discussion of the ongoing role of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson in the antebellum Democratic party. Jackson gave the party a highly gendered base—the image of an iron willed and independent man who dominated all others. Jefferson famously elevated yeoman farmers and the egalitarian society in which they lived to an ideal type. Few who came after Jackson, however, possessed his adroit balance of a defense of the yeoman with a display of manly strength and independence. Instead as secession approached and the Civil War unfolded leaders of the Democratic party often sought manly control and dominance at the expense of equal rights and equal participation by [End Page 325] the yeoman. Hettle uses case studies of John C. Rutherford of Virginia, Joseph Brown of Georgia, Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, Jeremiah Clemens of Alabama, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi to illustrate his point and to explain the variations and similarities between the Southern states. In each of these case studies, Hettle deftly explains both high politics and low politics: the overarching tension between elite control and democracy and the particular feuds, divisions, and issues that divided the public in individual states. For example, Hettle attributes the creation of a dictatorial Executive Council in wartime South Carolina to prewar schisms caused by such issues as conflict over legislative apportionment and the connection of South Carolinians to the national Democratic party. Yet even in South Carolina, devotion to Jacksonian principles and the need to ensure up-country support of the war caused the state's political leaders to retreat from aristocratic control symbolized by the Executive Council. In the end, however, Hettle's major contribution to our understanding of the Civil War and of Southern politics is to remind us of the role of slavery in all aspects of Southern life. The tension between elite control and manly dominance on one side and democracy and egalitarianism on the other grew from this. As Hettle puts it, "The peculiar institution produced a peculiar democracy, distorted by a culture of mastery and social inequality" (171). This democracy as well as the Democratic party that expressed it disintegrated during the war, weakening the political will and the ideological foundation of Southern citizens and the Southern government. By connecting wartime politics with prewar politics, by illuminating the distinctive features of each state, and most importantly by focusing on the political stress created by slavery, Hettle adds to our understanding of southern politics and to the debate over why the South lost the war. Walter L. Buenger Texas A&M University Copyright © 2006 The Kent State University Press

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This Thesis examines the development of neoliberal politics within the Democratic Party, concentrating on the period from 1978 to 1989. The thesis focuses on elite-level politics, examining neoliberal politics through the work of historical actors (politicians, commentators, policy analysts, and political operatives) who were either active members of or influential upon the Democratic Party. The introduction of this thesis sets out the parameters of the study, and reviews important topics and trends within historiographical literature relating to its subject. Chapter One examines the formulation of neoliberal political economy, including through an examination of political discourse around Japan and the Japanese economy. Chapter Two examines the relationship between neoliberal politics and the politics of race. The conclusion of this thesis indicates how neoliberal politics subsequently developed within the Democratic Party, assesses what thematical and topical areas were not examined in the thesis, makes suggestions as to how this subject could be developed in future projects, and draws together conclusions from the body of the thesis.

ABSTRACTThe Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi [HDP]) was one of the leading actors in Turkey's double parliamentary elections in 2015. Under the leadership of Selahattin Demirtaş, it has enjoyed great success, crossing the ten percent threshold and entering parliament in the June 7, 2015 elections. Yet the hype was mitigated by the party's poorer results in the November 1, 2015 elections. This electoral performance manifested the strengths as well as the limits of the HDP's ability to maintain its support in a polarized political environment. Yet the HDP remains an indispensable actor for the peaceful resolution of the Kurdish issue.

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.

The focus of this study is on pressures experienced by NGOs in a particular type of regime: partial democracies. This chapter starts with a discussion about this category of political context. In the literature on democratization, partial democracies have been given different names, with most authors arguing that this type of regime should not be seen as "on its way" to a full or consolidated democracy, but rather a type of regime in its own right. There is, however, an ongoing debate about what makes a democracy partial. Where should the boundary between "full" democracies and "partial" democracies be drawn? What different subtypes of partial democracy can be distinguished? Using a broad definition of partial democracies, we understand them as regimes where civil and political rights are recognized in the constitution, but where the liberties are not fully guaranteed or respected in practice. In addition, we argue that in order to understand and analyze pressures on NGOs in partial democracies, it is necessary to take into account both the formal and informal sources of power in a society.

