Ballot Battles
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-086595-5 (ISBN)
In Ballot Battles, Edward Foley presents a sweeping history of election controversies in the United States, tracing how their evolution generated legal precedents that ultimately transformed how we determine who wins and who loses. While weaving a narrative spanning over two centuries, Foley repeatedly returns to an originating event: because the Founding Fathers despised parties and never envisioned the emergence of a party system, they wrote a constitution that did not provide clear solutions for high-stakes and highly-contested elections in which two parties could pool resources against one another. Moreover, in the American political system that actually developed, politicians are beholden to the parties which they represent - and elected officials have typically had an outsized say in determining the outcomes of extremely close elections that involve recounts. This underlying structural problem, more than anything else, explains why intense ballot battles that leave one side feeling aggrieved will continue to occur for the foreseeable future.
American democracy has improved dramatically over the last two centuries. But the same cannot be said for the ways in which we determine who wins the very close races. From the founding until today, there has been little progress toward fixing the problem. Indeed, supporters of John Jay in 1792 and opponents of Lyndon Johnson in the 1948 Texas Senate race would find it easy to commiserate with Al Gore after the 2000 election. Ballot Battles is not only the first full chronicle of contested elections in the US. It also provides a powerful explanation of why the American election system has been-and remains-so ineffective at deciding the tightest races in a way that all sides will agree is fair.
Edward B. Foley is the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Law and Director of Election Law at The Ohio State University College of Law.
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Missing Institution of Impartiality
Introduction: Understanding the Past for the Sake of the Future
Chapter One: Uncertain Vote-Counting in the Founding Era
Chapter Two: The Novelty of Chief Executive Elections
Chapter Three: The Entrenchment of Two-Party Competition
Chapter Four: Counting Votes at Times of Crisis
Chapter Five: Hayes-Tilden: To the Edge of the Constitutional Cliff
Chapter Six: The Gilded Age: An Era of Hypercompetitive Elections
Chapter Seven: The Progressive Era: Missed Opportunities at a Time of Reform
Chapter Eight: America in the Middle of its Century: A Tarnished Ideal
Chapter Nine: The Sixties and Their Legacy: The Rise of Democratic Expectations
Chapter Ten: The Eighties and Nineties: Reemergence of Intensified Partisanship
Chapter Eleven: Florida 2000: Avoiding a Return to the Constitutional Brink
Chapter Twelve: After Bush v. Gore: Reinvigorated Demand for Electoral Fairness
Conclusion: The Enduring Quest for a Fair Count
Appendix
Erscheinungsdatum | 30.07.2019 |
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Verlagsort | New York |
Sprache | englisch |
Maße | 234 x 155 mm |
Gewicht | 839 g |
Themenwelt | Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918) |
Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung | |
ISBN-10 | 0-19-086595-4 / 0190865954 |
ISBN-13 | 978-0-19-086595-5 / 9780190865955 |
Zustand | Neuware |
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