Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Allison Calhoun-Brown, committee chair; Michael Binford, Richard Engstrom, committee members. Electronic text (83 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed May 10, 2207; title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-81).

In 1952, affluent white suburban citizens of Birmingham, Alabama voted overwhelmingly in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower. This thesis explores and examines why the emergence of a thriving suburban community that voted Republican occurred. This examination used a collection of numerous sources, primary and secondary. Newspapers served as the most important tool for discovering why the new suburbs aligned to Republicanism. The sources describe a suburban area that aligned with the Republican Party due to numerous reasons: race, Eisenhower’s popularity, the Cold War, and economic issues. Due to those reasons, the election of 1952 began to alter their society and political affiliations. The 1952 presidential election results symbolized the political, cultural, and economic acceptance of the Republican Party, which created a Republican political base in the heart of a Democratic state.

The thesis is divided into three parts. Part I is an introduction to the field of study and comprises only one chapter. This chapter includes short accounts of the geographical positions and the inhabitants of Zambia and Malawi. Part II deals with the constitutional history of the two countries from the introduction of European administration in the last decade of the nineteenth century to their attainment of independence in 1964--a period of seventy years. Zambia and Malawi are new states and a study of their Constitutions would not be properly appreciated if it were not to cover fairly fully the past that bore the present. Part III, which is the main section of the study, deals with the provisions of the present Constitutions of the two countries. It is divided into sixteen chapters. / Public, Constitutional, & International Law / LLD (Constitutional Law, Public International Law and Labour Law)

During the early twentieth century, the Democratic party dominated the conservative political landscape of Texas. Through the 1920s, members of the Republican party focused on patronage and seemed content to maintain the position of minority party. A growing dissatisfaction with the liberal policies of the New Deal during the 1930s created opportunities for state Republicans to woo dissenting Democrats to their side. With a change of leadership within the state GOP after 1950, the Republicans waged serious campaigns for offices for the first time. Republican men exercised their political yearnings through leadership positions. Women, on the other hand, were shut out of the leadership ranks, and, as a consequence, they chose a traditional female strategy. They organized clubs in order to support the new leadership and rising candidates. Against formidable odds, Republican women acted as foot soldiers and worked diligently to attain their objectives. As early as 1920, Texas Republican women began to organize. In 1938 they joined the newly chartered National Federation of Republican Women. In 1955 Texas women organized the Texas Federation of Republican Women (TFRW). Working through the TFRW, the women became the catalysts that broke the Republican party from its state of inertia, and they significantly contributed to the breakdown of the one-party system in Texas. Willing to do the "shoe leather politicking" necessary for victory, women became invaluable to GOP candidates, who began their campaigns in the clubhouses of Republican women. In 1978, with the election of the first Republican governor in a century, Republicans finally brought competitive politics to Texas. By the 1990s, the GOP became the majority party in the state. Republican women were not only important to the growth of the party, they were the driving force that broke the state from the shackles of one-party rule by winning elections through grassroots efforts. This study fully recognizes the rich contribution women made to Texas politics throughout the twentieth century.

The thesis is divided into three parts. Part I is an introduction to the field of study and comprises only one chapter. This chapter includes short accounts of the geographical positions and the inhabitants of Zambia and Malawi. Part II deals with the constitutional history of the two countries from the introduction of European administration in the last decade of the nineteenth century to their attainment of independence in 1964--a period of seventy years. Zambia and Malawi are new states and a study of their Constitutions would not be properly appreciated if it were not to cover fairly fully the past that bore the present. Part III, which is the main section of the study, deals with the provisions of the present Constitutions of the two countries. It is divided into sixteen chapters. / Public, Constitutional, and International Law / LLD (Constitutional Law, Public International Law and Labour Law)

The thesis of this paper is that the evolution of the black vote from Republicanism to the Democratic Party was determined by several causes, and these are the subjects of my paper. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, African Americans in the United States joined the Republican Party and by and large voted for Republican candidates, both in the North and South. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1876, the pressures or renewal of social conservatism, Southern localism, and the re-emergence of so-called “Calhoun” politics, along with main spread interference with African-American voting, all combined to establish the beginnings of a transition from Republican Party affiliation to increasing membership in the Democratic Party.

