Daniel J. Galvin

Presidential Partisanship Reconsidered Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and the Rise of Polarized Politics

Extant research has given little consideration to the conditions under which presidential partisan behavior might vary. This has undermined comparative analyses and obscured important partisan behaviors in earlier periods simply because they took unfamiliar forms. This article develops theoretical expectations to aid in the detection of different varieties of presidential partisanship. Illustrative case studies then examine one type—sub-rosa partisanship—observed in the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford presidencies. Though not overt partisan displays like those that are common today, their efforts to build southern party organizations made important contributions to American political development and to evolving modes of presidential partisanship.

The Democrats’ Misplaced Faith in Policy Feedback

From Social Security to Medicare, the Civil Rights Act to the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have long treated policy success as if it were tantamount to political success, assuming that the enactment of significant legislation would create supportive constituencies that would reward the party at the voting booth. President Obama appears to have made the same calculation. Instead of working to strengthen his party organization with an eye toward improving Democrats’ electoral prospects across the board, he focused almost exclusively on achieving significant policy accomplishments, assuming that those policy successes would redound to the party’s electoral benefit (Galvin 2010, 2016). His policy-centered approach, however, did not do much to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election or down-ballot Democrats during his two terms in the White House. Over that period, Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress (including 63 House seats and 11 Senate seats), 10 governorships, 27 state legislative chambers, and almost 1,000 state legislative seats. At the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Republicans controlled more legislative seats than at any time since the party’s founding, while Democrats enjoyed unified government in only 6 states, their lowest number since the Civil War. The notion that policies generate feedback effects that bring electoral benefits for parties is so commonly held that it has become almost an unstated premise of political thinking. Voters freely admit the link: in the key Rust Belt states of Ohio and Michigan, for example, voters said they felt they “owed” Obama for his efforts to save GM and Chrysler and planned to “thank” him with their votes in 2012; Obama predictably made the bailout central to his reelection campaign message (Gomez 2012; Zremski 2012). These expectations also have deep roots in political science scholarship. Whether the topic has been Civil War pensions, minimum wage increases, voting rights, or tax cuts, political scientists have long

The “Changing of the Guard” from Labor Law to Employment Law

In the 2016 presidential campaign, income inequality finally became a central topic of national debate, as all three major candidates (Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump) raised the issue and offered various explanations and remedies. That income inequality was roundly discussed was a development of major significance in and of itself, and should not be downplayed. But I would submit that there is still a different kind of inequality that did not get talked about nearly enough, despite it being an underlying cause of income inequality—and that is the vast asymmetry of power in the workplace. Unfortunately, unless something really surprising happens, this power imbalance will likely grow during a Trump administration, and workers’ rights will only be further diminished. How workers and their advocates respond to this imbalance will tell us a lot about the thrust of the contemporary labor movement and where it might be headed in the future. One thing that is clear, though, is that their response will necessarily be shaped and channeled by existing organizational supports (such as labor unions and alt-labor groups) and existing institutional arrangements (such as labor and employment laws). My aim with these comments is to try to capture in some broad strokes some of the historical-institutional developments that have shaped the current moment and are likely to be important going forward. It all starts with the observation that there has always been a vast power asymmetry in the American workplace—a great imbalance between the rights of employees, on one hand, and the prerogatives of employers on the other—but the particular means and mechanisms available for workers to redress it have varied over time. For example, the collective bargaining system established during the New Deal helped to even the scales somewhat and protect many workers’ rights. But as private-sector unions have declined, this power asymmetry has grown, and workers have become increasingly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Manifestations include the pernicious