Popular Efficacy in the Democratic Era
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A01=Peter F. Nardulli
Accountability
Activism
Athenian Democracy
Author_Peter F. Nardulli
Category=JPHF
Citizens (Spanish political party)
Constitutional liberalism
Criticism of democracy
Democracy
Democratization
Direct democracy
Economic power
Egalitarianism
Election
Elite
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Governance
Government
Great power
Incumbent
Industrial democracy
Inference
Issue voting
Jacksonian democracy
Legitimacy (political)
Liberal democracy
Liberalism
Major party
Majority rule
Meritocracy
Party leader
Party platform
Party system
Political agenda
Political campaign
Political communication
Political economy
Political machine
Political party
Political philosophy
Political psychology
Political science
Political sociology
Political statement
Political strategy
Political system
Politician
Politics
Popular sovereignty
Populism
Positive feedback
Progressive Era
Progressivism
Public participation
Public utility
Pyrrhic victory
Rational choice theory
Rational expectations
Realigning election
Regime
Representative democracy
Republicanism
Social revolution
Sovereignty
Suffrage
The American Voter
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
The Public Interest
Two-party system
Voter turnout
Voting
Voting behavior
White Southerners
Product details
- ISBN 9780691133935
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 26 Aug 2007
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Social scientists have long criticized American voters for being "unsophisticated" in the way they acquire and use political information. The low level of political sophistication leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by political "elites," whose sway over voters is deemed incontrovertible and often decisive. In this book, Peter Nardulli challenges the conventional wisdom that citizens are "manageable fools," with little capacity to exercise independent judgment in the voting booth. Rather, he argues, voters are eminently capable of playing an efficacious role in democratic politics and of routinely demonstrating the ability to evaluate competing stewards in a discriminating manner. Nardulli's book offers a cognitively based model of voting and uses a normal vote approach to analyzing local-level election returns. It examines the entire sweep of United States presidential elections in the democratic era (1828 to 2000), making it the most encompassing empirical analysis of presidential voting to date.
Nardulli's analysis separates presidential elections into three categories: those that produce a major, enduring change in voting patterns, those that represent a short-term deviation from prevailing voting patterns, and those in which the dominant party receives a resounding endorsement from the electorate. These "disequilibrating" elections have been routine in American electoral history, particularly after the adoption of the Progressive-Era reforms. Popular Efficacy in the Democratic Era provides a dramatically different picture of mass-elite linkages than most prior studies of American democracy, and an image of voters as being neither foolish nor manageable. Moreover, it shows why party elites must take proactive steps to provide for the core political desires of voters.
Peter F. Nardulli is Professor of Political Science and head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the founding director of UIUC's Center for the Study of Democratic Governance.
