Independent Candidates Research Articles

La protección de datos personales ante el ejercicio de los derechos político-electorales en México

La protección de datos personales en el ámbito político-electoral mexicano se sustenta en un régimen jurídico amplio, que garantiza el registro de los ciudadanos como electores y su derecho a participar como candidato; promueve su libertad individual y voluntad para afiliarse a un partido político, así como brindar su apoyo ciudadano a quienes aspiren a ser candidatos independientes; sin embargo, establece también prohibiciones y sanciones por la dispersión ilegal del padrón electoral. En este texto se exponen los alcances y límites de la legislación mexicana y la jurisprudencia emitida por el Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación, así como las experiencias derivadas de casos empíricos, con el fin de establecer que los datos personales en materia político-electoral en México posee diferentes grados de protección.

Las candidaturas independientes: retos jurídicos para fortalecer la democracia en México en el futuro inmediato

Se analizan los obstáculos jurídicos que enfrenta la nueva figura electoral apartidista de las candidaturas independientes en contraste con la necesidad urgente de fortalecer la democracia en México. La metodología empleada fue con base en diversos datos bibliográficos y estadísticos sobre el caso mexicano. A manera de conclusión, se plantean ocho medidas para superar esos retos y fortalecer la democracia que se vive cotidianamente en los procesos electorales.

Characterising Independent Candidates in Indonesian Local Politics

This article examines the phenomenon of independent candidates ( calon perseorangan) in Indonesia’s regional executive elections (Pilkada) to better understand why candidates run as independents and whether independent candidacy has reduced political inequality in the electoral system. In this study, we compiled candidate information using Indonesia’s General Election Commission’s (Komisi Pemilihan Umum, KPU) database as well as structured open-source searches to develop a data set and profiles of independents over three election cycles. Using this data set, we distinguished three categories of independents – partisan, non-partisan, and underdog independents – by analysing differences in power resources and motivations among the candidates. We found that contrary to public perceptions in Indonesia, independent candidacy has not helped to alleviate unequal access to political office. Successful independents are predominantly political insiders and local notables. This finding has important implications for democracy in Indonesia – we show how the inability for political outsiders to win political office harms democratic representation.

Federal and Regional Aspects of the Moscow City Duma Elections

The author focuses on one of the most resonant events of the last electoral cycle: the election of deputies of the Moscow city Duma, their Federal and purely local features using comparative and system methods. The author in most cases relied on open sources, widely attracting media materials. The article states the image damage suffered by “United Russia” in the capital, whose representatives were nominated as independent candidates. At the same time, reputational costs, taking into account the results of elections in other regions, paradoxically contribute to the fact that the project of “United Russia”, as the party in power, will continue.

Development and validation of a risk score to identify children at risk of life-threatening asthma

Objective To develop and validate a prediction risk score for identification of children at risk of developing life-threatening asthma (LTA). Methods Our study utilized existing medical records and retrospective analysis to develop and validate a risk score. The study population included children aged 2-17 years, admitted with a primary diagnosis of asthma, to Sydney Children’s Hospital between 2011-2016. Children admitted in the intensive care unit with asthma at risk of LTA (cases) and those admitted into general ward (comparison group), were randomly divided into a derivation and a validation cohort. Candidate predictors from derivation cohort were selected through multivariable regression, which were used to estimate each child’s risk of developing LTA in the validation cohort. Predictive performance of the risk score was evaluated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test. Results The study population comprised of 1171 children; 586 in the derivation and 585 in the validation cohort. Four independent candidate variables from derivation cohort (age at admission, socioeconomic status, a family history of asthma/atopy and previous asthma hospitalizations) were retained in the predictive model (AUROC 0.759; 95% CI, 0.694–0.823), with a sensitivity of 78.5% and specificity of 46.6%. Conclusions Our risk algorithm based on routinely collected clinical data may be used to develop a user-friendly risk score for early identification and monitoring of children at risk of developing LTA.

