Eternal Bandwagon

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. The Bandwagon Dynamic and the Causal Funnel: Institutional Dynamics and Nominating Politics

   • Byron E. Shafer, Elizabeth M. Sawyer

   Pages 1-35

3. Deep Channels to a Presidency: Occupations and Careers

   • Byron E. Shafer, Elizabeth M. Sawyer

   Pages 37-84

4. Factions, Constituencies, and Candidates: The Democrats

   • Byron E. Shafer, Elizabeth M. Sawyer

   Pages 85-120

5. Factions, Constituencies, and Candidates: The Republicans

   • Byron E. Shafer, Elizabeth M. Sawyer

   Pages 121-157

6. The Usual Suspects: Rules for the Nominating Contest

   • Byron E. Shafer, Elizabeth M. Sawyer

   Pages 159-192

7. The Usual Suspects: Strategies and Sequences

   • Byron E. Shafer, Elizabeth M. Sawyer

   Pages 193-239

8. Eternal Bandwagon: Nominating Politics and the General Election

   • Byron E. Shafer, Elizabeth M. Sawyer

   Pages 241-266

9. Back Matter

   Pages 267-273

   PDF

Orthodox reporting and conventional scholarship focuses on the factors that distinguish each presidential contest and then attempts to explain them. This book rather, demonstrates that the politics of presidential nomination has been remarkably stable in the United States since the 1830s and right through to 2020. A common bandwagon dynamic, rolling once through party organizations and now through presidential primaries, permits a simple measure that has predicted nominations well before the decisive threshold was reached, while allowing precise comparisons across the years. So it becomes possible to separate the handful of things that matter for winnowing a large and diverse society into two individual presidential nominees. This funnel of causality moves through the occupational and careers seedbeds of a field of presidential aspirants, squeezing these fields by way of a small set of structural shapers, until party factions and factional struggles—not rules of the game, notcandidate characteristics, not nominating strategies, nor all the other ephemera so beloved of commentators and observers—actually choose a given nominee.

• Presidential Elections
• Presidency
• American Presidency
• Elections & Voting
• Political Parties
• Presidential Nomination
• Republican
• Democrat
• American Political History
• General Election
• Nomination Politics
• Nominating Rules
• Candidate strategies
• State Sequences
• Constituencies
• Institutional Dynamics
• Donald Trump
• Hilary Clinton
• Bernie Sanders
• Barack Obama

“Shafer and Sawyer have given us the most comprehensive account of presidential nomination in decades. It is theoretically astute, rich in historical detail, and masterfully synthetic, drawing on almost 200 years of experience with a keen eye for what is particular to a specific era, party, or set of rules and what is, as the authors put it, eternal”.

—Larry M. Bartels, Professor, Vanderbilt University, USA

 

“What sets this study apart from virtually everything else that has recently been written about presidential nominations is the remarkable scope of the inquiry. Where most recent work on this topic has been about one election or one component of the nomination process, Shafer and Sawyer’s book seeks to examine every major component of the process, for the entire period from 1832 to the present, and organizes those components according to the point at which they enter the ‘causal funnel.’ This book raises the bar for all future studies of the presidential nomination process.”

—William G. Mayer, Professor of Political Science, Northeastern University, USA

 

“Many books on the politics of the presidential nomination process focus on the modern era in which candidates vie for the nomination by competing in a series of state-by-state contests. This book offers an important new take by linking the modern era to the past. Through an original analysis of nearly 200 years of nomination contests, Shafer and Sawyer show how a dominant nominating dynamic runs through them all. Most critically, they demonstrate how factional alignments and struggles within the two major parties shape the choice among contenders. The authors argue that it is these deep structural influences—not the candidates themselves, the media who cover them, or the decisions of party leaders—that provide the most insight into the logic of the presidential nomination process.”

—Amber Wichowsky, Associate Professor, Marquette University, USA

• Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, USA

  Byron E. Shafer, Elizabeth M. Sawyer

Byron E. Shafer is Hawkins Chair of Political Science Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. His most recent book with Regina L. Wagner is The Long War Over Party Structure: Democratic Representation and Policy Responsiveness in American Politics (2019). 


Elizabeth M. Sawyer is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. She is currently completing a doctoral dissertation on "How the Sausage Gets Made: Constitutions, Rules and Norms in State Legislature." She also studies presidential nominations, campaign finance, and the nature of effective representation.

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