Deploying a novel conception framework offering new understandings of familialism and the policy logic of PRR party family, this study will argue that the Republican Party’s family welfare policy...Show moreDeploying a novel conception framework offering new understandings of familialism and the policy logic of PRR party family, this study will argue that the Republican Party’s family welfare policy overlaps with that of European PRRPs to a currently limited and inconsistent, but significantly growing extent. Evidence from South Carolina and Wyoming—two of the four states selected for investigation to provide a cross-section of the party—indicates concerted familialisation, while data from Florida and Indiana implies GOP support fortification of the care role of the traditional family is conditional on exclusion of the Other, socially, ethnically, and nationally defined. Both policy offerings are understood as features of PRRP welfare logics concerning the family, but the substantial cross-state variation and continuance of long-standing neoliberal policy choices are too significant to decisively assert a Republican Party re-alignment with a radical right logic on the family. Nonetheless, intensified support for the ‘natural’ family since the early-mid 2010s can be discerned across all cases, leaving open the prospect of a truer policy overlap in the future. From this, the contributions of this study are two-fold: a clearer picture of an oft-posited but ill-understood transatlantic transmission of radical right logics, and an original, conceptually rigorous means to investigate it.Show less
This thesis analyzes how the Republican Party profited from the actions of Senator Joe McCarthy, looking at the 1950s' senatorial elections and party politics of the same year. It argues that he...Show moreThis thesis analyzes how the Republican Party profited from the actions of Senator Joe McCarthy, looking at the 1950s' senatorial elections and party politics of the same year. It argues that he was a Faustian bargain the party accepted because they could profit from him. In addition, the thesis provides the reader with an account of the anticommunist tradition before McCarthy. Furthermore, the thesis criticizes the role of the media in sustaining the power of McCarthy, and looks at how McCarthy manipulated and used the press as his weapon to spread the anticommunist sentiment. Finally, the thesis draws lines between the Trump era and the McCarthy era.Show less
