In: The journal of modern African studies: a quarterly survey of politics, economics & related topics in contemporary Africa, Band 53, Heft 3, S. 415-450
"In this book, I present an alternative view of party development in America's first century. During the Gilded Age, "electoral capitalism" became constitutive of the party system, a process that I explore through an investigation of New York and its role in national politics. Political commodification fueled individual ambitions, factional negotiation, and partisan combat. To be sure, a host of burning issues was paramount in the public's eye. Generations of historians have admirably documented how everything from Reconstruction, nativism, and the tariff to labor relations and monetary policy reflected deep social divisions that cleaved parties. My own concern is less about any particular issue like the "bloody shirt" or epochal ideology like Jeffersonianism. Instead, I seek to reevaluate the systemwide elements of political behavior that made this period distinctive"--