Suchergebnisse

In this book, Boris Heersink analyzes the DNC and RNC in their role as party-branders. Specifically, he argues the main role of the committees is to try and promote an image of the party to voters in a way they hope will help them win elections. However, in doing so, they often have to make controversial decisions, such as picking sides in big intra-party fights about what policies to support and what voting groups to target or ignore. Through extensive historical analysis, this book shows that the DNC and RNC were part of every major American policy debate throughout the 20th century.

Recent scholarship on the role of national party organizations in American politics—specifically, the Democratic and Republican National Committees—has argued that political science research has thus far undervalued the importance of these organizations. These studies have noted the importance that party leaders—including presidents, Congressional leaders, and governors—place on the national committees' role in shaping a party brand. Notably, these studies are all qualitative historical accounts—perhaps because finding consistent quantitative data from within the DNC and RNC across time is complicated due to limitations in access to archival resources across both parties and time. I present a new quantitative data set measuring DNC and RNC activity on the basis of an external source:New York Timescoverage of national committee activity in the period 1953–2012. I use this data to test the claim that, while "party branding" is a core national committee goal, the DNC and RNC do not consistently engage in it. I find that monthlyNew York Timesreferences of party branding operations decline for parties that hold the White House. Meanwhile, coverage of other service operations does not decline, suggesting committees step back their branding role when their party has control of the executive branch of the federal government.

Political scientists have traditionally dismissed the Democratic and Republican National Committees as "service providers"—organizations that provide assistance to candidates in the form of campaign funding and expertise but otherwise lack political power. I argue this perspective has missed a crucial role national committees play in American politics, namely that national party organizations publicize their party's policy positions and, in doing so, attempt to create national party brands. These brands are important to party leaders—especially when the party is in the national minority—since they are fundamental to mobilizing voters in elections. In case studies covering the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) in the period 1952–1976, I show that minority party committees prioritize their branding role and invest considerably in their publicity divisions, inaugurate new publicity programs, and create new communication tools to reach out to voting groups. Additionally, I show that in cases where the party is out of the White House, the national committees have considerable leeway in deciding what party image to publicize. Rather than being mere powerless service providers, I show that party committees have played crucial roles in debates concerning questions of ideology and issue positioning in both parties.

Political scientists who have studied electoral realignments in the American party system increasingly focus on explaining such changes as the result of major historical developments outside of the control of party leaders. Using both national parties' approaches to the South in the period 1948–1968, I argue that while party leaders may be unable to cause or prevent a realignment, they do attempt to affect the way in which that process plays out. That is, while the shift of Southern White voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party itself was a largely inevitable process, the timing and context in which it played out was affected by competing strategies from both parties. Specifically, I show that between 1948 and 1964, Democratic leaders hedged their bets between attempting to keep white Southern voters in the party, or expel them in favor of black voters in the Northeast based on their assessments of the party's electoral position. At the same time, between 1948 and 1968, Republican leaders struggled to balance an appeal to segregationist Southerners and voters in other regions before finding a winning formula in Richard Nixon's 1968 'Southern strategy.'

In Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968, Heersink and Jenkins examine how National Convention politics allowed the South to remain important to the Republican Party after Reconstruction, and trace how Republican organizations in the South changed from biracial coalitions to mostly all-white ones over time. Little research exists on the GOP in the South after Reconstruction and before the 1960s. Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 helps fill this knowledge gap. Using data on the race of Republican convention delegates from 1868 to 1952, the authors explore how the 'whitening' of the Republican Party affected its vote totals in the South. Once states passed laws to disenfranchise blacks during the Jim Crow era, the Republican Party in the South performed better electorally the whiter it became. These results are important for understanding how the GOP emerged as a competitive, and ultimately dominant, electoral party in the late-twentieth century South.

Abstract
While Republicans enjoyed unified control of the national government during the 1920s, scandals involving executive patronage and GOP state bosses in the South dogged the national party throughout the decade. The Republican Party in the South had been a set of "rotten boroughs" for decades, used by national politicians—especially presidents—for the sole purpose of controlling delegates at the Republican National Convention. This patronage-for-delegates arrangement was generally understood among political elites, but the murder-suicide involving a U.S. postmaster in Georgia in April 1928 brought the Southern GOP's patronage practices to national light. This forced Republican leaders in an election year to call for a Senate investigation. Chaired by Sen. Smith W. Brookhart (R-IA), the committee investigation lasted for eighteen months, covered portions of two Republican presidential administrations, and showed how state GOP leaders in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas engaged in office selling. The fallout would be a thorn in the side of President Herbert Hoover, who tried to clean up the corrupt GOP organizations in the South—and build an electorally-viable Republican Party in the ex-Confederate states—but largely failed.

In the post-Reconstruction South, two Republican factions vied for control of state party organizations. The Black-and-Tans sought to keep the party inclusive and integrated, while the Lily-Whites worked to turn the GOP into a whites-only party. The Lily-Whites ultimately emerged victorious, as they took over most state parties by the early twentieth century. Yet no comprehensive data exist to measure how the conflict played out in each state. To fill this void, we present original data that track the racial composition of Republican National Convention delegations from the South between 1868 and 1952. We then use these data in a set of statistical analyses to show that, once disfranchising laws were put into place, the "whitening" of the GOP in the South led to a significant increase in the Republican Party's vote totals in the region. Overall, our results suggest that the Lily-White takeover of the Southern GOP was a necessary step in the Republican Party's reemergence—and eventual dominance—in the region during the second half of the twentieth century.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Republican Party dominated American elections in all geographical areas except the former Confederacy, which remained solidly Democratic. Despite this, Southern states were consistently provided with a sizable delegation to the Republican National Convention (as much as 26 percent of the total). This raises the question: Why would a region that delivered no votes on Election Day be given a substantial say in the selection of the party's presidential candidate? Previous research on the role Southern delegates played in Republican conventions has been limited to individual cases or to studies only tangentially related to this question. We explore the continuous and sizable presence of Southern delegates at Republican conventions by conducting a historical overview of the 1880–1928 period. We find that Republican Party leaders—and particularly presidents—adopted a "Southern strategy" by investing heavily in maintaining a minor party organization in the South, as a way to create a reliable voting base at conventions. We also show that as the Republican Party's strength across the country grew under the "System of 1896," challenges to the delegate apportionment method—and thereby efforts to minimize Southern influence at Republican conventions—increased substantially.