📖 Overview
Presidential Ballots, 1836-1892 compiles and analyzes county-level voting data from U.S. presidential elections across a crucial 56-year period. This reference work contains detailed statistical tables showing election returns at both state and county levels during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras.
The book presents voting patterns and political trends through extensive quantitative data, focusing on regional differences and changes over time. The data covers 15 presidential elections, tracking the rise and fall of various political parties and documenting voter participation rates across different regions.
Walter Dean Burnham accompanies the statistical information with commentary on electoral patterns, party systems, and demographic shifts. The analysis examines factors like voter turnout, party competition, and the emergence of new political coalitions.
This volume serves as a foundational resource for understanding the evolution of American democracy and partisan alignment during a transformative period in U.S. political history. The work's emphasis on data-driven analysis established new methodological standards for studying electoral behavior.
👀 Reviews
This appears to be an academic reference book with very limited public reader reviews available online. No reviews were found on Goodreads or Amazon, likely due to its specialized nature as a historical data compilation.
The book is referenced and cited in other academic works but lacks direct reader feedback or ratings. Its main value seems to be as a statistical resource containing presidential election data and voting records from 1836-1892.
Scholars who have referenced the work in their own research note its usefulness for:
- County-level voting data from this time period
- Tables showing electoral results
- Analysis of voting patterns
Without broader reader reviews or ratings available, providing a comprehensive summary of public reception is not possible. The book appears to serve primarily as an academic reference rather than one aimed at general readers.
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Parties and Elections in America: The Electoral Process by Mark D. Brewer and L. Sandy Maisel The evolution of American electoral mechanisms from early Republic through modern times, with data on voting procedures and results.
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🤔 Interesting facts
🗳️ The book contains detailed county-level voting data that was groundbreaking for its time (1955), allowing historians and political scientists to analyze geographic voting patterns in ways not previously possible
📚 Walter Dean Burnham pioneered the study of "critical elections" - elections that mark dramatic shifts in voter behavior and party alignments - and used this book's data to support his theories
🗽 The period covered (1836-1892) includes some of America's most turbulent political events: the collapse of the Whig Party, the rise of the Republican Party, the Civil War, and Reconstruction
📊 Burnham spent years manually collecting and verifying election returns from scattered state records and newspaper archives, as such comprehensive data was not centrally maintained in the 19th century
🏛️ The book remains a vital resource for studying the Second Party System and Third Party System in American politics, documenting the transition from Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party dominance to the emergence of modern two-party competition