The American Public Mind

William J. M. Claggett is Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University. He is the author of The Two Majorities: The Issue Context of Modern American Politics, with Byron Shafer. He has also published numerous articles on public opinion and electoral behavior in leading academic journals including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. Byron E. Shafer is Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Chair of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South, with Richard Johnston; The Two Majorities: The Issue Context of Modern American Politics, with William Claggett; Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the National Party Convention; Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics; and numerous scholarly articles, some of which are collected as The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics. He has won the Schattschneider Prize, the Race and Ethnicity Prize, and the Party Politics Prize of the American Political Science Association, along with the V.O. Key Prize of the Southern Political Science Association.

“A richly thorough examination of the American public’s policy preferences over the past half century and of how those preferences informed the vote. An important contribution.” —George E. Marcus, Williams College

• Part I. The Structure of Public Preferences: 1. The established issues: social welfare; 2. The established issues: international relations; 3. The new issues: civil rights; 4. The new issues: cultural values; 5. Blended items: true, false, and obscure; Part II. Some Consequences of the Structure: 6. The established issues: voting behavior; 7. The new issues: voting behavior; 8. Voting behavior: the rest of the story; 9. The issue structure of mass politics.