Byron E Shafer
Biographic Data
| ID | 342426 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Byron E Shafer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Byron E |
| FAMILY NAME | Shafer |
| SIGNATURE | SHAFER B E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 71 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Prologue to 2024
Electoral contests in presidential years bring out a plethora of analyses of the specifics of the contest, enriched by assertions about the unprecedented character of whatever has just happened. Yet the same contests are more or less automatically the register of an ongoing, shaping context for the ultimate result. This paper is an effort to tease out these basic background influences in advance, while demonstrating both their continuity and thei…
Misreporting: Social Scientists, Political Commentators, and the Politics of Presidential Selection
A familiar framework for interpreting the politics of presidential nomination, built on an accumulating body of social science research plus the extended observations of experienced commentators, received remarkably little use in the day-to-day reportage of the Democratic and Republican contests of 2016 and 2020 as they unfolded. So this paper begins by sketching out the factional structure of the modern Democratic and Republican parties, along w…
The Trump Presidency and the Structure of Modern American Politics
How much of politics is specific to its actors and how much is the reflection of an established structure is a perennial concern of political analysts, one that becomes especially intense with the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. In order to have a template for assigning the outcomes of politics to structure rather than idiosyncrasy, we begin with party balance, ideological polarization, substantive content, and a resulting proc…
Affirmations for an Aging Electoral Order: The Mid-Term Elections of 2018
At bottom, the election of 2018 produced one more iteration of an electoral order dominating American politics since 1992. So the main task of this paper is to elicit the structure of that order, drop the results of 2018 into it, and see how well those results fit. The key micro-analytic tools for approaching any election did work well in 2018, but cannot distinguish this election from other recent contests. The common journalistic focus on idios…
Polls and Elections: Institutional Dynamics and Nominating Processes: The Latest Twists on a Familiar Story or the Emergence of a Brave New World
The presidential nominating contests of 2016 were extremely fertile ground for hypothesizing by media analysts about alternative outcomes. Lacking much theoretical grounding, most of these were almost destined to be embarrassed by actual events—and 2016 proved extremely good at that. Yet the practical collapse of these journalistic hypotheticals does raise insistent theoretical questions, most of which are variants of one central puzzle: Were the…
Modern Eras and Alternative Futures: The American Elections of 2016 in the Longest Run
On the morning after, the aggregate story of the American elections of 2016 was one of surprise. Professional pundits – not to mention the pollsters, those masters of disaggregation – had been rather strikingly wrong. So, one of the major products of the elections of 2016 was a major research project for these professional disaggregators. But can those who treat elections as aggregate phenomena – as patterned wins and losses across time – fit the…
The American Political Landscape
While pundits boil down elections to a choice between Democrat and Republican, The American Political Landscape explains how factors not usually considered hard data, such as attitudes and preferences, interact to produce the final tally of votes. This comprehensive analysis covers the past quarter-century of U.S. electoral politics.
American Political Landscape
The Evolution of Mass Ideologies in Modern American Politics
A newly created dataset makes it possible to go looking for the mass ideologies most common in American politics across the postwar years. For this purpose, it is necessary to distinguish five great ideological groups: Liberals, Conservatives, Populists, Libertarians, and Moderates. These prove to have distinct voting behaviors, not just in the ballot for President but also in the propensity and manner by which they split their tickets. They have…
The 2014 Midterm in the Longest Run: The Puzzle of a Modern Era
Comparisons across even the longest time-span cannot foretell the future. What they can do is generate the available analogies to what has just happened, isolate the patterned outcomes that have preceded it over time, and locate the current outcome in the most recent sequence of results. Accordingly, this article begins with the contests that received the most attention in 2014 – and were consensually regarded as the most consequential – namely t…
Public Opinion Among Political Elites: The “Insiders Poll” as a Research Tool
The linkages between political elites and their ostensible rank and files are central concerns of democratic theory, and central considerations in the empirical analysis of democratic politics. Yet in a world of burgeoning surveys of public opinion generally, there remains a desperate shortage of ways to tap the opinion of national elites. This piece (re)introduces political scientists and practicing journalists to one device for adding elite opi…
The Catholics and the Others: The Denominational Backdrop to Modern American Politics
This paper goes in search of the contribution of the five major religious families in American society to the ideological landscape for electoral conflict. Taking advantage of new methodological opportunities and a rich but underutilized dataset, it considers the distribution of political values within denominations, the link between these values and voting behavior, and the strategic landscape – plus strategic dilemmas – that results from that l…
American Public Mind: The Issues Structure of Mass Politics in the Postwar United States
Where Are We in History? 2010 in the Longest Run
