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Renee Lamis, who received her Ph.D. from our department in 2006,
recently published a revised and expanded version of her Case dissertation
in a new book, The Realignment of Pennsylvania Politics Since 1960, with
Pennsylvania State University Press. Congratulations, Renee!
[I]f everybody recognizes . . . that a
realignment in the South has clearly taken place, has the rest of the
country . . . realigned as well? That is the question that Renée Lamis set
out to answer [for Pennsylvania] and her technique has been to subject
that state s changing political configuration to what is surely the most
intense, microscopic scrutiny ever given to any state s electoral
landscape. —From the Foreword by James L. Sundquist
The political party system in the United States has periodically undergone
major realignments at various critical junctures in the country s history.
The Civil War boosted the Republican Party s fortunes and catapulted it
into majority status at the national level, a status that was further
solidified during the Populist realignment in the 1890s. Starting in the
1930s, however, Roosevelt s New Deal reversed the parties fortunes,
bringing the Democratic Party back to national power, and this realignment
was further modified by the culture wars beginning in the mid-1960s. Each
of these realignments occasioned shifts in the electorate s support for
the major parties, and they were superimposed on each other in a way that
did not negate entirely the consequences of the preceding realignments.
The story of realignment is further complicated by the variations that
occurred within individual states whose own particular political legacies,
circumstances, and personalities resulted in modulations and modifications
of the patterns playing out at the national level.
In this book, Renée Lamis investigates how Pennsylvania experienced this
series of realignments, with special attention to the period since 1960.
She uses a wealth of data from a wide variety of sources to produce an
analysis that allows her to trace the evolution of electoral behavior in
the Keystone State in a narrative that is accessible to a broad range of
readers. Her account helps explain why Senator Arlen Specter was
re-elected whereas Senator Rick Santorum was not, and why Pennsylvania
Republicans have been highly successful in major statewide elections in an
era when Democratic presidential standard-bearers have regularly carried
the state. Overall, her book constitutes a gold mine of information and
interpretation for political junkies as well as scholars who want to know
more about how national-level politics plays out within individual states.
The above material is reprinted from the inside of the book’s jacket.
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