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The first presidential debate will be held on June 27th, 2024 and the Republicans are heading to Milwaukee (a city Donald Trump recently called “horrible” and crime-ridden). Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell had a wide ranging discussion including analysis of the upcoming debate, summer conventions, party platforms, and polling with three experts.
Dr. Julia Azari is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University and a prolific media commentator on politics. Her scholarship focuses on the American presidency, political parties, political communication and American political development. Her most recent public facing pieces on are “Making sense of the 2024 election:When nothing seems to make sense, social science can still help” and “Checking in on Biden and Political Time.” Dr. Jonathan Bernstein is a political scientist who focuses on US politics, Political Parties, Congress the Presidency, Elections, and Democracy. He is now co-writing Good Politics/Bad Politics (a “plain newsletter about government and elections in the U.S.”) with Julia and David S. Bernstein. He recently wrote “How Debates Work. And all the things they don't - and shouldn't – do” and “Trump Acts Like an Idiot. Don’t Blame It on Age.” Dr. Seth Masket is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center on Politics at the University of Denver. He writes about political parties, American Politics, polarization, nominations, state legislatures, social networks, campaigns and elections. He can be found on Substack as Tusk and recently published “When debates are no longer automatic:Why Biden and Trump are debating and what they hope to get out of it” and “The Republican State Party Network: A deeper dive into party platforms, with some raised eyebrows at Michigan.“
During the podcast, we mentioned:
Julia Azari and Seth Masket’s June 27 live-blog of the first Presidential Debate will be at Arena. Follow them on social media for updates on what will be a GREAT conversation.
Nat Cohen, “If Everyone Voted, Would Biden Benefit? Not Anymore.” New York Times, 6/15/24 (on infrequent voters)
Seth Masket, “It's not just Texas State GOPs veer to the extremes on policy and democracy.” 6/7/24 (on extremism in state party platforms)
Erika Franklin Fowler, 6/19/24 Bluesky post on advertising when candidates are well-known
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: The Presidential Transition Project available here and summarized on Jenn White with Todd Swillich on podcast 1A, “If You Can Keep It” (on conservative nationalist “platform” that is not authored by GOP).
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From his overwhelming embrace by evangelicals and other people of faith to his championing of policies and conservative judicial candidates long sought by right-wing Christians, Donald Trump’s candidacy, campaign, and presidency were empowered by believers of many stripes who employed different methods of rationalizing or Christianizing Trump and his administration. In Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Trump Era (Routledge, 2024), Hank Willenbrink examines this intersection of political power and religion through the lens of performance studies, in part via Trump’s own expressions but predominantly through mass media performances of his Christian supporters.
From Trump’s affiliation with his “court evangelicals” and televangelists to the 2018 film The Trump Prophecy and other prophetic/apostolic movements latching onto Trump’s ascension in service of dominionistic ends, and from his support among very conservative Catholics to the “cult” of Trump that has coalesced in conspiratorial online spaces advocating QAnon beliefs, the last decade has witnessed a mainstreaming of theology and ideology ripe for an interdisciplinary analysis of the performative aspects of Trump’s faith-based support. Dr. Willenbrink joined the New Books Network to discuss all these subjects as well as Christian nationalism in the present American political climate.
Hank Willenbrink (Ph.D. in Dramatic Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara) is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at The University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. A scholar and theatre artist, Hank has published on a range of topics like Hell Houses, the playwright Naomi Iizuka, the intersections of playwriting and nature writing, and the use of music in HBO’s Girls. With his wife, Dr. Yamile Silva, he co-edited an anthology of contemporary Spanish and Portuguese writing. Hank’s play, The Boat in the Tiger Suit, premiered in New York and is published by Original Works Publishing. He’s developed theatrical work internationally, including at Sala Beckett in Barcelona. Hank has also led several interdisciplinary, community-engaged projects that bring together students and community members of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to engage in deeper and more intentional ways through collectively created theatrical performance. Hank played in a number of questionable bands, co-founded the music blog We Listen for You, and hails from Toad Suck, Arkansas. He is currently continuing the research that he discusses on today’s podcast episode on his Substack: performingforthedon.substack.com.
Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) primarily hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.