One classic way to get perspective on the most recent election is to drop it into the full sweep of congressional elections across all of American history. A focus on partisan control of the House, on partisan control of national government, and on the difference in these between mid-term and presidential years provides a way to isolate elements of distinction for the mid-term of 2010. While this hardly provides a means of foretelling the future,…
The American Public Mind: The Issues Structure of Mass Politics in the Postwar United States
What is the real nature of substantive conflict in mass politics during the postwar years in the United States? How is it reflected in the American public mind? And how does this issue structure shape electoral conflict? William J. M. Claggett and Byron E. Shafer answer by developing measures of public preference in four great policy realms - social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values - for the entire period betwee…
The Pure Partisan Institution: National Party Conventions as Research Sites
This article concentrates on national party conventions, the ‘pure partisan institutions’ of American politics. First, it identifies the convention within a conceptual framework for analyzing the evolution of the institution itself. It moves on to the practical implications of this evolution, from institutional mechanism to institutional arena. Next, it describes the politics of the contemporary institution, organized around its role as ‘infomerc…
The Nomination and the Election: Clearing Away Underbrush
The politics of presidential selection in 2008 reinvigorated an old argument from democratic theory about the relationship between nominating politics and the general election. Now that the latter is over, it is possible to return to these debates and ask how candidate fortunes at the nominating stage were linked to performances in November. For 2008, the strongest of these relationships proved to be perverse, with nominees performing best in sta…
Institutional Structure and Democratic Values: A Research Note on a Natural Experiment
The presidential nominating contest of 2008 resurrected an earlier debate about the democratic impact of the main institutional alternatives for delegate selection. This time, however, the debate came packaged with a major 'natural experiment' comparing the impact of primaries versus caucuses, courtesy of the Democratic Party of Texas which actually used both institutions on the same day to select different parts of the Texas delegation. Evidence…
Election Issue and Blog Discussion
This is our election issue of The Forum. Two articles consider fundamental demographic influences on the 2008 election: Paul Sniderman and Edward Stiglitz on race and the vote, and David Kimball on interest groups and the campaign. Two articles consider fundamental procedural influences: Byron Shafer and Amber Wichowsky on the nominations and the election, and Michael McDonald on voter turnout. Two articles consider major substantive influences o…
The Politics of Immigration Reform
The immigration issue seems insistently with us in the late 2000s, though immigration policy seems persistently elusive. Seeking an intellectual handle on this disjunction, a cluster of Forum authors focus on immigration politics in its many forms. Daniel Tichenor maps the difficult terrain for policymaking in this realm, while Ben Marquez and John Witte address alternative congressional strategies for making immigration policy. Randall Hansen lo…
The Obama Administration: Setting Up a Government
This issue of The Forum brings a focus on elements shaping the new presidential administration. One cluster of articles concentrates on key influences going into the Obama Administration: Wendy Cho and James Gimpel on the differential influences from an economic meltdown; Charles O. Jones on the place of prior political experiences; Todd Estes on lessons from the beginnings of the Clinton Administration; Casey Dominquez on the mandate and the hon…
Special Issue: The Politics of Presidential Selection
What Do We (Think We) Know about the Politics of Presidential Selection? For this special issue, the Editors asked an array of political scientists, not so much to predict the outcome of the 2008 nominating contests - though we did invite everyone to take a flyer on that one - but to set out what we think we now know about the politics of presidential selection, that is, the fundamentals of this politics that are now more or less invariant. In pu…
Nelson W. Polsby: A Scholarly Appreciation
Where Are We in History? Political Orders and Political Eras in the Postwar U.S
An effort to pump new life into the notions of political order and political era suggests that the Untied States has seen three different mixes of key structural elements, influential policy conflicts, and the dynamic following from their interaction since the Second World War. For a full generation after the end of World War II, American politics was really just an extension of what had gone before, in effect the Late New Deal Era. Yet this same…
Notes from a New Editor
The new editor of The Forum, Byron Shafer, explains the mission of the journal and highlights new directions of interest for contributors and readers
The Transformation of Southern Politics Revisited: The House of Representatives as a Window
The appearance of a Republican majority among Southern members of the US House of Representatives provides a substantive reason to reconsider political change in the post-war South. And a newly created, merged dataset makes it possible to address the central and recurrent propositions about change in Southern politics in a manner not previously possible. When this is done, four basic contributions are highlighted, each a clear modification of the…
American Exceptionalism
American exceptionalism is the oldest and most contentious of the alleged national exceptionalisms—arguments that a given nation must be understood in essentially idiosyncratic fashion. John Winthrop, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx helped develop and sustain an American variant for the first 350 years of a separate American political life. Modern political scientists have addressed the notion in a more systematic and methodologically self-c…
Primary Rules, Political Power, and Social Change
