Partisan nation : the dangerous new logic of American politics in a nationalized era / Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pierson, Paul, author.

Schickler, Eric, 1969- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political parties--United States.

Political parties.

Polarization (Social sciences)--United States.

Polarization (Social sciences).

Constitutional history--United States.

Constitutional history.

United States--Politics and government--21st century.

United States.

Physical Description:

264 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

"American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. Although American political institutions remain federated and fragmented, the ground beneath them has moved, with the national subsuming and transforming the local. In this brilliant, paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring today's challenges into new perspective. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape-state parties, interest groups, and media-varied locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. They created openings for new policy demands and factional divisions that disrupted party lines. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. Now thoroughly integrated into a single political order and tightly coupled with partisanship, they no longer militate against polarization. Instead, they accelerate it. Precisely because today's polarization is different, it is self-perpetuating and, indeed, intensifying. With the precision and acuity characteristic of both authors' earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy. They show that America's political system is distinctively, and acutely, vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America's unusual Constitutional design"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics

Polarization in Historical Perspective

Conflict and Faction in the Early Republic and Civil War Era

Constrained Polarization at the Turn of the Century

The Rise of Contemporary Polarization

Triggers of a Nationalized Partisanship

The Transformation of State Parties, Interest Groups, and Media

The Crisis of the New American Constitutional Order

Policy by Other Means

Democracy in the Balance

What's Next.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226836430

0226836436

OCLC:

1427507021