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Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. The Strategic Landscape: How to Find It, How to Read It, What It Reveals -- 2. Mapping the Political Landscape: The Nexus of Demographics and Preferences -- 3. Structure and Substance: Demographic Cleavages and the Roots of Political Values -- 4. Structure and Substance: Social Groups and the Incarnation of Political Values -- 5. Mapping the Political Landscape: Three Routes across Ideological Terrain -- 6. Political Values and Presidential Votes: A Benchmark Year -- 7. The Evolution of the Strategic Landscape: 1984-2008 -- 8. Social Groups and Electoral Evolution: 1984-2008 -- Conclusion. The Landscape of Modern American Politics: Ideological Evolution and Strategic Incentives -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Main Description:Social scientists and campaign strategists approach voting behavior from opposite poles. Reconciling these rival camps through a merger of precise statistics and hard-won election experience, The American Political Landscape presents a full-scale analysis of U.S. electoral politics over the last quarter-century. Byron Shafer and Richard Spady explain how factors not usually considered hard data, such as latent attitudes and personal preferences, interact to produce an indisputably solid result: the final tally of votes. Pundits and pollsters usually boil down U.S. elections to a stark choice between Democrat and Republican. Shafer and Spady explore the significance of a third possibility: not voting at all. Voters can and do form coalitions based on specific issues, so that simple party identification does not determine voter turnout or ballot choices. Deploying a new method that quantifiably maps the distribution of political attitudes in the voting population, the authors describe an American electoral landscape in flux during the period from 1984 to 2008. The old order, organized by economic values, ceded ground to a new one in which cultural and economic values enjoy equal prominence. This realignment yielded election outcomes that contradicted the prevailing wisdom about the importance of ideological centrism. Moderates have fared badly in recent contests as Republican and Democratic blocs have drifted further apart. Shafer and Spady find that persisting links between social backgrounds and political values tend to empty the ideological center while increasing the clout of the ideologically committed.

AbstractThis 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 link. By considering these across the most recent quarter-century, it isolates an older world sometimes characterized as "the Protestant nation," where Catholics offered additionally distinctive political behavior, and a new world in which the great denominations behave very differently, but where changes in Catholic behavior are arguably most critical to this change.