Description: Polarized Families, Polarized Parties demonstrates that differing regional ideals of family have shaped party policy and ideological positions throughout the twentieth century.
Review Quotes: "Skillfully combining political science and history, thick description and empirical data, and top down-bottom up vantage points, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties sheds new light on the mainsprings of American politics. Rejecting the conventional wisdom that party conflict is a contest over the size of government, Gwendoline Alphonso portrays a century long battle for the power to define the meaning, function, and purpose of the family-a Manichean struggle that animates the raw and disruptive partisanship of our political time."-- "Sidney M. Milkis, University of Virginia"