Crossing the Border of Citizenship: Helen Taylor, the Independent Radical Democrat Candidate for Camberwell North, 1885

‘Until 1918, in principle, and 1928 in practice, women’s political activity in Britain was defined as beyond the frontier of formal citizenship’ (Abrams and Hunt, 2000). This article explores the campaign of one such frontier woman, Helen Taylor, to become the first woman MP. Taylor accepted the nomination of Camberwell Radical Club to stand as the Independent Radical Democrat candidate for Camberwell North in the November 1885 election. The radicals of Camberwell were, thereby, directly challenging the 1832 Reform Act which had legally excluded women from full citizenship.This article locates Taylor in the historiography of resistance to elite political culture, by radical clubs, in 1885. Links were made between Taylor’s candidature and that of previous non-elite candidates, namely the attempt of Daniel O’Connell, David Salomon and Charles Bradlaugh to breach the frontier of full citizenship for Catholics, Jews and atheists in previous elections. The Liberal Party had become more centralised through the power of local Liberal Associations and committees based on the Birmingham caucus model (Lawrence, 1998; Parry, 1993). This led to some radical clubs challenging the Liberal establishment ‘wire pullers’ and standing their own candidates, creating triangular contests between the Liberal, Independent/Radical and Conservative candidates (Owen, 2008). This article further explores the anomaly of all three Camberwell North candidates openly supporting Home Rule, in an election where the contentious Irish question has been identified as being avoided by the majority of candidates (Biagini, 2007). In Camberwell North this saw two factions of Irish nationalism endorsing separate candidates.The provenance of Taylor’s feminism, socialism and anti-imperialism is also examined, which rescues the campaign from being the actions of a well-connected upper middle-class eccentric. The only previous detailed exploration of Taylor’s candidature claimed it was the idiosyncratic whim of a political maverick whose manifesto would need explaining to the electorate (Pugh, 1978). On the contrary, Taylor’s candidature and manifesto were located in contemporary socialist, radical and liberal politics and no such explanation would have been necessary. It was very much of its time.

Exploring the Process of Creating and Managing Personal Political Brand Identities in Nonparty Environments: The Case of the Bailiwick of Guernsey

How do you create and build a personal political brand? Personal branding can enable individuals to self-commodify and formulate distinct identities created from both tangible and intangible characteristics. However, there is little insight into how individuals create and manage their personal brand identities. This paper contributes to this lacuna in the literature and focusses on personal political branding. Contextualized in the British Crown Dependence of Guernsey; the island community has no political parties and Parliamentarians [deputies] stand as independent candidates. Deputies construct their own personal brand with the aim of resonating with their constituents often with limited resources and without the ‘political machine’ found in party-systems. Therefore, this study examines the deputies’ strategies to create, build and communicate their brands in a nonparty system. Findings indicate that Guernsey’s politicians created their desired identities around key components including legacy, heritage and experience, personality characteristics opposed to focused policies, personal values and acknowledged that brand building was a continuous process of maintaining presence, and communicating personal aspirations. Therefore, Guernsey’s politicians formulated their personal political brand identities without the mechanisms of a party system. This paper extends the personal branding literature demonstrating the challenging process of formulating and managing personal political brands in a competitive environment and presents a Personal Brand Identity framework, a strategic tool to evaluate and refine desired identities within and beyond the setting of politics.

Türk Siyasi Hayatında Kasım Küfrevi

1920 yılında Bitlis’te doğan Kasım Küfrevi, İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat fakültesinden mezun olduktan sonra siyasete atılmıştır. 1950 yılında Demokrat Parti (DP)den Ağrı adayı olarak gösterilen Küfrevi, Nakşibendi kimliği ile de ön plana çıkmıştır. Demokrat Parti, Ağrı’da yeni örgütlenen bir parti olmasına rağmen Küfrevi’nin bu kimliğinin de etkisiyle halkın kısa sürede ilgi ve güvenini kazanmıştır. Bu süreçte, Ağrı halkının parti, particilik ve ideolojik tutumdan ziyade Kasım Küfrevi ve beraberindekilere olan güven duygusunun yanı sıra, dini bağlılıklarının da etkili olduğunu söylemek yerinde olacaktır. 1950 yılının ardından 1954’te tekrar DP saflarında mecliste bulunan Küfrevi parti içerisindeki anlaşmazlıklardan dolayı DP ile yollarını ayırarak, aynı yıl Hürriyet Partisi’nde kurucu üye olarak görev almıştır. 1957 seçimlerinde Ağrı’dan bağımsız milletvekili olarak adaylığını koyan Küfrevi halkın kendisine gösterdiği teveccüh ile TBMM’ye girmeyi başarmıştır. 27 Mayıs 1960 Askeri Darbesi’nin ardından Yassıada’da yargılanan Küfrevi sonraki süreçte beraat etmiştir. 1965’te Yeni Türkiye Partisi’nden 13. dönem, 1969’da Cumhuriyetçi Güven Partisi’nden 14. dönem Ağrı milletvekili olarak mecliste bulunan Küfrevi, 14 Ekim 1973 – 12 Eylül 1980 tarihleri arasında Ağrı senatörlüğü yapmıştır. Demokrat Parti, Bağımsız, Yeni Türkiye Partisi ve Güven Partisi olmak üzere üç farklı partiden milletvekili olarak meclise girmeyi başaran Kasım Küfrevi, meccliste bulunduğu sürece gerek Ağrı özelinde gerekse, ekonomi, eğitim, fikir, sanat, sosyal ve siyasal konularda önergeler vermiş, bu önergelerin çoğunu mecliste kabul ettirmeyi başarmıştır. Farklı siyasi partiler altında seçime girmiş olmasına rağmen milletvekili seçilen Küfrevi hem dini bir kişilik olarak, hem de Ağrı halkı tarafından sevilen, saygı duyulan bir lider olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Çalışmada, Türk siyasi hayatına Ağrıdan milletvekili olarak katılan ve uzun süre politikada bulunan Kasım Küfrevi’nin yaşam öyküsü ile beraber siyasi geçmişi incelenecektir. Çalışma sırasında Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi, TBMM Arşivi, TBMM Zabıt Cerideleri ve süreli yayın seksiyonlarından yararlanılmıştır.

