Welcome to the MedLibrary.org Wikipedia Supplement on Walter Dean Burnham -- Please Click to Return to Front Page

Walter Dean Burnham n(born 1930) is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held the Frank Erwin Centennial Chair in Government. He is an expert in the analysis of elections. He has been called “one of the country's pre-eminent Marxists”¹

Biography

Burnham received his AB degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1951 and his AM (1958) and PhD degrees (1963) from Harvard University. Prior to coming to UT in 1988, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Burnham was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he served as President of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association.

Burnham is a specialist in election returns, and a leading expert on the sources of data for the ICPSR. He is famous for interpreting the data. He is primarily involved in American Election data from 1824-1960. Earlier data from 1788-1824 was compiled Phil Lampi.

Burnham retired in 2003 and lives in Texas.

Political theory

Burnham's 1970 book Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics presented a theory of American political development focused on the role of party systems that last several decades and are then disrupted by a critical election. Such elections not only hand presidential and congressional power to the non-incumbent political party, but they do so in a dramatic way that repudiates the worn-out ideas of the old party and initiates a new era whose leaders govern on a new set of assumptions, ideologies, and public policies. The elections of 1860 and 1932 are perhaps the clearest examples of critical elections, and scholars have disagreed about how well Burnham's theories still explain American electoral politics.

The frequency of its citation in the footnotes of other works indicates that Burnham's article "The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe" (1965) was highly influential. The majority of citations focus on the themes of voter turnout decline, realignment in 1896, and explanations for voter decline. The theory of elite, capitalist control of the political system in the 20th century has gained less attention and support, but deserves extended qualitative evaluation.²

Publications

• "The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe" American Political Science Review (1965) in JSTOR
• Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (1970) (summary)
• Politics/America: The Cutting Edge of Change (1972)
• The Current Crisis in American Politics (1982)
• Democracy in the Making: American Government and Politics (1986), textbook

About Burnham

• Beck, Paul Allen. "Micropolitics in Macro Perspective: the Political History of Walter Dean Burnham." Social Science History 1986 10(3): 221-245. Issn: 0145-5532 Fulltext in Jstor
• Burnham, Walter Dean. "Critical Realignments Revisited." April 5, 2006 video recording of Burnham retrospective on critical realignments
• Jensen, Richard. "The Changing Shape of Burnham's Political Universe," Social Science History 10 (1986) 209-19 Issn: 0145-5532 Fulltext in Jstor

References

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 4 December 2008, at 18:23.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Walter Dean Burnham".

The URL for this specific entry is:

• http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Walter_Dean_Burnham

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.