This paper examines the relationship between the kinds of delegate allocation rules used in Democratic presidential primaries (Winner-Take-All, Districted, and Proportional) and the power of various states within the national Democratic party. It demonstrates that these rules are often, in the short run, more important than a state's voters in determining the fate of particular candidates. It shows, in the middle run, that different types of stat…
The Trump Presidency and the Structure of Modern American Politics
How much of politics is specific to its actors and how much is the reflection of an established structure is a perennial concern of political analysts, one that becomes especially intense with the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. In order to have a template for assigning the outcomes of politics to structure rather than idiosyncrasy, we begin with party balance, ideological polarization, substantive content, and a resulting proc…
Scholarship on Presidential Selection in the United States
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The American Political Nation, 1838-1893
Journal Article The American Political Nation, 1838–1893. By Joel H. Silbey. Stanford: Stanford University Press and The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras. Ed. by Byron E. Shafer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Get access Ronald P. Formisano Ronald P. Formisano University of Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 2, September 199…
The election of 1988 and the structure of American politics: Thoughts on interpreting an electoral order
Institutional Structure and Democratic Values: A Research Note on a Natural Experiment
The presidential nominating contest of 2008 resurrected an earlier debate about the democratic impact of the main institutional alternatives for delegate selection. This time, however, the debate came packaged with a major 'natural experiment' comparing the impact of primaries versus caucuses, courtesy of the Democratic Party of Texas which actually used both institutions on the same day to select different parts of the Texas delegation. Evidence…
Orders and Eras in American Politics
Affirmations for an Aging Electoral Order: The Mid-Term Elections of 2018
At bottom, the election of 2018 produced one more iteration of an electoral order dominating American politics since 1992. So the main task of this paper is to elicit the structure of that order, drop the results of 2018 into it, and see how well those results fit. The key micro-analytic tools for approaching any election did work well in 2018, but cannot distinguish this election from other recent contests. The common journalistic focus on idios…
The Evolution of Mass Ideologies in Modern American Politics
A newly created dataset makes it possible to go looking for the mass ideologies most common in American politics across the postwar years. For this purpose, it is necessary to distinguish five great ideological groups: Liberals, Conservatives, Populists, Libertarians, and Moderates. These prove to have distinct voting behaviors, not just in the ballot for President but also in the propensity and manner by which they split their tickets. They have…
From Social Welfare to Cultural Values: The Puzzle of Postwar Change in Britain and the United States
On Thursday, 5 July 1945, the British electorate appeared to draw a line under the prewar political world. This electorate turned the wartime government, led by the Conservative party, out of office. Moreover, it dismissed the Conservatives in favor of a party that still harbored doubts about its proper governing role, namely, British Labour. The scale of this reversal was additionally unprecedented. Labour had only ever formed minority, shortliv…
Roberto Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Henry Jones Ford: Classical Insights and the Structure of Contemporary American Politics
Historical analyses of prospects for democratization are used to address the contours of contemporary American politics. Thus the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" and associated propositions from Roberto Michels, the "Circulation of Elites" and an associated framework from Vilfredo Pareto, and the notion of "Party Efficiency" and its associated predictions from Henry Jones Ford—all written at the turn of the century—are used to address certain central and…
Exceptionalism’ in American Politics
American politics seems constantly surprising even to many of its most attentive domestic observers. It seems nearly unfathomable to many of their foreign counterparts. Is there something about American politics which really is distinct, even unique, in world perspective? Something which implies that this politics can be understood only in terms of the peculiar characteristics of the larger political system in which it occurs? Something which jus…
The New Cultural Politics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Projecting the Outcome in 1984
A catalog of the general sources of change in the politics of presidential selection, with applications to 1984, might suggest that this politics has become more changeable—and hence more unpredictable—in the modern era, the period marked off by the extensive procedural reforms enacted after 1968. Yet an initial comparison of the period from 1968 through 1980 with the period from 1848 through 1860, from 1876 to 1888, or from 1912 through 1924—to …
Primary Rules, Political Power, and Social Change
This paper examines the relationship between the kinds of delegate allocation rules used in Democratic presidential primaries (Winner-Take-All, Districted, and Proportional) and the power of various states within the national Democratic party. It demonstrates that these rules are often, in the short run, more important than a state's voters in determining the fate of particular candidates. It shows, in the middle run, that different types of stat…
Political Scientists as Professional Observers
Walter Beach has provided a roster of political scientists as delegates and alternates to national party conventions and short essays by a number of them. Elaine Kamarck and John Bibby have contributed some more extended thoughts on political scientists as campaign operatives and party officials at national party conventions. And I have been asked to add a few words on political scientists as, well, political scientists in the same locale. I doub…