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Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a groundbreaking book, of which the findings have significant implications both for German-China relations and also in understanding the rising influence of autocratic China on liberal democracies globally. In today's interview, Associate Professor Andreas Fulda and I spoke about Germany's entanglement with China, and the extent of Germany's dependancies on China in terms of economics, technology, politics and academia. We spoke about the blind spots of policy makers and academics have, and the way that China policy is constructed and interpreted as a result. We also spoke about the implications for national security and German sovereignty, and the way that Germany entanglement with China is a warning sign for democratic states everywhere.
Dr Fulda is a political scientist and China scholar with a keen interest in the philosophy of science. You can listen to an interview about his previous book, The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong KongSharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge: 2019) here.
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In this episode of our occasional series, Postscript, we focus on the Supreme Court’s recently published decisions in two cases, about guns and abortion, but more about how the Executive and Judicial branches of government function in the United States. Constitutional Law scholar (and New Books in Political Science co-host) Susan Liebell takes us through Garland v. Cargill, which focused on the Trump Administration’s implementation of a prohibition against bump stocks for rifles following the deadly shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2017. Liebell, a published expert on the Second Amendment and the long history of gun regulation in the United States, explains the thrust of the case, which is only tangentially connected to the Second Amendment, but calls into question the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm’s (ATF) expertise, particularly in context of the majority opinion’s decision that the ATF was not using its administrative power correctly. The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, may signal the Supreme Court’s inclinations towards Chevron deference, which is also before the Court this term in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
Liebell, also an expert on abortion access, reproductive health regulation, and citizenship, explains the Court’s unanimous decision in Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, focused solely on the question of standing, and whether the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine actually qualified to bring the case since there was no clear injury that had been sustained in the suit they brought before the District Court in Amarillo, Texas. Thus, the drug Mifepristone, which was to be banned nationwide in the initial court ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, was not banned as a result of this lawsuit brought by the Food and Drug Administration. This case, not dissimilar from Garland v. Cargill, focuses on procedural questions more than it focuses on other issues. And the unanimous decision is about that legal procedure, not about the FDA, or the process to through which drugs are brought to market in the United States, or about the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine’s indictment of the process for prescribing mifepristone. Our conversation threads through these cases, and others (like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and District of Columbia v. Heller) that set the foundation for these cases to come forward.
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Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situation of their respective countries.
In this podcast the presenter of the Indonesia update, Ms Navhat Nuraniyah, discusses the political situation in Indonesia.
Navhat (Nava) Nuraniyah is a PhD scholar at the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. Her doctoral research focuses on how Islamist opposition groups in Indonesia respond to political repression and its broader implications for democratic decline. She was previously an analyst at the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), where she researched extensively on violent extremism, communal conflict and Islamist activism in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Prior to that, she was a researcher at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She has been published in academic journals and media such as Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, The New York Times, and Sydney Morning Herald.
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In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.
Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (U Chicago Press, 2024) also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights that Rana reconstructs to forward an ambitious and comprehensive vision for moving past the constitutional bind.
Aziz Rana is a Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School and the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government (beginning 2024).
Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).
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The 2020 Presidential Election in the United States marked, for many, a return to "compassionate politics." Joe Biden had run on a platform of empathy, emphasising his personal history as a means of connecting with everyone from American workers who had lost jobs to military families who had lost loved ones. Although perceptions of candidate compassion are broadly understood to influence vote choice, less understood is the question of how candidates convince voters they truly "care about people like them." In Feeling their Pain: Why Voters Want Leaders who Care (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Jared McDonald provides a framework for understanding why voters view some politicians as more compassionate than others.
