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Session Submission Type: Author meet critics
This author meets critics session incorporates scholars of American Political Development, Comparative Politics, American Politics, and Political Theory to discussthe new book by Gwendoline Alphonso:"Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
The book and its proposed discussants demonstrate the multidisciplinary scope of new scholarship of family in American Political Development that integrates debates across fields as diverse as legal and political theory, sociology, Comparative and American politics.
The book contributes to the prevailing understanding of party evolution, contemporary political polarization, and the role of the family in American political development by placing family at the center of political and cultural clashes. It demonstrates how regional ideas about family in the twentieth century have continually shaped not only Republican and Democratic policy and ideological positions concerning race and gender but also their ideals concerning the economy and the state.
Drawing on extensive data from congressional committee hearings, political party platforms, legislation sponsorship, and demographic data from the Progressive, post-World War II, and late twentieth-century periods in the United States, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties analyzes how deliberations around the ideal family became critical to characterizations of party politics.