Reagan's Election Research Articles

Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement

Sports, race, and politics are deeply intertwined—just ask Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Naomi Osaka, or Colin Kaepernick. Derek Charles Catsam, an accomplished historian of race, social movements, and sports in South Africa, the United States, and globally, has authored an easy-to-read, fascinating, if perhaps misnamed, book. The book's subtitle contends the 1981 U.S. tour of the legendary South African rugby team, nicknamed the Springboks, “fueled America's anti-apartheid movement.” More accurately, the book focuses on the sociopolitical roles of rugby in South Africa and the world, including how antiapartheid activists targeted the sport because of its importance to white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners. Following a preface celebrating the first Black Springboks captain, only appointed in 2018, a strong introduction outlines the Springboks' U.S. tour, U.S. foreign policy toward apartheid South Africa and how Ronald Reagan's election changed the equation, America's nascent antiapartheid movement, sports boycotts in the global struggle against apartheid, white South Africa's fierce resistance to change, and the role of race in American sports. Subsequent chapters cover planning for the Springboks' U.S. tour, an Irish rugby tour to South Africa in 1981, the Springboks' 1981 New Zealand tour—which saw massive protests that rocked the nation—and the book culminates with several chapters on the Springboks' U.S. tour, with matches in Racine, Wisconsin, Albany, and tiny Glenville, New York. The U.S.-focused chapters present a blow-by-blow account of the planning of the events as well as the protests. The “Boks” destroyed every American team and, since rugby was an incredibly obscure sport in the United States, these matches drew only a handful of fans. For those interested in a film on antiapartheid protests of the Springboks, Connie Field's documentary series, Have You Heard from Johannesburg (2010), includes a wonderful episode, “Fair Play,” on Springbok tours to Australia, England, and New Zealand.

Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great RecessionCapitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies

Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great RecessionCapitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies

Beyond the New Deal Order: US Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

Beyond the New Deal Order: US Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

What Is the Relationship between Higher Education and Neoliberalism in the United States?

What Is the Relationship between Higher Education and Neoliberalism in the United States?

Deflated Dreams: The EPA's Bubble Policy and the Politics of Uncertainty in Regulatory Reform

In the late 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled the bubble policy as a central part of Jimmy Carter's plan to reform environmental regulations that many believed had grown too proscriptive and too costly for American industry. Since the EPA's formation, regulators had dictated method and means for reducing air pollution. The bubble returned the prerogative to business. But despite bipartisan support, the bubble never took off. Drawing on EPA records and interviews, this article shows how skeptical regulators intentionally made the bubble unwieldy, driving away businesses wary of uncertainty. Though Ronald Reagan's election seemed to lift the bubble's fortunes, his undiscerning assault on the administrative state ironically deflated the EPA's development of a viable alternative to the proscriptive model.

Marginal Utility and the Theory of Relative Advantage: The Case of Alabama*

ObjectiveUsing the “theory of relative advantage” (Hood, Kidd, and Morris, 2012), this study tests a number of hypotheses focusing on the short‐ and long‐term influences of Governor George Wallace on the partisan voting alignment of Alabama counties at the presidential and gubernatorial levels.MethodsThe analysis uses county‐level vote shares data for president and governor from 1952 to 2012 in a confirmatory factor analysis to model party alignments among counties within a state and to identify the sequence and timing of party realignments (Aistrup, 2012).ResultsWe find that Wallace's presidential county voting patterns in 1968 deviated significantly from Alabama's New Deal structure of partisan competition, and that the structured partisan competition associated with Reagan's election in 1980 follows the same patterns initiated by Wallace in 1968. However, Wallace's New Right alignment at the gubernatorial level does not emerge until the controversial 1986 gubernatorial election. There is a marginal utility function modeled as a curvilinear relationship between black voter mobilization and the change in the Republican bias between the New Deal and the New Right alignment.ConclusionsThe theory of relative advantage provides a strong theoretical platform for understanding how the political cues provided by Wallace affected the timing and sequence of changes in the structure of partisan competition among Alabama counties at the presidential and gubernatorial levels.

