Where did the Era of Divided Government come from? What sustains
split partisan control of the institutions of American national
government year after year? Why can it shift so easily from
Democratic or Republican presidencies, coupled with Republican or
Democratic Congresses? How can the vast array of issues and
personalities that have surfaced in American politics over the last
forty years fit so neatly within-indeed, reinforce-the sustaining
political pattern of our time?
These big questions constitute the puzzle of modern American
politics. The old answer--a majority and a minority party, plus
dominant and recessive public issues--will not work in the Era of
Divided Government. Byron Shafer, a political scientist who is
regarded as one of the most comprehensive and original thinkers on
American politics, provides a convincing new answer that has three
major elements. These elements in combination, not "divided
government" as a catch phrase, are the real story of politics in
our time.
The first element is comprised of two great sets of public
preferences that manifest themselves at the ballot box as two
majorities. The old cluster of economic and welfare issues has not
so much been displaced as simply joined by a second cluster of
cultural and national concerns. The second element can be seen in
the behavior of political parties and party activists, whose own
preferences don't match those of the general public. That public
remains reliably left of the active Republican Party on economic
and welfare issues and reliably right of the active Democratic
Party on cultural and national concerns. The third crucial element
is found in an institutional arrangement--the distinctively
American matrix of governmental institutions, which converts those
first two elements into a framework for policymaking, year in and
year out.
In the first half of the book, Shafer examines how dominant
features of the Reagan, first Bush, Clinton, and second Bush
administrations reflect the interplay of these three elements.
Recent policy conflicts and institutional combatants, in Shafer's
analysis, illuminate this new pattern of American politics. In the
second half, he ranges across time and nations to put these modern
elements and their composite pattern into a much larger historical
and institutional framework. In this light, modern American
politics appears not so much as new and different, but as a
distinctive recombination of familiar elements of a political
style, a political process, and a political conflict that has been
running for a much, much longer time.
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