In The Enemy Within , Gilbert D. Chaitin deepens our understanding of the nature and sources of culture wars during the French Third Republic. The psychological trauma caused by the Ferry educational reform laws of 1880-1882, which strove to create a new national identity based on secular morality rather than God-given commandments, pitted Catholics against proponents of lay education and gave rise to novels by Bourget, Barrès, A. France, and Zola.             By deploying Lacanian concepts to understand the “erotics of politics” revealed in these novels, Chaitin examines the formation of national identity, offering a new intellectual history of the period and shedding light on the intimate relations among literature, education, philosophy, morality, and political order. The mechanisms described in The Enemy Within provide fresh insight into the affective structure of culture wars not only in the French Third Republic but elsewhere in the world today.

lgli/R:\Project-Muse\md5_rep\07456C6526B05C53C8AB8F55B76BFC8F.pdf

Project MUSE (https://muse.jhu.edu/)

Robert G. Boatright

United States, United States of America

Columbus, 2021

July 15, 2004

producers:
Muse-DL/1.1.0

Cover 1
Title Page, Copyright Page 2
Table of Contents 6
List of Tables and Figures 8
Acknowledgments 10
Introduction 12
Chapter 1. Parallel Histories: The Incumbency Advantage and Electoral Competition 26
Chapter 2. The Rational Candidate and the Hopeless Cause 42
Chapter 3. Incumbents and Challengers Compared 73
Chapter 4. "It's Not Like Rocket Science": How Candidates Understand Public Opinion 99
Chapter 5. "Like Throwing Golf Balls against the Wall": The Candidates Talk about Campaign Issues and Ideology 127
Chapter 6. "You Don't Know Me, But Here I Am": Candidate Perceptions of Party Strength 167
Chapter 7. Expressive Campaigning in 2000 and Beyond 208
Chapter 8. Conclusions: Expressive Politics and Invisible Politics 236
Notes 252
Interviews 256
Works Cited 260
Index 270
Publisher:The Ohio State University Press,Published:2004,ISBN:9780814273005,Related ISBN:9780814209431,Language:English,OCLC:607457358
The advantage incumbent members of Congress hold over their opponents in campaigns for office has steadily grown over the past five decades. While students of congressional politics have analyzed the effect of this advantage on members' behavior in office, little is known of its effect on their opponents. Sitting members of the House frequently face underfinanced and obscure challengers. Conventional theories of electoral competition assume that the only hope these candidates have of even coming close to making such an election competitive is to align their policy positions as closely as possible to those of the median voter. Yet challengers to incumbents often run on quite extreme position platforms. In the majority of these uncompetitive races, Robert G. Boatright explains, a new type of politics is emerging-a politics of expressive campaigning, where challengers seek to use their campaigns as a platform for their own views and as a means for helping their party achieve goals other than winning the election at hand. This research makes two types of contributions to existing political science literature. On a theoretical level, it argues for a reconceptualization of the motives of candidates and parties in rational choice analysis. On a practical level, it seeks to enrich our understanding of the role that challengers play in American elections and of the reason why different types of challengers emerge in different types of elections. Boatright argues that the role of challengers in the American electoral process can be understood only if we broaden our theories about rational candidate behavior.

"This research makes two types of contributions to existing political science literature. On a theoretical level, it argues for a reconceptualization of the motives of candidates and parties in rational choice analysis. On a practical level, it seeks to enrich our understanding of the role that challengers play in American elections and of the reason why different types of challengers emerge in different types of elections. Boatright argues that the role of challengers in the American electoral process can be understood only if we broaden our theories about rational candidate behavior."--Jacket

2022-03-08