In the grip of “democratic centralism” – the case of The Democratic Party in The People Republic of Poland
 So – called “democratic centralism”, originally created by W. Lenin, was the main principle used by the communist party (PPR/PZPR) in Poland after the World War II to control the society and its organizations. One of them was a Democratic Party established in the 1939 by the politicians and activists rooted in the left – oriented independence movement, of whom Marshall Józef Piłsudski said to has been the icon and the undisputed leader. After the war the Democratic Party was enslaved by the communists and became the part of the rule system. It was said to be the representative of the systematically vanishing middle class (craftsmen, merchants, intelligence), due to the thesis of Stalin concerning the raging class struggle. Until the fall of the totalitarian system in 1989 the Democratic Party officially supported the communists who overwhelmed every aspect of political reality. That is why the phenomenon of political realism was not involved in its policy despite of being the part of the official propaganda. Nevertheless, in the party structures dwelled the resistance that headed for the independence, of whom Karol Głogowski or Przemysław Górny were the leaders. The Democratic Party conversed in 1989 and supported the first democratic government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

The article is devoted to the coverage of the political crisis in Slovakia in 1947, which for the Czech and Slovak communists, became a kind of dress rehearsal for the future nationwide putsch of 1948. The research methodology is based on general scientific and special scientific methods, allowing the authors to avoid inconsistency, imprecision, and detachment from the objective historical process. The article's authors note that the impetus for the political crisis of 1947 was the victory of the Democratic Party in the parliamentary elections of 1946 in Slovakia. This prevented the further strengthening of the position of the communists in the national system of state power by creating the prerequisites for forming an anti-communist bloc of Czech and Slovak parties. The victory of the Democratic Party in Slovakia also stood in the way of the rapid implementation of socialist transformations on the Soviet model. To avoid political isolation and clear the way for the communization of Slovakia, the communist parties of the republic started a struggle against the Democratic Party to remove it from power. The article highlights the communists' accusation against the Democratic Party of supporting the reactionary forces of the state, connections with the people's underground and emigration. The authors did not ignore the influence of external factors and attempts of the communists to use in the fight against the democrats the dissatisfaction of partisans and the left wing of the Resistance movement with the course of “purges” of Slovak national bodies from reactionary elements. The authors of the article state that the DP leadership was not ready for an aggressive communist attack, and the expected help from the Czech democratic parties did not come. The latter believed the claims of the communists that there was a real threat of separatism and a repetition of the events of “March 14, 1939” in Slovakia. As a result, through a discrediting campaign, fabrication of cases of state “enemies”, threats of mass strikes by supporters, and provocation of a government crisis, the communists managed to eliminate the majority of the Democratic Party in the Slovak national bodies, legitimately existing as a result of the 1946 elections, and to strengthen their own positions in Slovakia. The political crisis of 1947 opened the way for Slovakia to slide from democracy to dictatorship

In April 1947, the American Institute of Public Opinion Surveys asked a sample of voters a question it had been asking off and on for years: “It has been suggested that we give up the present Republican and Democratic parties and have two new parties – one for the Liberals and one for the Conservatives. Would you favor this idea?” Today, this question might seem absurd. For most practical purposes, the present Republican and Democratic parties are parties of conservatives and liberals. But in 1947, 72 percent of respondents said no (Smith and Davis 1947).

In 1964 at the Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the party’s Credentials Committee to explain the atmosphere of fear in which civil rights workers lived in Mississippi and to challenge the moral legitimacy of the state’s “regular” delegation to the convention. Hamer and her colleagues from the civil rights movement in Mississippi had generated momentum that year through the Freedom Summer project, which accomplished widespread education and registration of African American voters. The activists used this momentum to launch a new political institution, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), to challenge the legitimacy of the state’s traditional Democratic Party (in the one-party Solid South, the Democratic Party was the only one that mattered). They did so in part simply to bring national attention to Mississippi, but they also held hopes that their gambit would result in the national Democratic Party’s stripping the state’s traditional branch of its status and recognizing MFDP members instead as the representatives of the Magnolia State.