The center cannot hold: the 1960 presidential election and the rise of modern conservatism

This book takes a close look at the key party leaders and constituencies who pushed the party to the right. Most historians agree that, by the end of the 1960s, the conservative branch of the Republican Party had largely taken control of party direction. 'Reagan Revolution' of 1980 secured the GOP for conservatives, and while the events of the 2008 election may prompt considerable soulsearching, the party of Lincoln has maintained an undeniably conservative ideological orientation for almost 30 years. Too often, scholars have regarded the process of conservative transformation as a foregone conclusion. Historian Laura Gifford offers an innovative examination of the 1960 presidential election that restores an essential sense of contingency to the process. In the years prior to 1960, the GOP could have taken its agenda from a number of sources and pursued a number of directions. By the end of the 1960 campaign, however, Republican liberals had lost the battle over the party's future, and thereafter conservatives would take the lead in formulating GOP policy. initial establishment of control over the party's future direction marked conservatives' first step toward the culmination of modern conservatism - Reagan's election. While liberals and conservatives were equally optimistic about their futures in the Republican Party in January 1960, by December a fundamental shift in power had taken place. The Center Cannot Hold provides an analysis of interactions between three key party leaders - liberal Nelson Rockefeller, conservative Barry Goldwater, and moderate Richard Nixon - and six key constituencies: liberals, African Americans, conservative intellectuals, youth, Southerners, and ethnic Americans. Gifford's study of these interactions demonstrates that conservatives successfully used grassroots organizations to develop networks that could push the Republican Party in a rightward direction. Furthermore, conservative leaders responded to their supporters more effectively than did liberal and moderate leaders. Ultimately, individuals and groups possessed the means to alter the shape of the American party system.

Global Feminism in a Conservative Age: Possibilities and Pieties Since 1980

In 1980, Ronald Reagan's election brought the New Right to Washington. For feminists, it was the culmination of a series of devastating setbacks. The new administration gave the green light to an anti-feminist agenda that the Moral Majority, the Hyde Amendment and Phyllis Schlafly's Stop-ERA had already advanced. In the drastically altered climate, with the rightward turn affecting states and municipalities as well, feminist legislative and policy initiatives collapsed. Who truly spoke for the masses of women? Anti-feminists now insisted that they did. Faced with blockage at home, one response of American feminists was to reorient their political ambitions to women's movements abroad. A flourishing international women's movement looked to be a hospitable venue for American energies and ideas.

