Populism and Politics: William Alfred Peffer and the People\u27s Party

This study focuses attention of the People’s party which existed for a short time in the 1890s. Despite its brief existence the party and the movement that brought it into being had a lasting effect on American politics and society. Populism originally developed outside the political system because the system had proved incapable of responding to real needs. As the movement was transformed into the People’s party, however, much of its responsive nature was lost. The People’s party became subject to the same influences that guided the old parties and it became more concerned with winning office than with promoting genuine reform. In finding this sharp distinction between Populism and the People’s party, Mr. Argersinger portrays Populism not as a success but as a tragic failure, betrayed from within by politicians who followed political dictates rather than Populist principles. Mr. Argersinger studies the Populist predicament in organizing a national movement in a time of political sectionalism and discovers neglected phases of Populist activity in the crucial campaign of 1896. He suggests that there may have been some validity to the charge of Populist “conspiracy-mindedness.” Peter H. Argersinger is assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_political_science_american_politics/1007/thumbnail.jp

Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver

Review of: "Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver," by Robert B. Mitchell

Editing Sophia Peabody’s Cuba Journal: Travel, Recovery, and Interpretation

Some collaborations are born out of chance encounters. For us, it happened at a recent conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Having briefly met before on the common ground of studies in nineteenth- century American literature, we said “Hello” and discovered in the space of a five-minute conversation that both of us had our eyes on the early nineteenth- century journal-account of a young New Englander’s rest cure in Cuba. The traveler who authored the journal was Sophia Amelia Peabody (1809–1871), an accomplished visual artist, writer, member of a family that was vitally involved in the intellectual and cultural life of antebellum New England, and later Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collaborator and wife. Creating an edition of her crumb - ling unpublished manuscript from the 1830s had begun to take shape in our respective research plans, but after discussing our individual intentions, we eventually agreed to embark on the project together. We come to Peabody’s text with complementary angles of interest: Cheryl J. Fish, in women’s travel texts of nineteenth-century America and the intersections among travel, race, and disability studies; Jana Argersinger, in “relational aesthetics,” theories of antebellum female authorship, and scholarly editing

Voter Partisanship and the Effect of Distributive Spending on Political Participation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96350/1/j.1540-5907.2012.00613.x.pd

Voter Buying: Shaping the Electorate through Clientelism

Studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate. We argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate, but can also shape its composition. Across the world, machines employ “voter buying” to import outsiders into their districts. Voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud, and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote choices. Our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in Brazil. A regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits—which undermined voter buying—decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points. Consistent with voter buying, these effects are significantly greater in municipalities with large voter inflows, and where neighboring municipalities had large voter outflows. Findings are robust to an alternative research design using a different data set

Review of The Just Polity; Populism, Law, and Human Welfare.

Rejecting political narrative as debilitating to historical scholarship., Norman Pollack employs textual exegesis in this effort to construct a coherent intellectual history of Populism. Interspersing extensive quotations with his own paraphrases, elaborations, and inferences, Pollack examines a handful of Populist writings and extravagantly maintains that his work reconceptualizes both the nature and the study of Populism. After struggling through nearly 350 pages of opaque and often tumid prose, few historians will accept such claims. Even those sympathetic to this style of history, which ignores the specific political context of the documents analyzed, will worry about some issues that Pollack dismisses here. In The Populist Response to Industrial America (1962), for example, Pollack warned that the intellectual history of social movements is without value unless the evidence is in fact representative, but he now ostentatiously rejects any concern about the representative character of my evidence and ... generalizations