The Political Realignment of Health: How Partisan Power Shaped Infant Health in the U.S., 1915–2017

The U.S. two-party system was transformed in the 1960s, when the Democratic Party abandoned its Jim Crow protectionism to incorporate the policy agenda fostered by the Civil Rights Movement and the Republican Party redirected its platform toward socioeconomic and racial conservatism. We argue that the policy agendas that the parties promote through presidents and state legislatures codify a racially patterned access to resources and power detrimental to the health of all. To test the hypothesis that fluctuations in overall and race-specific infant mortality rates (IMR) shift between the parties in power before and after the Political Realignment, we apply panel data analysis methods to state-level data from the National Center for Health Statistics, 1915–2017. Net of trend, overall, and race-specific infant mortality rates were not statistically different between presidential parties before the Political Realignment. This pattern, however, changed after the Political Realignment, with Republican administrations consistently underperforming Democratic ones. Net of trend, non-Southern state legislatures controlled by Republicans underperform Democratic ones in overall and racial IMRs in both periods.

UK vote reinforces long-term political realignment

Headline UNITED KINGDOM: Election reflects behavioural shifts

Rivers of the Sultan

Rivers of the Sultan offers a history of the Ottoman Empire’s management of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the early modern period. During the early sixteenth century, a radical political realignment in West Asia placed the reins of the Tigris and Euphrates in the hands of Istanbul. The political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia allowed the Ottoman state to rebalance the natural resource disparity along its eastern frontier. It regularly organized the shipment of grain, metal, and timber from upstream areas of surplus in Anatolia and the Jazira to downstream areas of need in Iraq. This imperial system of waterborne communication, the book argues, created heavily militarized fortresses that anchored the Ottoman presence in Iraq, enabling Istanbul to hold in check foreign and domestic challenges to its authority and to exploit the organic wealth of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium. From the end of the seventeenth century, the convergence of natural and human disasters transformed the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with its twin rivers. A trend toward provincial autonomy ensued that would localize the Ottoman management of the Tigris and Euphrates and shift its command post from Istanbul to the provinces. By placing a river system at the center of analysis, this book reveals intimate bonds between valley and mountain, water and power in the early modern world.

Gender and attitudes toward welfare state reform: Are women really social investment promoters?

This article contributes to the study of the demand side of welfare politics by investigating gender differences in social investment preferences systematically. Building on the different functions of social investment policies in creating, preserving, or mobilizing skills, we argue that women do not support social investment policies generally more strongly than men. Rather, women demand, in particular, policies to preserve their skills during career interruptions and help to mobilize their skills on the labour market. In a second analytical step, we examine women’s policy priorities if skill preservation and mobilization come at the expense of social compensation. We test our arguments for eight Western European countries with data from the INVEDUC survey. The confirmation of our arguments challenges a core assumption of the literatures on the social investment turn and women’s political realignment. We discuss the implication of our findings in the conclusion.

Uprooting Identity: European Integration, Political Realignment and the Wine of the Languedoc, 1984–2014

Uprooting productive vines transformed the landscape of the wine growing Languedoc as part of a coordinated European effort to reduce agricultural overproduction, most notably after 1984. The demographic shifts caused by this transformation upset regional political alliances, coinciding with a socialist presidency and electoral gains for the far-right Front National (FN). More traditional syndical bodies lost their ability to accent national change, floundering in the face of supra-national reform. This left space for political parties to politicise this gap between agency and power, and the FN retooled regional rhetoric emerging from wine protests on the left in service of local campaigns. Contextualising the election of Robert Ménard in Béziers in 2014, this article looks at how sectoral and economic transformation was passed over in favour of populist language borrowed from the vineyards only decades earlier, in which the uprooting of vines explains the perceived uprooting of identity.

COVID-19 may prompt Israeli political realignment

Headline ISRAEL: COVID-19 may prompt political realignment

Politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction

This essay traces political developments in the Civil War Era between 1861 and 1877. In doing so, it argues that unpredictability and uncertainty defined the politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Political parties and party labels were fluid and malleable in the midst of contemporary predictions of political realignment. The essay attempts to interpret the major events of the period through this lens of political instability. It outlines party politics during the Civil War in both the North and the South, discusses the Lincoln administration, and interprets the elections of 1862 and 1864. The essay then moves to the politics of Reconstruction, discussing the clash between Andrew Johnson and Congress, Radical Reconstruction, and the presidential elections of 1868 and 1872. The essay concludes with political developments in the South, the failure of Reconstruction, and the presidential election of 1876.