Jerry F. Hough is James B. Duke Professor of Political Science at Duke University, where he teaches courses on the US Presidency. A well-known figure in comparative politics and especially the Soviet Union, his earlier works were published by the Brookings Institution and by journals including World Policy Journal, Post-Soviet Affairs, Post-Soviet Politics, Problems of Communism, The Nation, and Commentary. As a long-time specialist on comparative political development, he brings a rare perspective to the study of American political evolution. Expert and student alike will find his revision of the conventional wisdom fresh and thought-provoking.
Political Science - U.S. Politics This book by the erstwhile Soviet/Russian specialist is a welcome addition to the literature on American political development. Hough (Duke Univ.) intends to do nothing less than explain the evolution of the "red" state-"blue" state dichotomy in American politics, and he largely succeeds in giving a logically argued and elegantly written account. He contends that the Republican-Democrat divide goes back to the Civil War and the hostility between some European-American "races" against one another. The remnants of these hostilities largely disappeared by the 1960s and 1970s, and subsequently political elites produced a realignment that is now customarily referred to as the red state-blue state manifestation of American political culture. Although the differences between these orientations seldom generate overt confrontations, the dichotomy itself is based on a few polarizing issues of little relevance to many voters. Hough maintains that the reason for this is none other than the machinations of party strategists. They appear less interested in generating healthy debates on core issues than in winning elections. The book is meticulously researched and offers original insights on some of the big questions of contemporary American politics.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, lower- and upper-division undergraduates. -- --Choice
The 1970s saw the end of the historic North-South conflict and the conflict between European-American ethnicities that had defined American two-party politics up to that time, argues Hough (political science, Duke U.), leading to a political realignment in which both parties abandoned any attempt to represent the economic interests of anyone but the upper class. He finds that the result of this realignment is the increasing importance of cultural issues in defining party electoral strategies. -- --BookNews
AMERICAN DUOPOLY...Amid fears of recession at home and disillusion in Iraq, the collapse of Karl Rove s once-acclaimed electoral strategy mobilizing a red-state alliance of Southern whites, Midwest Evangelicals and security moms around God, guns and the War on Terror prompts a longer-term look at the bloc-building tactics of American political elites. The merit of Jerry Hough s recent
Changing Party Coalitions is the rigorously estranging eye it casts on these processes. A comparative political scientist at Duke University, Hough is best known for his work on the USSR, in which he set aside then dominant totalitarian interpretations to focus on the actual institutional workings of the Soviet polity. Far from the monolithic dictatorship posited by the likes of Richard Pipes, Hough revealed a complex system of factions and countervailing tendencies; nor did he hesitate to draw parallels between the ussr s one-party system and the practices of the us duopoly, including elite management of faction-ridden parties and interest-group capture of policy-making. Here, he brings a similar independence of mind to his discussion of American electoral processes and the emergence of what he sees as the deliberately anti-democratic red-state/blue-state paradigm; in the process, many of the central episodes of a familiar narrative appear in a new light....
In his view, the recent withdrawal of the two parties behind the winner-takes-all ramparts of the red-state/blue-state division, leaving only a dozen states genuinely competitive, represents a further diminution of the real electorate, narrowing the already circumscribed space available for meaningful political participation....
Changing Party Coalitions offers a ruggedly idiosyncratic take on the American political system, deeply researched and widely read. Hough has been well served by his publisher, Agathon Press: footnotes are helpfully placed at the bottom of each page and the list of archives alone should make it essential reading for serious students of the country s political history... --Tom Mertes, New Left Review 49, January-February 2008