The purpose of this monograph is to study the early Texas Republican party within the framework of well-known political party functions, i.e., to provide political leadership, recruit governmental personnel, generate public policy, and propagate ideology.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Derek S. Hoff / In the years immediately after World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted that he did not want to run for office. However, the general, persuaded by the efforts of Citizens for Eisenhower groups, reversed his decision before the 1952 election. The new politician did not take an easy path to the White House, however, as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the leading conservative Republican, fought to represent the GOP. Eisenhower aligned with the moderate faction, the party’s traditional source of power, and joined the Republicans during the early stages of a civil war in the party. From the time Eisenhower received the presidential nomination in 1952 until his death in 1969, he committed himself to leading the GOP and establishing moderate, not conservative, Republicanism as the party’s ideology. However, this aspect of Eisenhower’s political career has largely been ignored by historians. The analyses of Eisenhower that focus on his presidency, rather than his military career, concentrate on policy decisions, omitting the president’s role as party leader during a transformative era. This oversight not only skews Eisenhower’s legacy but also renders analyses of the conservative revolution in American politics incomplete. Before conservative Senator Barry Goldwater secured the Republican nomination in 1964, a very important moment that augured —but did not guarantee — the future triumph of the conservative wing, Eisenhower worked to stop his campaign. Had Eisenhower succeeded, the GOP and American politics could have followed a much different trajectory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Utilizing documents from throughout Eisenhower’s political career, this study argues that although Eisenhower failed to halt conservatism, he influenced the course of the GOP. During the 1950s and 1960s, Eisenhower helped revitalize the party, improved the party’s organization, and contributed to conservatism’s delayed ascendancy. Furthermore, Eisenhower merits recognition as a party leader who worked tirelessly on behalf of moderate Republicanism, not just as a man with impressive coattails for Republicans to cling to during elections.

In 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book that postulated that the United States was in the beginning of a political realignment that would spell the end of the Reagan-era coalition that gave Republicans an electoral advantage on the presidency. The authors claimed an electorate that would favor the Democratic Party would emerge to take its place. Since Senator Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election was powered by a coalition that looked much like the one Judis and Teixeira described, it appeared the authors’ thesis was being borne out by actual election results. However, the events of the 2000s and early 2010s have lent both credibility and doubt to this possible realignment, and have drawn attention to the problems of regular realignment theory. Exploring the premise laid out by Judis and Teixeira from their work, The Emerging Democratic Majority, as well as observations about the changing composition of the American electorate, I analyze key groups in the American electorate to determine if these groups are trending more Democratic in presidential and congressional races since the 1988 presidential election. Findings showed several of these groups regularly supported Democratic candidates but did not consistently trend to the Democrats from year to year. Changes across time often depended on match-ups of nonconsecutive years, with Democrats in the year 2008 drawing especially strong support from hypothesized voter groups. While Democrats can count on the support of groups such as voters who achieve high levels of college education or voters with secular outlooks on life, their success still depends highly on candidate quality and advantage on issues and cannot be taken for granted.

A tese aqui exposta dedica-se ao estudo e à maior compreensão da política norte-americana. Mais especificamente, dedica-se ao estudo da suposta polarização partidária e ascensão conservadora Republicana no período recente. Tratados como fato pela literatura especializada, o estudo aqui feito trata esses dois fenômenos como hipóteses a serem testadas. Desse modo, por meio de uma maior apreensão do que se entende por ideologias políticas como Conservadorismo e Liberalismo no contexto dos Estados Unidos, bem como de uma metodologia que privilegia o uso de plataformas nacionais como indicativo de retrato ideológico partidário; esse estudo busca evidenciar empiricamente aproximações e/ou distanciamentos entre os partidos políticos e, consequentemente, a ascensão ou o declínio de ideologias tal como o Conservadorismo no que tange ao Partido Rebublicano. Através de indicadores de gradação, rede e frequência de palavras a partir das plataformas nacionais de ambos os partidos políticos (Democrata e Republicano) no período entre 1936 a 2012; se busca evidenciar de modo mais empírico esses dois fenômenos. Os resultados nos indicam que, de fato, há uma polarização partidária no período recente; no entanto, essa não é única na história desse país. Da mesma forma, percebe-se que há uma ascensão conservadora por parte do Partido Republicano, sobretudo no que diz respeito a certas categorias de análise tal como as questões sociais. / The work exposed here is dedicated to the study and to a greater understanding of the North-American politics. More specifically, intends to study the suposedly recent party polarization and Republican conservative ascendancy. Treated as a fact by the specialized literature, the study here done treats these two phenomena as hypothesis to be tested. As such, through a greater understanding of ideologies such as Conservatism and Liberalism in the context of the United States, as well as a methodology that favors the use of national platforms as an indicative of party ideological portrait; this work seeks to empirically evidence points of similiarities and differences between the political parties and, as a consequence, the ascent or decline of ideologies such as Conservatism in reference to the Republican Party. Through indicators of gradation, wordtree and word frequency from the national platforms of the two political parties (Democratic and Republican) between 1936 and 2012; this work seeks to evidence in a more empirical way these two phenomena. The results show us that, indeed, there is a party polarization in the recent period; nevertheless, this is not the only one in the history of this country. In the same way, it can be perceived that there is a conservative ascendancy by the Republican Party, especially when dealing with some categories of analysis such as social policies.