The politics of experimentation: Political competition and randomized controlled trials

This paper provides an analysis of how political factors affect the incidence of the evaluation of public policies, with a focus on Randomized Control Trial (RCT) experiments in international development. We argue that political environments where incumbents face greater electoral competition and smaller ruling margins are more likely to host RCT experiments. Using various data sources for the incidence of RCTs both at the cross-country level and at the sub-national level in India, we find that RCTs are more likely to occur in politically competitive jurisdictions. We employ fixed effects regressions using various estimators and an instrumental variable strategy that exploits an electoral reform in India which limited the entry of independent candidates and exogenously affected the degree of electoral competition in state-level politics. The effect seems concentrated on RCTs that have the government as a partner, suggesting that political competition has an important demand-side effect on the incidence of RCTs.

On Their Own? Women Running as Independent Candidates in the Middle East

Abstract This paper considers examples of women successfully running as independents at the national level in the Middle East, investigating how existing electoral systems impacted their ability to contest political office. Women in the region face a host of challenges when it comes to launching political campaigns outside of sociocultural norms. Most extant literature on political participation focuses on parties as the primary vector for female participation in the Global North and South. However, women in the Middle East often cannot rely on this mechanism due to the absence of political parties or existing parties’ unwillingness to back women for cultural reasons. Yet, the region hosts many female independents holding office at the national level. Through the cases of Jordan, Egypt, and Oman, I unpack this phenomenon using an institutional argument and assess what the emergence of such candidates bodes for the future of women in the Middle East.

Jóvenes y su participación ciudadana a través de los wiki partidos y el partido digital en México 2018

La crisis de credibilidad que durante años construyeron los Partidos Políticos y un desencanto casi generalizado en contra de la forma en que se ejerce la política y la reforma electoral que entró en vigor en enero de 2014, son algunos de los indicadores que provocaron que emergiera una oleada de Candidaturas Independientes cuyos resultados trajeron consigo la oxigenación parcial del sistema político mexicano y abrieron un nuevo debate sobre el Empoderamiento Ciudadano. Inspirados en la idea de un Wiki Partido —donde la participación fuese a través de las tecnologías y de las redes sociales---, y los modelos de los Partidos Piratas de Alemania y Suecia, distintos grupos de jóvenes en todo México comenzaron los trabajos de organización de un Wiki Partido y de un Partido Digital encaminados a impulsar Candidaturas Independientes y Ciudadanas.

The desire of power: Candidate ambiguity and incumbent monopoly in local leaders’ election