The End of the Innocence

The End of the Innocence Charles L. Ponce de Leon (bio) Philip Jenkins. Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 291 pp. Notes and index. $28.00. The election of Ronald Reagan, as Philip Jenkins notes in his provocative book, Decade of Nightmares, struck liberals and progressives like a thunderbolt. I can still remember the gloating phone call I received from my roommate's girlfriend, a wealthy, sun-tanned southern California Republican, informing me that Jimmy Carter had already conceded defeat, before the polls had even closed on the West Coast—before I had even voted. Disgusted, I went down to our local polling site and cast my vote for Barry Commoner, a gesture of defiance and utter futility. For young, liberal Californians like me, Reagan's election was unfathomable. Ensconced in a comfortable, self-congratulatory undergraduate left-wing subculture, my friends and I knew relatively few Republicans, much less conservative Republicans, and we were inclined to dismiss the many public opinion polls that had predicted a Reagan victory. Come election day, we reassured each other, the majority of Americans, even my roommate's girlfriend, would wake up, cast a sober eye on Reagan, and see him for what we had long known him to be: a zealous, simple-minded extremist. Two years later, on a cross-country road trip, I came to see a very different America, and I began to recognize that my friends and I had completely misread the nation's political landscape. Reagan's election began to make sense, and I could now see that his political rise was attributable to factors I had never recognized and barely understood. I remained intrigued by Reagan's popularity and the political success of the conservative movement throughout the 1980s. But it remained a source of bewilderment—not just to me but to many of the distinguished historians I was reading and taking classes from in graduate school. Waiting for the swing of the pendulum that would produce the revival of liberalism predicted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., we were reluctant to see it as anything more than a bitter, mean-spirited backlash, the last stand of people unwilling to accept the inexorable tide of "progress." By the early 1990s, however, the persistence of [End Page 557] the conservative movement made it a subject worthy of more sustained and objective inquiry. And when, in mid-1990s, it became clear that the election of a Democratic president had not produced a liberal revival, the "problem" of American conservatism, as Alan Brinkley described it, became a virtual cottage industry within the profession. Over the past decade or so, a flood of illuminating books and articles on the rise of conservatism have appeared, enabling us to understand and appreciate the scope of its triumph. For example, we now know much more about its origins and the ideas that inspired it, which scholars have traced to the 1940s and 1950s. And we are aware of the innovative methods that conservative activists, often ordinary middle-class suburbanites, employed to transform a fringe movement within the GOP into a political colossus. The best of these works straddle the line between political and social history and are often based on specific case studies that enable their authors to pay attention to detail as well as gesture more widely. Reading them often makes me embarrassed about the liberal naiveté I displayed in 1980. Philip Jenkins's book is a valuable addition to this literature. A sweeping interpretive history of the decade between the Richard Nixon's resignation and the high tide of Reaganism in the mid-1980s, it covers much the same ground as several other recently published books. And like most of these works, it makes frequent reference to popular culture, using assorted movies, television programs, musical groups, and best-selling books to make bold claims about the public "mood." Jenkins has done his homework, and much of the book is built on the solid foundation that historians of conservatism have constructed since the early 1990s. But Jenkins has larger ambitions. His aim is to widen our frame of analysis, focusing on issues that...

The Great Society after Johnson: The Case of Bilingual Education

Historians considering the ideological direction of American politics during the 1970s have often taken for granted that troubled decade's strong rightward impulse, said to have originated in a reaction against Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and stewardship of the Vietnam War, grown amid the economic strains and political resentments of the Nixon years, and reached its full force with Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980.1 Certainly, that version of events has some force, especially if one focuses on presidential politics and elections. Having lost only two presidential elections in the third of a century that preceded Lyndon Johnson's landslide in 1964, the Democratic party won only one of the next six contests, and its successful candidate in the Watergate-influenced year of 1976 was Jimmy Carter, the quintessential post-New Deal Democrat. Millions of erstwhile New Deal Democrats either started voting Republican or ceased voting at all, reflecting the mood of alienation from liberalism and government that was subsequently captured so brilliantly in books by J. Anthony Lukas and Jonathan Rieder.2 But if one turns to the policy legacy of the 1970s, it becomes hard to sustain the contention that the decade was fundamentally conservative: It saw the legalization of abortion; a halt to capital punishment; important new regulatory regimes in the areas of environmental protection, consumer protection, campaign finance, disability

The Power, the Glitter, the Muscles: Movie Masculinities in the Age of Reagan

Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980 occasioned much disbelief that an actor (of all things!) should ascend to the White House. This surprise is, in retrospect, surprising. Popular culture and politics are both in some measure dependent on projecting messages that mass audiences want, and the communications abilities of actors and politicians are more similar than either might wish to acknowledge. The belief that Hollywood could not prepare Reagan for politics reflected the success of a particular version of movie colony myth-making-that the movies were pure entertainment. The master of this beguiling nonsense about Hollywood was Will Hays, the Hoosier politician and architect of Harding's victory in 1920, who headed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association-better known as the Hays Office-from 1922 to 1945. This was the Hollywood in which Reagan rose to success and came into political consciousness. It was Hays's genius to cast the movies as apolitical while he had in fact been hired for the most political of tasks: saving the industry from federal antitrust lawyers and citizen censorship groups. Hollywood, meanwhile, seethed with politics. In World War II, for instance, industry people actively supported groups ranging from the rightwing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to numerous liberal and antifascist causes and the Communist party. From their earliest days the movies conveyed powerful political messages. Some were overt, such as Birth of a Nation's racist brief and pro-interventionist pictures from 1939 to 1941. Movies that were seemingly the least political were often freighted with heavily political implications for gender roles. Whether one

