Partisan Priorities - Patrick J.Egan
Publisher's Note Americans consistently name Republicans as the
party better at handling issues like national security and crime, while they
trust Democrats on issues like education and the environment - a phenomenon
called 'issue ownership'. Partisan Priorities investigates the origins and
consequences of issue ownership, showing that in fact the parties deliver
neither superior performance nor popular policies on the issues they 'own'.
Reviews
"Partisan Priorities is a most important and welcome book that links
'issue ownership' to larger questions of declining short-term democratic
responsiveness and increasing partisan polarization in the United States. It
is
theoretically and empirically impressive, marshalling a wide array of public
opinion and other data and persuasively emphasizing the importance of
examining issues and behavior in the aggregate to understand the significance
of
issue ownership in the American political system." - Robert Y. Shapiro,
Columbia University
Partisan Priorities is a provocative book that challenges our
understanding of how political parties and issues matter in American politics.
At its
heart is a simple idea,
that party ownership of issues matters in American politics and that this
ownership is driven not by the policy positions parties take or their
performance on the issues while in government, but by the priorities parties
place on them. The idea turns out to be quite powerful. Egan carefully crafts
a measure of ownership based on public assessments of which party would do
a better job on various issues, and demonstrates that party priorities
drive public assessments. He then shows that this issue ownership impacts
politics and political representation in important ways. It is an ambitious
piece of work to be sure and deserves a wide audience among scholars of
American politics and beyond. Christopher Wlezien, University of Texas at
Austin
This book takes us far toward understanding the current dysfunction in
Washington. Using powerful tools and scrupulously even-handed analysis, Egan
shows that each party's priorities are driven by its office holders,
activists, and interest groups. The policy preferences of ordinary Americans
have
little impact. Real reform will not happen until the hard lessons of this
book have been absorbed Christopher H. Achen, Princeton University
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