This study explores and discusses the phenomenon of a single candidate in the local leaders’ election or Pemilihan Kepala Daerah (Pilkada) in Deli Serdang Regency, North Sumatra Province, in 2018. The study is motivated by the phenomenon of a single candidate in the local leaders’ election. In Deli Serdang, the local leaders’ election should have a multi-candidate pattern, either independent or 3-4 political party candidates. This study has focused on the mechanism of the emergence of a single candidate. According to Dahl, the theoretical approach is the candidacy mechanism, and according to Norris, the significance of the right to vote. The study was conducted qualitatively with an ongoing explorative, independent, and case-oriented study approach. The data collected through in-depth interviews with nine key informants consisting of the Political Party Branch Management Board or Dewan Pimpinan Cabang (DPC), the General Elections Commission or Komisi Pemilihan Umum (KPU), the Election Supervisory Committee or Panitia Pengawas Pemilihan (Panwaslih), independent, failed, and incumbent candidates. The sixteen secondary informants consisted of eight voting behaviors and eight non-voting behaviors randomly selected and interviewed to determine their perception of a single candidate. The study found that a single candidate is the logical consequence of ambiguity in an internal political party candidacy. The study’s novelty is the exclusion of incumbent ruling candidates incentivizing a political party monopoly to ensure victory in contestation. The study concluded that the dysfunction of the candidacy and exclusion in power has implications for a single candidate in the local leaders’ election. Contestation with a single candidate’s presence is an uncontested election, and it is contrary to the theoretical paradigm referred to in this study.

When Is It Democratic to Postpone an Election? Elections During Natural Disasters, COVID-19, and Emergency Situations

Holding regular elections is an essential feature of democratic practices. The case for postponing elections is often made during emergency situations, however. Despite the critical nature of the i...

The Politics of Experimentation: Political Competition and Randomized Controlled Trials

This paper provides an analysis of how political factors affect the incidence of the evaluation of public policies, with a focus on Randomized Control Trial (RCT) experiments in international development. We argue that political environments where incumbents face greater electoral competition and smaller ruling margins are more likely to host RCT experiments. Using various data sources for the incidence of RCTs both at the cross-country level and at the sub-national level in India, we find that RCTs are more likely to occur in politically competitive jurisdictions. We employ fixed effects regressions using various estimators and an instrumental variable strategy that exploits an electoral reform in India which limited the entry of independent candidates and exogenously affected the degree of electoral competition in state-level politics. The effect seems concentrated on RCTs that have the government as a partner, suggesting that political competition has an important demand-side effect on the incidence of RCTs.

Predicting forest fire kernel density at multiple scales with geographically weighted regression in Mexico

Identifying the relative importance of human and environmental drivers on fire occurrence in different regions and scales is critical for a sound fire management. Nevertheless, studies analyzing fire occurrence spatial patterns at multiple scales, covering the regional to national levels at multiple spatial resolutions, both in the fire occurrence drivers and in fire density, are very scarce. Furthermore, there is a scarcity of studies that analyze the spatial stationarity in the relationships of fire occurrence and its drivers at multiple scales.The current study aimed at predicting the spatial patterns of fire occurrence at regional and national levels in Mexico, utilizing geographically weighted regression (GWR) to predict fire density, calculated with two different approaches –regular grid density and kernel density – at spatial resolutions from 5 to 50 km, both in the dependent and in the independent human and environmental candidate variables.A better performance of GWR, both in goodness of fit and residual correlation reduction, was observed for prediction of kernel density as opposed to regular grid density. Our study is, to our best knowledge, the first study utilizing GWR to predict fire kernel density, and the first study to utilize GWR considering multiple scales, both in the dependent and independent variables. GWR models goodness of fit increased with fire kernel density search radius (bandwidths), but saturation in predictive capacity was apparent at 15–20 km for most regions. This suggests that this scale has a good potential for operational use in fire prevention and suppression decision-making as a compromise between predictive capability and spatial detail in fire occurrence predictions. This result might be a consequence of the specific spatial patterns of fire occurrence in Mexico and should be analyzed in future studies replicating this methodology elsewhere.

The form of a ‘half-baked’ creative idea: Empirical explorations into the structure of ill-defined mental representations

Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum approach to describing how concepts interact, posits that what appears to be discrete, separate ideas are actually different projections of the same underlying mental representation, which can be described as a superposition state, and which may take different outward forms when reflected upon from different perspectives. As creative thought proceeds, this representation loses potentiality to be viewed from different perspectives and manifest as different outcomes. Honing theory yields different predictions from conventional theories about the mental representation of an idea midway through the creative process. These predictions were pitted against one another in two studies: one closed-ended and one open-ended. In the first study, participants were interrupted midway through solving an analogy problem and wrote down what they were thinking in terms of a solution. In the second, participants were instructed to create a painting that expressed their true essence and describe how they conceived of the painting. For both studies, naïve judges categorized these responses as supportive of either the conventional view or the honing theory view. The results of both studies were significantly more consistent with the predictions of honing theory. Some implications for creative cognition, and cognition in general, are discussed.