Life on the front lines

Warren Hern's reminiscences about his experiences as medical director of the Boulder (Colorado) Abortion Clinic and as an abortion provider in private practice provide support for his statement, "Every doctor in America who does abortions lives under a death threat." Shortly after the clinic was opened, a group of anti-abortion physicians pressured the Boulder County Medical Society to pass a resolution declaring the clinic a "clear and present danger" that should be shut down by local health boards. As the only freestanding abortion clinic in the state in the mid-1970's, the Boulder center was targeted by the Right-to-Life Committee picketers and Dr. Hern was harassed in his home and in public. When Dr. Hern left the clinic a year later to establish a private practice specializing in pregnancy termination, the picketers followed. After release of a textbook he prepared on abortion practice, the publisher was deluged with hate mail and threats of boycott, leading them to withdraw the text from its list. Violent attacks on abortion clinics accelerated after Reagan's election and bullets were fired into Hern's waiting room. Randall Terry, national head of Operation Rescue, prayed for Hern's death at a rally in front of his clinic. By the time Dr. David Gunn was assassinated by an anti-abortionist in March 1993, there had been over 1285 acts of violence against abortion facilities and more than 100 facilities had been completely destroyed. The transgression for which Dr. Gunn was murdered was that he sought to save the lives and futures of countless women and support their right to become full participants in society.

Carter and the Failure of Foreign Policy Reform

The 1970s were a period of aborted change in U.S. foreign policy. The pervasive post-World War II consensus among foreign policy elites crumbled under the weight of the Vietnam war and global economic travails. New policy paradigms such as detente and liberal internationalism not only stirred debate but often served as the basis for marked policy departures. Richard Nixon was the first American president to challenge past orthodoxy when he took bold steps toward improving relations with both the Soviet Union and mainland China. Yet the influence of new schools of thought was most evident during the early years of the Carter presidency. Jimmy Carter and his advisers believed that many of the traditional rationales that had guided U.S. foreign policy for over a generation were now outmoded and inappropriate to altered world realities. By the end of the decade, however, these new orientations had largely been abandoned in favor of policies reminiscent of the cold war era. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 only confirmed the passing of this liberal interlude in U.S. foreign policy. This article offers a frankly revisionist (though admittedly partial) explanation for the failure of policy reform during the Carter years. Contrary to many observers, I argue that Carter's initial foreign policy design was neither confused and incoherent nor simply a reflection

Federal Aid to Local Governments in the West: An Irony of the Reagan Revolution

Despite the fact that the Reagan election was viewed as a power shift toward the West, the decade of the 1980s produced cruel disappointment. The region was generally left out of the economic recmery of the nation because of the bust in the agricultural and mineral industries. These state and local gmernments which sufferfrom high costs and low resources were particularly dependent on the national gmernment at the very time when the Reagan Administration was cutting federal aid and transferring power to the states. Unlike Nixon's New Federalism which helped the state and local governments of the West, Reagan's policies caused their relative position in federal aid flows to deteriorate. Although the Reagan revolution in cutting domestic programs was viewed as the embodiment of western rugged individualism, the region lost in terms of federal aid to small rural local governments.

All the king's horses and all the king's men…

A jubilant industry hailed Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, but not even Reagan could bring back the plant orders canceled after Chernobyl, or persuade communities to accept nuclear waste.

Progress toward Racial and Sexual Equality in the Federal Civil Service?

