The Making of the New Deal Democrats: Voting Behavior and Realignment in Boston, 1920-1940 - Hardcover

Gamm, Gerald H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226280608 ISBN 13: 9780226280608

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1989

Synopsis

"Why is The Making of New Deal Democrats so significant? One of the major controversies in the study of American elections has to do with the nature of electoral realignments. One school argues that a realignment involves a major shift of voters from one party to another, while another school argues that the process consists largely of mobilization of previously inactive voters. The debate is crucial for understanding the nature of the New Deal realignment.

Almost all previous work on the subject has dealt with large-scale national patterns which make it difficult to pin down the precise processes by which the alignment took place. Gamm's work is most remarkable in that it is a close analysis of shifting voter alignments on the precinct and block level in the city of Boston. His extremely detailed and painstaking work of isolating homogeneous ethnic units over a twenty-year period allows one to trace the voting behavior of the particular ethnic groups that ultimately formed the core of the New Deal realignment."—Sidney Verba, Harvard University

About this title

About the Author

Gerald H. Gamm is a Ph.D. candidate in a joint program in history and government at Harvard University.

From the Back Cover

Once in this century, and probably for the last time in this nation's political history, there was an intense moment of realignment in the American party system. In the 1930's, the Democratic party took control of the federal and most state governments and gained the loyalty of a majority of voters, reclaiming a position in the political system which it had not enjoyed since before the Civil War.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226280608
• ISBN 13: 9780226280608
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 285