Northern Mariana Islands

Northern Mariana Islands Zaldy Dandan (bio) The period in review covers one of the most traumatic events in recent Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) history—and we are not referring to the November 2018 election results, which, for some, were just as distressing. Four months before the general elections, CNMI politicians in power—the "ins"—and those who were not—the "outs"—had, more or less, completed a realign ment that would have startled if not dismayed those who still believed that politics should be about "ideals" and "principles." US Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan, a longtime CNMI Democrat who was elected as the islands' first delegate to the US House of Representatives in 2008, was seeking a sixth term. Kilili, as he is known in the CNMI, was aligned with the US Democrats in the US Congress, but he was also a political ally of the late CNMI Republican Governor Eloy S Inos (mv, 31 July 2014). In the 2018 elections, however, Inos's successor, Ralph Deleon Guerrero Torres, supported the candidacy of a fellow young Republican, CNMI Representative Angel A Demapan (mv, 5 Oct 2017). On 2 July 2018, Kilili endorsed the gubernatorial candidacy of one of his 2010 election opponents, former Governor Juan Nekai Babauta, a longtime Republican who had decided, after four consecutive election losses (mv, 13 April 2018), to seek office again. This time, Babauta was running as an independent, and his running mate was former Education Commissioner Rita A Sablan, who earlier considered running for governor herself as a Democrat (mv, 13 April 2018). In 2016, Sablan, who supported the losing gubernatorial candidate in 2014, announced her retirement as education commissioner and was succeeded by someone more politically aligned with the governor (mv, 17 Nov 2016). On 4 July 2018, as if foreshadowing the twin disasters that would soon befall the CNMI's three major islands, Tropical Depression 10w moved [End Page 225] slowly through the Marianas, prompting the government to postpone the Liberation Day/Fourth of July parade indefinitely (mv, 1 Aug 2018). The Torres-Palacios campaign team replied by denouncing Babauta's "well-established strategy to perpetuate falsehoods, mislead voters, and cover up years of his mismanagement of government resources and trust" (mv, 5 July 2018). The CNMI Democratic Party, which used to be the islands' other major political group, announced on 10 July 2018 that it was endorsing the Babauta-Sablan ticket and other independent candidates. The last time the local Democrats won a gubernatorial election was in 1993, and the last time a local Democrat won an elective office was in 2007 (mv, 1 Feb 2019). One of the islands' high-profile good-government advocates, Tina Sablan, said she and the other independent candidates were "running to take back the government and make it work for all and not for the selected few." First elected to the House of Representatives in 2007, Sablan ran for one of Saipan's two Senate seats in 2009, placing fifth in an eight-person race topped by Torres (mv, 1 Feb 2019). On 26 July 2018, the governor announced that President Donald Trump had signed into law the Northern Mariana Islands US Workforce Act to extend the temporary foreign contract workers (cw) program for another ten years after December 2019 and to increase the cw cap from 4,999 to 13,000. "Appropriate access to a labor workforce is necessary to ensure robust and healthy economic growth in the Northern Mariana Islands," then-US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said (mv, 26 July 2018). On 26 July 2018, former Lieutenant Governor Diego T Benavente endorsed the Republican ticket of Governor Torres and his running mate, Senate President Arnold I Palacios. The administration had "accomplished a lot and… made tough but the right decisions for the entire Commonwealth," said Benavente, who in the 2001 and 2005 elections was the running mate of Torres's opponent, former Governor Babauta (mv, 27 July 2018). According to Babauta, who first ran for office in 1985 when Torres was six years old, the people wanted change, and they also wanted to "partake in this supposedly booming economy" (mv, 1 Aug 2018). The Torres-Palacios campaign team replied by...

Independent MPs, Political Party Legislation and Electoral Politics in Solomon Islands

Independent MPs have always determined formation of government in Solomon Islands. In an effort to limit the critical influence of independent MPs in forming governments, which has been a problem after almost all elections since 1974, the National Parliament of Solomon Islands debated and passed the Political Parties Integrity Act (PPIA) in 2014. The PPIA promises to limit the influence of independent MPs and prescribes how political parties are to be administered. It is also intended to establish fairer gender representation in Parliament. We noted with interest that most MPs who debated and passed the PPIA went on and contested as independent candidates. In this paper, we look at the 2014 and 2019 election results to assess the impacts, effectiveness, and weaknesses of the PPIA. We also explain why it may have failed, and highlight factors that determine voter behaviour, election outcomes, and government formation in the country. Lessons learnt from the loopholes and weaknesses of the PPIA and electoral politics more generally are then used to suggest ways forward for political party development, inclusiveness, integrity, and stability in Solomon Islands.