In addition to being one of the largest employers in the country, the federal civil service acts as a symbol of this nation's commitment to racial and sexual equality. Its treatment of women and minorities therefore deserves steady scrutiny, especially since most studies indicate that it is far from a model employer. White males hold the vast majority of high-paying, policymaking positions in the federal civil service. They also earn far more than women and minorities at all education and experience levels. In an effort to increase representation and approach pay equality, federal policy has slowly shifted from strategies for eliminating discrimination to affirmative action to abolish inequality of opportunity to the use of numerical goals and timetables. These goals and timetables have never been popular with the general public (Rosenbloom, 1984) nor with elected or administrative officials (Daley, 1984), however. The election of Ronald Reagan gave goals and timetables a strong opponent in the White House. The Justice Department, which for nearly 20 years before 1981 had sided with women and minorities in court battles, began to join lawsuits on the side of white males charging reverse discrimination. Reagan's Justice Department has argued forcefully against affirmative action plans for state and local governments and private employers, and it has even refused to submit its own goals and timetables to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC, in turn, "has quietly abandoned the use of hiring goals and timetables in settlements with private employers accused of race and sex discrimination" ("EEOC Abandons," 1986), and it has dropped "broad complaints against large companies ... in favor of more tightly focused cases involving specific persons" (Williams, 1985). The Reagan Administration's rejection of statistical evidence of patterns of discrimination convinces many critics that the federal government has taken a giant step backwards in its treatment of women and minorities on personnel issues. To date, however, little empirical evidence has been reported on whether presidential opposition to affirmative action has slowed progress toward racial and sexual equality. This paper attempts to fill this gap; exploring whether the federal personnel system has made progress in the past decade and whether the rate of progress has slowed since Reagan's election. What measures best gauge progress? Political scientists and students of public administration have concen* This paper addresses two questions. First, has the federal civil service made progress toward racial and sexual equality in the past decade? Second, has progress slowed during the Reagan Administration? The paper examines changes in total employment, employment at upper grade levels, average grade levels, average salaries, and unexplained salary gaps since 1976 for ten groups-Asian, Native American, Hispanic, black nonHispanic, and white non-Hispanic men and women. The good news is that women and minorities have made progress relative to white males on all measures, and that progress has continued under Reagan. The bad news is that progress remains slow.

Realignment: New Party Coalitions and the Nationalization of the South

Among academic and non-academic observers the Reagan election provoked speculation about whether the party system was finally embarking upon a realignment whose symptoms had been visible for some time. The discussion rarely produced a consensus because definitions of realignment are neither explicit nor theoretical, but historical and descriptive. This paper extends an argument which defines realignments as changes in the social group coalitions which distinguish party supporters. It uses this definition to describe changes which have been underway for over twenty years; it identifies the significance of the South in the transformation, and it shows the realignment to be programmatically significant even if the Democratic party retains its numerical dominance.

The Electoral Connection in the 99th Congress

Participant observation has provided some of our most impressive insights into the contemporary Congress. In particular, two scholars relied upon this method for results that must be regarded as shaping our current paradigm on Congress and its members: David Mayhew, who, six years after serving as an APSA Congressional Fellow, published his essay, Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974), and Richard Fenno, who traveled with representatives and senators in order to assess how members of Congress interact with their constituents and the impact of those interactions upon their performances in Washington in Home Style (1978) and its companion volume on the Senate (1982).Despite the influence of these works, some ambiguities remained when I began my stint as a Congressional Fellow in the fall of 1984. For one thing, Mayhew and Fenno had reached different conclusions regarding the impact of the need to run for reelection. Mayhew asserted that congressional behavior and congressional outcomes could be explained solely by the goal of getting reelected; on the other hand, Fenno contended that members could establish separate “home styles” and “Washington styles,” as leeway in the latter increased with more successful presentations of self back home. Likewise, whereas Mayhew made no distinction between the strength of the electoral incentive for representatives and senators, Fenno argued that having longer terms than representatives provided much more temptation for senators to do something besides merely run for reelection. A second ambiguity was that most of Mayhew's and Fenno's fieldwork was accomplished in the early to mid 1970s, before the sea-change in American politics best symbolized by Ronald Reagan's election and the dramatic shifts in policy and in political style that ensued (see especially Edsall, 1984; Chubb and Peterson, 1985). While studies suggest that congressional decision-making has changed only slightly in the Reagan years (e.g., Smith, 1985), the altered electoral environment may have produced far-reaching changes in how the electoral connection shapes Congress.

