Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Twentieth Century Fund Study)
投票権法が人種政策と選挙制度の中でどのように変質したかを、法制度と政治の両面から検証する研究書。黒人有権者の拡大を支えた制度が、やがて別の政治原理へ組み替えられていく過程を批判的に追う。
作品情報
投票権をめぐる制度は、どこで「公正」の名を変えたのか。
1965年投票権法が、制定時の意図からどのように拡張・変形されてきたのかを論じる。選挙制度、区割り、救済措置をめぐる論点を通じて、投票の平等が何を意味するのかを問う。
レビュー要約
-
投票権法の変遷を明快に整理し、少数派代表と地方自治の緊張関係を広い読者に示した点が評価されている。
書籍情報
- 出版社
- Harvard University Press
- 発売日
- 1987-09-10
- ページ数
- 316ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 15.88 x 3.18 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780674951952
- ISBN-10
- 0674951956
- 価格
- 13863 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 洋書/Politics & Social Sciences/Politics & Government/Elections & Political Process/General
The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that all citizens have the right to vote without regard to their "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." For almost a century the Fifteenth Amendment was a dead letter. Throughout the South millions of nonwhite Americans were excluded from the political process by poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices. The landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to end that injustice. In this absorbing book, political scientist Abigail Thernstrom analyzes the radical transformation of the Voting Rights Act in the years since its passage. She shows how a measure carefully crafted to open the polling booths to southern blacks has evolved into a powerful tool for affirmative action in the electoral sphere--a means to promote black and Hispanic officeholding by creating "safe" seats for minority candidates, What began as an effort to give minorities a fair shake has become a means of ensuring a fair share. Thernstrom demonstrates how voting rights have created a "political thicket" in which Congress, the courts, and the justice Department have been lost. Why this should be true, how small statutory changes led to large and unexpected results, how civil rights groups prevailed against a conservative Senate, how Republicans have benefited from gerrymandering to increase black officeholding--these stories are all part of Thernstrom's well-told tale. Even though the concept of the right to vote retains an aura of moral simplicity, the issue of minority voting rights is perhaps the most complex, yet least studied, of all affirmative action issues. Whose Votes Count? should stimulate the overdue discussion that the subject deserves among all those concerned with American politics.
Abigail Thernstrom a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and the vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Right
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