From Washington to Obama, the single best source on U.S. presidential elections

Provides a comprehensive history, written by prominent historians and political scientists. Records the circumstances of such elections, and whatever had an appreciable influence upon the result.

This book presents a theory of political disalignment and a revised theory of party realignment, using four case studies from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Italy to illustrate these concepts. Why do major political parties die? The shelf life of minor parties in democracies tends to be short, but major parties tend to be highly durable. The Democratic Party of the United States and the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom have been going strong for two centuries. Major parties perpetuate themselves by maintaining a consistent ideology on major national issues, even at the cost of periodic defeats at the polls. In American politics, ideological polarization maintains the vitality of the two major parties and renders them almost immune to threats from new parties, even as it impedes consensus and compromise on public issues. Spectacular instances of sudden death in major parties have nevertheless occurred in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy, and they all exhibit similar characteristics. The fatal event—which author Charles S. Mack calls "disalignment"—occurs when a schism opens between party leaders and traditional core-base voters on an issue of overriding national importance. Major parties survive periodic defeats, but they cannot survive disalignment.

Concentrating on the American historical experience, the contributors to this volume apply quantitative techniques to the study of popular voting behavior. Their essays address problems of improving conceptualization and classifications of voting patterns, accounting for electoral outcomes, examining the nature and impact of constraints on participation, and considering the relationship of electoral behavior to subsequent public policy. The writers draw upon various kind of data: time series of election returns, census enumerations that provide the social and economic characteristics of voting populations, and individual poll books and other lists that indicate whom the individual voters actually supported. Appropriate statistical techniques serve to order the data and aid in evaluating relationships among them. The contributions cover electoral behavior throughout most of American history, as reflected by collections in official and private archives. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Contains annual, time-series data with national coverage on almost any aspect of United States economics, population or infrastructure since the government began recording statistics. Part 1 covers: Population. Vital statistics and health and medical care. Migration. Labor. Prices and price indexes. National income and wealth. Consumer income and expenditures. Social statistics. Land, water, and climate. Agriculture. Forestry and fisheries. Minerals. Part 2 covers: Construction and housing. Manufactures. Transportation. Communications. Energy. Distribution and services. International transactions and foreign commerce. Business enterprise. Productivity and technological development. Financial markets and institutions.

The election of 1824 is commonly viewed as a mildly interesting contest involving several colorful personalities—John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and William H. Crawford—that established Old Hickory as the people's choice and yet, through "bargain and corruption," deprived him of the presidency. In The One-Party Presidential Contest, Donald Ratcliffe reveals that Jackson was not the most popular candidate and the corrupt bargaining was a myth. The election saw the final disruption of both the dominant Democratic Republican Party and the dying Federalist Party, and the creation of new political formations that would slowly evolve into the Democratic and National Republicans (later Whig) Parties—thus bringing about arguably the greatest voter realignment in US history. Bringing to bear over 35 years of research, Ratcliffe describes how loyal Democratic Republicans tried to control the election but failed, as five of their party colleagues persisted in competing, in novel ways, until the contest had to be decided in the House of Representatives. Initially a struggle between personalities, the election evolved into a fight to control future policy, with large consequences for future presidential politics. The One-Party Presidential Contest offers a nuanced account of the proceedings, one that balances the undisciplined conflict of personal ambitions with the issues, principles, and prejudices that swirled around the election. In this book we clearly see, perhaps for the first time, how the election of 1824 revealed fracture lines within the young republic—and created others that would forever change the course of American politics.

A classic study of fifteen crucial years in the formation of the modern world The Birth of the Modern has established itself as a new kind of historical work - an examination of the way the matrix of the modern world was formed. Paul Johnson, one of today's most popular historians, takes fifteen critical years and subjects them to a fascinatingly detailed analysis: their geopolitics and politics, their cultural and intellectual life, their technology and science. He investigates every area of life, in every corner of the world. And he makes of this huge variety of elements a coherent narrative, told through the lives and actual words of the age's people - outstanding and ordinary - so that the reader feels he was there.