John Aldrich and John Griffin, "Why Parties Matter: Political Competition and Democracy in the American South" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Summary

John Aldrich and John Griffin are the co-authors of Why Parties Matter: Political Competition and Democracy in the American South (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Aldrich is the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke University; Griffin is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Why Parties Matter argues that competition between political parties is an essential component of a democracy. Competition facilitates responsiveness to citizens and a politics better able to address citizen concerns. Aldrich and Griffin follow the history of the parties in the United States through four eras---the Democratic---Whig party era that preceded the Civil War; the post-Reconstruction period; the Jim Crow era; and the modern era. They show the emergence of competition between the parties and when it succeeded and failed.

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