Leadership and change: the new politics and the american electorate

Leadership and Change is a book on contemporary American presidential politics for students of political behavior, whether formally enrolled in classes or not. It is written for political analysts and activists, for citizens who are concerned with electoral politics, for undergraduate and graduate students, and for our professional colleagues who have made their insights a part of the growing public understanding of mass politics.

The book is based primarily on survey data collected over the last twenty-five years by the Center for Political Studies of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. We have not attempted to use those data to provide a comprehensive history of the decades just past. Rather, we have tried to explain selected aspects of continuity and change in presidential politics. There have been recent changes in the extent to which the electorate votes on the basis of issue concerns, changes in the strength of ties to the Democratic and Republican parties, changes in the nature of political leadership, and changes in support for the political system. The turmoil of the 1960s and the coalescing of that turmoil into the themes of the New Politics are seen as having a major impact on all of these changes. It is our contention that the New Politics themes-the growth of political protest, of the counterculture, of concern with law and order, and of resistance to authority-defined new social concerns for many citizens and provided them with new ways of thinking about politics. These new perspectives are neither identical with nor absorbed into tradi tional Democratic/Republican or liberal/conservative distinctions.