Quiet revolution: The struggle for the Democratic Party and the shaping of post-reform politics
Continuity and Change, Predictability and Change, in the Politics of Presidential Selection
Political scientists are charged with explaining the recurrent elements in the politics of presidential selection. Journalists are charged with explaining the elements of the moment. The best political scientists are nevertheless able to apply their larger analytic framework to the specific developments of the day. Just as the best journalists are able to frame those developments in some larger theoretical context. Political history, however, has…
Projecting the Outcome in 1984
A catalog of the general sources of change in the politics of presidential selection, with applications to 1984, might suggest that this politics has become more changeable—and hence more unpredictable—in the modern era, the period marked off by the extensive procedural reforms enacted after 1968. Yet an initial comparison of the period from 1968 through 1980 with the period from 1848 through 1860, from 1876 to 1888, or from 1912 through 1924—to …
Politics as Process
The New Cultural Politics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics
Journal Article Quiet Revolution: The Struggle fox the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics. By Byron E. Shafer. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983. ix + 618 pp. Map, charts, appendixes, notes, and index. $29.95.) Get access Herbert S. Parmet Herbert S. Parmet City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 72, Issue 3, December 1985…
Dealignment affirmed or explosion deferred? The american mid-term elections of 1986
Scholarship on Presidential Selection in the United States
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Exceptionalism’ in American Politics
American politics seems constantly surprising even to many of its most attentive domestic observers. It seems nearly unfathomable to many of their foreign counterparts. Is there something about American politics which really is distinct, even unique, in world perspective? Something which implies that this politics can be understood only in terms of the peculiar characteristics of the larger political system in which it occurs? Something which jus…
Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the National Party Convention
Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the National Party Convention
Journal Article Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the National Party Convention. By Byron E. Shafer. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. vii + 391 pp. $27.50.) Get access David W. Abbott David W. Abbott Brooklyn College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 76, Issue 2, September 1989, Pages 650–651, https://doi.org/10.2307/1908094 Published: 01 September 19…
The election of 1988 and the structure of American politics: Thoughts on interpreting an electoral order
Life and Death as Public Policy: Capital Punishment and Abortion in American Political Opinion
Recent decisions of the US Supreme Court, in returning to the issues of capital punishment and abortion, have simultaneously expanded the potential for public opinion on these issues to have an impact on public policy. This article considers the distribution of the available combinations of attitudes toward issues of the institutionalized taking (or preservation) of human life, both in the general American public and in subgroups which combine th…
Roberto Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Henry Jones Ford: Classical Insights and the Structure of Contemporary American Politics
Historical analyses of prospects for democratization are used to address the contours of contemporary American politics. Thus the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" and associated propositions from Roberto Michels, the "Circulation of Elites" and an associated framework from Vilfredo Pareto, and the notion of "Party Efficiency" and its associated predictions from Henry Jones Ford—all written at the turn of the century—are used to address certain central and…
The American Political Nation, 1838-1893
Journal Article The American Political Nation, 1838–1893. By Joel H. Silbey. Stanford: Stanford University Press and The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras. Ed. by Byron E. Shafer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Get access Ronald P. Formisano Ronald P. Formisano University of Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 2, September 199…
Political Eras in Political History A Review Essay - Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford: (Stanford University Press, 1991)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Two Majorities: The issue context of modern American politics
Postwar Politics in the G-7: Orders and Eras in Comparative Perspective
The American elections of 1996
Temples of Ancient Egypt
From Social Welfare to Cultural Values: The Puzzle of Postwar Change in Britain and the United States
On Thursday, 5 July 1945, the British electorate appeared to draw a line under the prewar political world. This electorate turned the wartime government, led by the Conservative party, out of office. Moreover, it dismissed the Conservatives in favor of a party that still harbored doubts about its proper governing role, namely, British Labour. The scale of this reversal was additionally unprecedented. Labour had only ever formed minority, shortliv…
The American Elections of 1998
American Exceptionalism
American exceptionalism is the oldest and most contentious of the alleged national exceptionalisms—arguments that a given nation must be understood in essentially idiosyncratic fashion. John Winthrop, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx helped develop and sustain an American variant for the first 350 years of a separate American political life. Modern political scientists have addressed the notion in a more systematic and methodologically self-c…
Political science (47 works) · Politics (43 works) · Law (40 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Law (35 works) · Political economy (29 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (24 works) · Economics (16 works) · History (14 works) · Public Administration (14 works)