Dr. McDonald shows that perceptions of compassion in candidates for public office are based on the number and intensity of commonalities that bind citizens to political leaders. Commonalities can come in many forms, such as a shared experience ("I've been through what you've been through"), a shared emotion ("I feel the way you feel"), or a shared identity ("I am who you are"). Compassion is conceptualised through the lens of self-interest. Compassion may be universal, such as when candidates convey empathy to all individuals who are struggling. Or compassion may be exclusionary, such as when candidates express a preference for some groups over others. Thus, the way campaigns choose to wield compassion in their messaging strategies has important implications not only for election outcomes, but for American political polarisation as well.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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States are holding primaries. The Democrats and Republicans will convene in July and August but it has already been decided that the presidential race will be a rematch. Former President Donald Trump will challenge President Joe Biden. To take stock of where the race stands five months out, we have two experts on the presidency. Dr. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, both at Hofstra University. Dr. Daniel E. Ponder is the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University. Meena and Dan are the co-editors of a new De Gruyter Series in Presidential Politics, Leadership, and Policy Making. The first volume is Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities (De Gruyter, 2024) edited by Meena Bose and Paul Fritz. It includes a chapter on presidential leverage and Obama’s decision making on Syria by Dan Ponder and Jeff VanDenBerg.
Previously, Meena joined the podcast to discuss her book Executive Policymaking: The Role of the OMB in the Presidency (co-authored with Andrew Rudalevige) and Dan also chatted with Lilly about his book Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State. They are also veterans of Postscript and we are thrilled to welcome them back to talk about the 2024 presidential race.
During the podcast, we mentioned:
Frances Lee’s Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (U of Chicago, 2016)
Elaine Kamarck’s Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates (Brookings, 2016) and Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again (Brookings, 2016)
Ezra Klein’s New York Times opinion piece “The Democrats have a better option than Biden,” 21 February 2024
Ezra Klein’s interview with Elaine Kamarck, “Here’s How An Open Democratic Convention Would Work,” New York Times, 21 February 2024
Peter Baker’s “For Democrats Pining for an Alternative, Biden Team Has a Message: Get Over It,” New York Times, 2 March 2024
University of Chicago’s GenForward Poll (June 2024)
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In China's Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century (Oxford University Press, 2024), authors Dr. John Keane and Dr. Baogang He, target a development of enormous significance: China's return, after two centuries of decline and subjugation, to a position of prominence in world affairs. The daring thesis is that China is a newly rising empire of a kind never before witnessed: a galaxy empire. The first to be born of the digital communications era, this young empire is economically and politically powerful, and heavily armed. Its gravitational, push-pull effects are impacting every continent--and even outer space, where China is competing with the United States, India, and Europe to become the leading power.
The galaxy empire interpretation rejects clichéd misdescriptions of China as a "big power" or monolithic "autocracy", and it explains why China defies older definitions of land, sea, and air-based empires. The book charts the developments that have made its rising empire so novel, including the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, the rapid rise of a global Chinese middle class, and internal colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang. The book notes the protean, shapeshifting qualities of this young empire. It therefore warns against the political and military perils of simple-minded, friend-versus-enemy thinking and "Big China, Bad China" politics. But it also proffers a forewarning to China's rulers: while every rising empire aims to shift the balance of power in its favour, no empire lasts forever, and some are stillborn, because they indulge illusions of greatness and reckless power adventures.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Although we live in a globalised world, territorially embedded factors are highly relevant in such domains as security, economy, energy, environment, politics & diplomacy. Today's analysts of world affairs are often loosely referring to 'geopolitics', but do not always clearly define it. Geopolitics and International Relations: Grounding World Politics Anew (Brill | Nijhoff, 2021) therefore offers a necessary framework: an introduction into the main components of geopolitical analysis, an overview of the main geopolitical schools of thought, as well as reflections on how technology and geopolitics affect each other in economy, energy and security. In addition, several empirical studies are showcased, each developing innovative approaches. Leading authors reflect upon containment, analyse geopolitical myths, research geoeconomic rivalries, study mental maps, analyse conflict through territorially embedded variables & greed motivations and apply 'neo-medievalism' to study sub-state diplomacy.
David Criekemans is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He also teaches at KU Leuven (Belgium), University College Roosevelt (Utrecht University) in Middelburg (the Netherlands), Geneva Institute of Geopolitical Studies (Switzerland) and Blanquerna, Ramon Lull University in Barcelona (Spain).
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.
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Politicians in Southeast Asia, as in many other regions, win elections by distributing cash, goods, jobs, projects, and other benefits to supporters, but the ways in which they do this vary tremendously, both across and within countries.
Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a new framework for analyzing variation in patronage democracies, focusing on distinct forms of patronage and different networks through which it is distributed. The book draws on an extensive, multi-country, multi-year research effort involving interactions with hundreds of politicians and vote brokers, as well as surveys of voters and political campaigners across the region. Chapters explore how local machines in the Philippines, ad hoc election teams in Indonesia, and political parties in Malaysia pursue distinctive clusters of strategies of patronage distribution – what the authors term electoral mobilization regimes. In doing so, the book shows how and why patronage politics varies, and how it works on the ground.
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Pivoting from studies that emphasize the dominance of progressivism on American college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd positions conservative critiques of, and agendas in, American colleges and universities as an essential dimension of a broader conversation of conservative backlash against liberal education.
This book explores the story of how stakeholders in American higher education organized and reacted to challenges to their power from the New Left and Black Power student resistance movements of the late 1960s. By examining the range of conservative student organizations and coalition building, Shepherd shows how wealthy donors and conservative intellectuals trained future GOP leaders such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Pat Buchanan, and others in conservative politics, providing them with tactics to consciously drive American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right and to "reclaim" American higher education.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is instructor of higher education at the University of New Orleans.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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How do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examines how America’s DIY society depends on the labour of mothers and excludes the sorts of social supports present in other countries. This dependence has hugely negative social and individual consequences, as demonstrated by the rich qualitiative and quantitative data examined in the book. Alongside the analysis of the problems and consequences of women’s role in the US, the book also thinks through solutions, demonstrating how much political discourse is far from the collective action that is likely to be effective for social change. An outstanding contribution to social science and contemporary politics, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary social inequalities.
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Dr. Lydia Walker's deeply researched and carefully narrated debut monograph, States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024) traces “the un-endings of decolonization” – the messy and improvised ways in which the 20th-century state-centric international order replaced empire as the default mode of political organization. States-in-Waiting zooms in on the postwar Naga national liberation movement which failed to achieve independence from India at a time when dozens of European colonial possessions secured statehood. The work illuminates the complicated issue of self-determination for minority peoples within new postcolonial states and highlights transcontinental networks of Asian, African, American, and European activists and insurgents who pushed against legal-political constraints of an emergent postimperial world order. Finally, the author recovers riveting “hidden dramas” of decolonization by amplifying the voices of marginalized historical actors, lost non-state archives, and understudied regions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Dr. Lydia Walker is the Assistant Professor and Myers Chair in Global Military History at the Ohio State University.
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In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey spoke with Francesco Ronchi and Udo Zolleis, two European Parliament officials and analysts. With the European Parliament elections taking place shortly after we spoke, they share their insights on the direction that politics in Europe may take in the coming months and years, especially with regard to right-wing nationalist groups. With its unique position as a supranational institution with diverse political parties and the power to elect the president of the Commission, the European Parliament faces important challenges for Europeans to reach consensus in light of war on the continent, immigration, and global economics.
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Why do international donors brand foreign aid? And what impact does it have on popular attitudes towards them? Join Matthew Winters and Petra Alderman as they talk about soft power, foreign aid branding, and popular attitudes towards USAID and Japan in India, Bangladesh, and Uganda. They discuss whether foreign aid branding works and address several tensions linked to this practice, including branding in the context of unequal North-South power relations and colonial legacies.
Matthew Winters is Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois and a recent holder of the Fulbright-University of Birmingham Distinguished Scholar Award at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham.
Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.
The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on X (Twitter) at @CEDAR_Bham!
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Italy's resurrection from 20 years of fascism, three years of war, and two years of civil war is one of the 20th century's great, under-told stories. It's a history of a decade of clashes and compromises between two mass movements - Communism and Christian Democracy - backed offstage by two superpowers.
Above all, it's about the party management of one man - Palmiro Togliatti - and the West-facing vision and cunning of another, Alcide De Gasperi. From the ashes of war, De Gasperi chose a republican government and a market economy, resisted pressure from the Vatican to ally with the far right, and wooed the Americans while acknowledging the unique organisational powers of the Communists until picking the right time to drop them. On top of that, he won Marshall Aid, drove through land reform, and helped found the European communities.
As Professor Gilbert writes in Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy (Norton, 2024): "One need only envision what might have happened had De Gasperi failed to make even one of those calls to see how much his agency mattered for Italy's transition to democracy".