The Electoral Connection in the 99th Congress

Participant observation has provided some of our most impressive insights into the contemporary Congress. In particular, two scholars relied upon this method for results that must be regarded as shaping our current paradigm on Congress and its members: David Mayhew, who, six years after serving as an APSA Congressional Fellow, published his essay,Congress: The Electoral Connection(1974), and Richard Fenno, who traveled with representatives and senators in order to assess how members of Congress interact with their constituents and the impact of those interactions upon their performances in Washington inHome Style(1978) and its companion volume on the Senate (1982).Despite the influence of these works, some ambiguities remained when I began my stint as a Congressional Fellow in the fall of 1984. For one thing, Mayhew and Fenno had reached different conclusions regarding the impact of the need to run for reelection. Mayhew asserted that congressional behavior and congressional outcomes could be explained solely by the goal of getting reelected; on the other hand, Fenno contended that members could establish separate “home styles” and “Washington styles,” as leeway in the latter increased with more successful presentations of self back home. Likewise, whereas Mayhew made no distinction between the strength of the electoral incentive for representatives and senators, Fenno argued that having longer terms than representatives provided much more temptation for senators to do something besides merely run for reelection. A second ambiguity was that most of Mayhew's and Fenno's fieldwork was accomplished in the early to mid 1970s, before the sea-change in American politics best symbolized by Ronald Reagan's election and the dramatic shifts in policy and in political style that ensued (see especially Edsall, 1984; Chubb and Peterson, 1985). While studies suggest that congressional decision-making has changed only slightly in the Reagan years (e.g., Smith, 1985), the altered electoral environment may have produced far-reaching changes in how the electoral connection shapes Congress.

The Electoral Connection in the 99th Congress

Participant observation has provided some of our most impressive insights into the contemporary Congress. In particular, two scholars relied upon this method for results that must be regarded as shaping our current paradigm on Congress and its members: David Mayhew, who, six years after serving as an APSA Congressional Fellow, published his essay, Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974), and Richard Fenno, who traveled with representatives and senators in order to assess how members of Congress interact with their constituents and the impact of those interactions upon their performances in Washington in Home Style (1978) and its companion volume on the Senate (1982).Despite the influence of these works, some ambiguities remained when I began my stint as a Congressional Fellow in the fall of 1984. For one thing, Mayhew and Fenno had reached different conclusions regarding the impact of the need to run for reelection. Mayhew asserted that congressional behavior and congressional outcomes could be explained solely by the goal of getting reelected; on the other hand, Fenno contended that members could establish separate “home styles” and “Washington styles,” as leeway in the latter increased with more successful presentations of self back home. Likewise, whereas Mayhew made no distinction between the strength of the electoral incentive for representatives and senators, Fenno argued that having longer terms than representatives provided much more temptation for senators to do something besides merely run for reelection. A second ambiguity was that most of Mayhew's and Fenno's fieldwork was accomplished in the early to mid 1970s, before the sea-change in American politics best symbolized by Ronald Reagan's election and the dramatic shifts in policy and in political style that ensued (see especially Edsall, 1984; Chubb and Peterson, 1985). While studies suggest that congressional decision-making has changed only slightly in the Reagan years (e.g., Smith, 1985), the altered electoral environment may have produced far-reaching changes in how the electoral connection shapes Congress.