Winnowing and Endorsing: Separating the Two Distinct Functions of Party Primaries

This chapter of an edited volume on presidential primaries focuses on the relationship of the primaries to the general election. It does not suffice that the rules are sound for each stage of the overall electoral system considered separately. Instead, the relationship of the two stages must also be sound for the overall system to be coherent. The chapter analyzes this relationship by examining the possibility of a “bolt” from a brokered convention, as occurred in 1912 when ex-president Theodore Roosevelt launched his separate Progressive Party (“Bull Moose”) candidacy after losing his bid for the GOP nomination. The chapter considers the hypothetical possibility that something similar might occur in the context of the 2020 Democratic Party primary, where deep ideological divisions between two wings of the party have become evident. If Democrats are internally torn between progressives and moderates, what is the relationship between this internal party split and the general presidential election that inevitably must follow? The chapter considers whether the use of Ranked Choice Voting in the general election and eliminating so-called “sore loser” laws, to permit the losing candidate of a divisive primary election to run in the general election as an independent candidate, would provide a more coherent relationship between the two stages of the overall process than what currently exists.

The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America by Aram Goudsouzian

Reviewed by: The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America by Aram Goudsouzian Fred Slocum The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America. By Aram Goudsouzian. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 220. $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5109-5.) In The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America, Aram Goudsouzian provides a detailed, authoritative, well-written, and often gripping account of the tumultuous election year of 1968. Goudsouzian, a professor of history at the University of Memphis, provides an account of the 1968 election structured by those who primarily shaped that election. Most of these men were presidential candidates (Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene J. McCarthy, and Hubert H. Humphrey for the Democrats; Nelson A. Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and Richard M. Nixon for the Republicans; and the American Independent Party candidate George C. Wallace). However, The Men and the Moment begins with an examination of the incumbent president and (as 1968 began) expected candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson, who on March 31, 1968, stunned the country by announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race. Goudsouzian organizes the book by personalities. The first eight of the book’s ten chapters paint a portrait of each leader, alternating between political parties. Chapter 9 focuses on the 1968 fall campaign, tracing Humphrey’s declining fortunes into late September and his comeback in October and early November and documenting the common wisdom that, had the election been held one week later than it was, Humphrey might have won. Chapter 10 considers the aftermath of the election, especially its role in ending the fifth party system—the era of Democratic Party national dominance since the 1930s. Goudsouzian’s writing style is energetic, accessible, and at times laced with verve and wit. For instance, Miami Beach, Florida, the host city for the 1968 National Republican Convention, is described as full of “gaudy replica architecture”; its nightclubs “glittered with fleshy delights”; and the city itself was “a bubble of indulgence . . . a sun-drenched oasis from the crises of race and crime and poverty and Vietnam” (p. 80). Goudsouzian describes the “violent energy” at Wallace’s rallies; the “cool dignity” of McCarthy, matching the “‘[n]o hippie style’” of his “‘Neat and Clean for Gene’” youthful supporters; and Humphrey’s status as “an icon of national malaise” during the summer of 1968 (pp. 117, 36, 95). Initially, this reviewer was skeptical of Goudsouzian’s organizing the book around the year’s major political personalities. After reading The Men and the Moment, however, this organization was successful. The drawback of this approach is that the book tends to jump forward and backward chronologically. Outweighing this, however, is the intense focus on each political leader and the exhaustive documentation, which is contained in sixty-one pages of endnotes. Also helpful is the 1968 election timeline in the appendix, chronicling events from January 2, when Wallace succeeded in getting his name on the California ballot, to November 6, when Nixon was confirmed as the election winner and president-elect. Overall, The Men and the Moment is an excellent read. I highly recommend it to both academic audiences, especially in American history and politics, and general readers. Two minor shortcomings stand out. First, notwithstanding the engaging writing and rapt attention to detail, it is not immediately clear what [End Page 535] Goudsouzian was setting out to add to existing accounts of the 1968 election. I did not see any mention of where previous studies have fallen short or left questions unanswered. The Men and the Moment seems not well grounded in past works, such as Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President: 1968 (New York, 1969). Second, the coverage of the aftermath of the 1968 election struck this reviewer as extremely brief and cursory. The book’s title ends with “and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America,” but it seems there is little to no discussion of the ramifications of 1968 for rising partisan polarization in the years since. To this reviewer, the book would benefit from an...