Walter Dean Burnham (b. 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 received his AB from Johns Hopkins University in 1951 and his AM (1958) and Ph. D (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. He retired in 2003. 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. The University of Texas at Austin, often called UT or Texas, is a doctoral/research university located in Austin, Texas. ... The Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, is a private institution of higher learning located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. ... Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private, coeducational research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... Washington University in St. ...

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. ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, was established in 1962. ...

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. Realigning election or political realignment are terms from political history and political science describing a dramatic change in 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.^[1]

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
• Jensen, Richard. "The Changing Shape of Burnham's Political Universe," Social Science History 10 (1986) 209-19 Issn: 0145-5532 Fulltext in Jstor

1. ^ Beck (1986)