Mark Gilbert is C. Grove Haines Professor of History and International Studies at SAIS Europe in Bologna. Educated at Durham and the University of Wales, he taught history at the universities of Trento and Bath before joining SAIS.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.
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What are political beliefs and how do we form them? Oliver Traldi, a current John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the James Madison Program, discusses this and more in his recently-published his first book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2024), a textbook which aims to explain the reasons behind political beliefs and disagreements from a philosophical perspective. In this conversation, Oliver delves into the unique contributions of philosophy to the study of political beliefs, the sources of our political ideas, the impact of online discourse and technological advancements on political trust and polarization, the importance of developing personal heuristics for evaluating information, and the challenges of maintaining trust in institutions and experts.
Oliver Traldi received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he specialized in epistemology. After his You can read Oliver's essays and other writings here, and his textbook is available for free here.
Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.
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Over the past several decades, predominantly White, postindustrial cities in America’s agriculture and manufacturing centre have flipped from blue to red. Cities that were once part of the traditional Democratic New Deal coalition began to vote Republican, providing crucial support for the electoral victories of Republican presidents from Reagan to Trump.
In How the Heartland Went Red Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie Ternullo argues for the importance of place in understanding this rightward shift, showing how voters in these small Midwestern cities view national politics—whether Republican appeals to racial and religious identities or Democrat’s appeals to class—through the lens of local conditions.
Offering a comparative study of three White blue-collar Midwestern cities in the run-up to the 2020 election, Ternullo shows the ways that local contexts have sped up or slowed down White voters’ shift to the right. One of these cities has voted overwhelmingly Republican for decades; one swung to the right in 2016 but remains closely divided between Republicans and Democrats; and one, defying current trends, remains reliably Democratic. Through extensive interviews, Ternullo traces the structural and organisational dimensions of place that frame residents’ perceptions of political and economic developments. These place-based conditions—including the ways that local leaders define their cities’ challenges—help prioritise residents’ social identities, connecting them to one party over another. Despite elite polarisation, fragmented media, and the nationalisation of American politics, Ternullo argues, the importance of place persists—as one of many factors informing partisanship, but as a particularly important one among cross-pressured voters whose loyalties are contested.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Until 1900, most political parties in the United States chose their leaders – either in back rooms with a few party elites making decisions or in conventions. The direct primary, in which voters select party nominees for state and federal offices, was one of the most widely adopted political reforms of the early twentieth century Progressive movement.
Intuitively, the direct primary sounds democratic. Voters directly select the candidates. They have more of say over who will ultimately represent or govern them. But decades of scholarship suggests that direct primaries might not have changed the outcomes of party nominations. The conventional wisdom is that as the strength of the Progressive movement declined and voters paid attention to other issues. Party leaders were able to reassert control over candidate selection. In Reform and Retrenchment: A Century of Efforts to Fix Primary Elections (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr. Robert G. Boatright insists this narrative is incorrect and misleading for contemporary efforts to reform the primary election system in the U.S. because some of the early concerns about primaries are still with us today.
The book presents data from 1928-1970 explaining the type of reforms states implemented and their success or failure. Dr. Boatright argues that the introduction of the indirect primary created more chaos than scholars have previously documented. Political parties, factions, and reform groups manipulated primary election laws to gain advantage, often under the guise of enhancing democracy. How does this history impact contemporary plans for reform of the primary system? Many suggested reforms were tried – and failed – during the 20th century. Boatright concludes that despite the clear flaws in the direct primary system, little can be done to change the primary system. Reformers should instead focus on elections and governance. The end of the podcast features his suggestions.
During the podcast, Rob mentions Dr. Jack Santucci’s More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America (Oxford 2022).
Dr. Robert G. Boatright is Professor of Political Science at Clark University in Worcester, MA and the Director of Research for the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the effects of campaign and election laws on the behavior of politicians and interest groups with a particular emphasis on primary elections and campaign finance laws. He is the author or editor of 9 books. Heath Brown and I have interviewed Rob previously on New Books in Political Science: Trumping Politics as Usual:Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections
(with co-author Valerie Sperling) and The Deregulatory Moment?: A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws.
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