USF St. Petersburg campus Honors Program Theses (Undergraduate)
First Advisor
Seth C. McKee, Ph.D. Professor, College of Arts and Sciences
Publisher
University of South Florida St. Petersburg
Document Type
Thesis
Date Available
March 2012
Publication Date
2010
Date Issued
December 2010
Abstract
My first encounter of the political kind occurred in 1992, when a kindergarten classmate asked me who my parents voted for. Based on some dinner conversations, which went mostly over my head, I knew they voted for Bill Clinton. He told me his parents voted for Bush. At that time, a "party" was something associated only with birthdays and I was unaware of the existence of the word "ideology." I understood, however, that politics entails conflict. His parents voted for someone different than my parents voted for: his parents lost and my parents won. Over the next several years, my understanding of politics increased only by knowing that my mother is a Democrat, my father is a Republican, Bill Clinton had an affair, my grandmother yells at the Republicans on Meet the Press every Sunday morning, and she never voted for one in all of her eighty-plus years. I did not know about the nature of the disagreements between the two parties, but I knew the conflict is not so grave that you cannot be married to someone from the opposing party; that some people, like my father, sometimes vote for candidates from the opposing party; and others, like my grandmother, never vote for candidates from the opposing party.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Manter, Charles Jolm, "The Nature and Intersection of Partisanship and Ideology" (2010). USF St. Petersburg campus Honors Program Theses (Undergraduate).
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/honorstheses/8
Comments
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the University Honors Program, University of South Florida St. Petersburg.