Reviews for The neoliberals

The average rating for The neoliberals based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-25 00:00:00 Terry Aubrey I wavered between three and four stars for this book. I ultimately went with four because the subject matter is very important to understand if we hope to develop an accurate picture of American politics, but I do have to say in the same breath that this book could have been written in a much more engaging manner. The thesis which Myth of the Independent Voter bears out is that people that self-identify as political independents are, most of the time, not. Though they make up almost a third of registered voters, most independents are actually partisans, voting for the same party the large majority of the time. In fact, independents on the whole tend to be more partisan than those that self-identify as "weak partisans." It is only a small subset of independents--somewhere around 10 percent of the electorate--that actually swing between the parties from one election cycle to the next. It is no surprise that these are also the voters that tend to be the least informed and least committed to voting in general. As I mentioned earlier, understanding this concept is very important in seeing how elections work in the U.S. This book does a fine job of getting that across, and provides plenty of documentation to support the view. It is also, however, extremely repetitive. It feels very much like a paper that was stretched into a book on a quick timeline. If you merely read the opening and closing chapters, you are likely to get the drift enough to make the rest unnecessary--or you'd probably be even better served by just reading the original paper that became the book.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-18 00:00:00 G E Johansen The image of the independent voter is often that of the rational calculator, assessing issue positions of candidates and then voting based on that calculus. Who is an independent, according to political scientists who study voting behavior? A person who says so on survey instruments, that's who! Based on that definition, at the time this book was published,ore and more Americans were deemed Independents. This book, though, uses data to suggest that "it ain't necessarily so." A fine work when it came out. . . .