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This chapter focuses on the fourth and final religious signal: engaging in morality politics. Morality politics is an approach that elevates political issues into symbolic, moral battles. The evidence in this chapter comes from Republican and Democratic party platforms since 1932. It considers five issues central to religious conservatives' political engagement: abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, same-sex relationships, school prayer, and stem-cell research. Analyzing platforms language shows that since 1980 Republicans have increasingly aligned their issue positions with those of religious conservatives, while Democrats have done the opposite. Further, Republicans have elevated the importance of these issues by attacking the courts and calling for constitutional amendments, while also grounding their claims in the language of faith and family. The chapter concludes with an analysis of three Justice Sunday events, which showcase morality politics in its most overt form.

Examines whether the role of parties in policy‐making has changed substantially since the 1950s. The chapter uses data from the Comparative Manifestos Project and aggregate policy measures to assess long‐term trends in parties’ policy positions, and governing parties’ impacts on policy outcomes for 15 advanced industrial democracies. The chapter first analyses how the parties’ policy profiles have changed over time. Second, it examines whether parties are becoming increasingly flexible in terms of the issues they emphasize, moving from a strategy of selling a consistent package of policies toward marketing an increasingly volatile variety of issues. Third, it analyses changes in the degree of partisan impact on policy outputs, concluding that despite a pattern of ideological convergence, there is less evidence that the policy impact of parties has eroded over time.

This chapter outlines the history of the concept of “judicial activism” as well as the basic contours of the political and academic debate over the practice. The chapter explores the development of the debate over activism within the electorate, political elites, and in the context of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. It also considers the voluminous academic literature on the topic, with generally focuses on the potential for the Supreme Court to act in a “countermajoritarian” fashion and concern over the justices' exercising their substantial powers of judicial review in furtherance of their own policy preferences.

Chapter 9 discusses two questions: first, whether the explanation for declining trade salience is specific to the American experience; and second, what conditions in the U.S. could change to revive the salience of trade policy. To address the first question, the chapter compares trade salience patterns in the U.S. and eight other similar advanced industrial countries (AICs). It provides a comparison of beliefs about the benefits of trade the 9 identified AICs; analysis of parties’ position taking and trade’s salience in the party platforms of those countries since 1920, and two comparative case studies of the relationship between party position taking on trade the varying trade salience in Canada and the United Kingdom. The chapter also provides additional detail on the American experience of higher trade salience surrounding the debate and subsequent passage of North American Free Trade Agreement. The chapter concludes with implication for the future of trade policy, electoral politics, and applies the lessons to Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 Republican primary.

This chapter mines the political history of the last quarter of a century for insights into the parties' motivations. But though the confrontations preoccupied lawyers, they did not even register on anyone else's political radar screen. Histories, biographies, and autobiographies of the period (with the exception of Nigel Lawson's) never mention them. Promises and practices affecting the economy, health care, education, and crime may influence elections; legal services are electorally insignificant. This chapter, therefore, speculates on the implications of party platforms and policies for the positions governments took concerning lawyers. With this brief history of motivations, electoral strategies, and policies, this chapter turns to the way that parties, lawyers, clients, and the media played the politics of professionalism in the 1990s.

Because Americans’ understanding of their own and others’ connections to trade underpins their beliefs about trade’s costs and benefits, chapter 2 investigates what Americans know—or think they know—about trade and trade policy. It examines how trade has reshaped post-NAFTA America and argues that the new economic conditions of post-industrial America require expanding our analysis of factors shaping trade preferences beyond the traditional categories of skill level and industry. Additionally, the chapter identifies new sources of information uncertainty and in doing so provides a series of tables and figures detailing the changing composition of the U.S. economy and manufacturing; the changing influence of trade and specific trading relationships; and the convergence of major political parties’ policies. Furthermore, by analysing voters’ knowledge of roll call votes on a range of issues, the chapter offers a comparison of the political salience of trade with other important ideological and economic issues.