Party Polarization in America

B. Dan Wood's other books include Presidential Saber Rattling (Cambridge, 2012), The Myth of Presidential Representation (Cambridge, 2009, and recipient of the 2010 Richard Neustadt Award), The Politics of Economic Leadership (2007), and Bureaucratic Dynamics: The Role of Bureaucracy in a Democracy (1994). He is a widely cited author of many articles in leading political science journals. Wood has also taught statistical methods at the Essex Summer School, Colchester, the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan, and the European Consortium for Political Research, Vienna, Austria. Soren Jordan is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University. His research focuses on lawmaking in Congress, especially how lawmaking strategies have evolved over time as a result of the polarization between the two political parties. His work has appeared in Social Science Quarterly, Research and Politics, and The Forum. He is also the author (with Kim Quaile Hill and Patricia A. Hurley) of Representation in Congress: A Unified Theory (Cambridge, 2015). Prior to coming to Auburn in 2016, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University after earning his Ph.D. there in 2015.

• 1. Theoretical perspectives on party polarization in America; 2. Establishing the founders' social contract from the constitutional convention through George Washington; 3. The consequences of the founders' social contract from reconstruction to the Great Depression; 4. Forging the new deal social contract from the Great Depression through World War II; 5. The new deal social contract through the 1970s; 6. Polarization over the new deal social contract from the 1970s to present; 7. Are Americans ideologically polarized?; 8. Elite polarization and democratic representation; 9. Polarization as the norm of the American system.

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