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" Politicians are polarized. Public opinion is volatile. Government is gridlocked. Or so journalists and pundits constantly report. But where are we, really, in modern American politics, and how did we get there? Those are the questions that Byron E. Shafer aims to answer in The American Political Pattern. Looking at the state of American politics at diverse points over the past eighty years, the book draws a picture, broad in scope yet precise in detail, of our political system in the modern era. It is a picture of stretches of political stability, but also, even more, of political change, one that goes a long way toward explaining how shifting factors alter the content of public policy and the character of American politicking. Shafer divides the modern world into four distinct periods: the High New Deal (1932-1938), the Late New Deal (1939-1968), the Era of Divided Government (1969-1992), and the Era of Partisan Volatility (1993-2016). Each period is characterized by a different arrangement of the same key factors: party balance, ideological polarization, issue conflict, and the policy-making process that goes with them. The American Political Pattern shows how these factors are in turn shaped by permanent aspects of the US Constitution, most especially the separation of powers and federalism, while their alignment is simultaneously influenced by the external demands for governmental action that arise in each period, including those derived from economic currents, major wars, and social movements. Analyzing these periods, Shafer sets the terms for understanding the structure and dynamics of politics in our own turbulent time. Placing the current political world in its historical and evolutionary framework, while illuminating major influences on American politics over time, his book explains where this modern world came from, why it endures, and how it might change yet again. "--

"Shafer has produced an ambitious book that helps explain political dynamics across a wide swath of American history."-Political Science Quarterly "Shafer's enterprise is truly grand and will undoubtedly raise numerous debates in the years to come."--Perspectives on Politics "This complex and illuminating study merits the attention of both historians and public policy analysts."--Journal of American History "Shafer aims to provide a means to understand the whole of American politics since the New Deal, and in this he succeeds. Highly recommended"--Choice.

Main description: 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 last quarter-century of U.S. electoral politics.

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 effort suggests that larger social trends were undermining the stability of this era well before major anomalies began to break through in the late 1960s, ultimately producing a different mix of structure and substance, one that we now recognize as the Era of Divided Government. And it suggests, by 2000, that major anomalies were breaking through again, so that the next analytic challenge is to see which of these are harbingers of lasting shifts and which are just the ructions that inevitably accompany the death of an old order, without revealing anything about the new.