Walter Dean Burnham
| Walter Dean Burnham | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1930 Columbus, Ohio |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation |
Political scientist Professor emeritus at University of Texas at Austin |
Walter Dean Burnham (born 1930) is an authority on American elections and voting patterns, best known for quantitative analysis of national trends and patterns in the popular vote, in developing the "Party Systems" model, and for assembling county election returns for the entire country.
Burnham retired in 2003; he is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held the Frank Erwin Centennial Chair in Government, named for a former long-term UT regent. In 1951, Burnham received his AB from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1963 by Harvard University, where he worked with political scientist V.O. Key, Jr. Prior to coming to Texas 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 the sources of data for the ICPSR. He interprets data in terms of statistical patterns and trends. He is primarily involved in American election data from 1824 to 1960.
In 1964, Burnham published an article on the 1962 U.S. Senate election in Alabama, when Republicans made their first strong showing for federal office since Reconstruction in the state known as "The Heart of Dixie." The Republican James D. Martin of Gadsden, an oil products distributor, challenged veteran Democrat J. Lister Hill of Montgomery and fell only a few thousand votes short of victory. Burnham describes the Martin campaign as an aberration from the customary issueless, personalist southern primary elections. Martin's campaign was a pacesetter for subsequent southern elections in that it was waged over national issues—mobilizing the white backlash against civil rights, stressing free enterprise, local control, and individual freedom; decrying big-spending federal program which had not yet gained wide acceptance in Alabama, shifting emphasis from opposition to desegregation to the preservation of states rights, and claiming that the Republican candidates would safeguard liberty, freedom, and the state's social system. Burnham found it ironical that a Republican from the populist North Alabama ran strongly in the cities and Black Belt, while the Democratic senator from the capital city of Montgomery appealed to the northern hill country, where voters appreciated programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority and were less racially conscious because of the relatively small number of African Americans in their region. Martin fared best in those counties with non-voting blacks, prior to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. All but one of the fifteen counties which showed a decline in the Republican vote between 1960 and 1962 were in the Appalachian section of North Alabama. Martin's showing along the Gulf Coast and the Florida Panhandle was paradoxical because southeast Alabama had been traditionally the most populist since the 1890s. Two years after the Hill-Martin race, Burnham correctly forecast that the inroads of presidential Republicanism would continue in the South, but competition at the state and local levels would take root slowly.
...
Wikipedia