I'm please to announce that my new book, Altered States: Changing Populations, Changing Parties and the Transformation of the American Political Landscape, is coming out soon (shipping date set for May 30) with Oxford University Press. (You can get an early look inside on the Amazon page.)
The book focuses primarily on explaining changes in party support in state-level presidential elections outcomes over time (1970s to 2010s), using two different but related explanatory frameworks: a compositional model that sees changing demographic characteristics in the states as the source of political change; and a contextual model that focuses on changes in the relationships between state characteristics and election outcomes--in response to elite polarization-- as the source of change. The analysis supports both models, though the compositional model does a better job of accounting for political change over time.
The book addresses a number of important topics including partisan advantages in the Electoral College, the efficiency of vote distributions across the states, geographic and demographic sorting, population migration, elite polarization, and many other related issues. I will be posting a few things in the next couple of weeks to highlight some of the findings.
