John W. Burns and Andrew J. Taylor, "The Mythical Causes of the Republican Supply-Side Economics Revolution," Party Politics, 6 (October 2000), 419-440.

First Paragraph:
Before 1977, the national Republican Party was generally ambivalent about federal individual income tax policy. Revisions to extant policy passed by the US Congress were Democratically initiated, Keynesian-style tax cuts that targeted the benefits of tax reduction to lower-income Americans (Witte, 1985: 165--79, 190--204; Pollack, 1996: 78--86).' A number of significant pieces of such legislation were passed during the Nixon and Ford years, including the tax reduction bills of 1969, 1971, 1975 (two bills), 1976 and early 1977. Republicans were usually split on these initiatives, with many arguing that such cuts would fuel inflation and exacerbate the deficit, and others taking President Nixon to heart when, in 1971, he observed that 'we are all Keynesians now' (quoted in Hall, 1989).

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Determinations of the congressional Republican vote on four pieces of individual income tax legislation, 1975-90
Table 2: The Republican mass and tax cuts, 1976-90
Figure 1: The percentage of the public saying their taxes were 'too high', 1969-90
Table 3: The Wall Street Journal editorial page position on taxes, 1969-89 (%)

Last Paragraph:
Our main point remains, however. Currently, national American parties are more centralized and their elites more capable of policy initiation and leadership than conventional wisdom suggests. The contemporary congressional parties are already the subject of a compendium of theoretical and empirical work that discusses their ideological polarization and homogeneity and the rising strength of formal leaders (Robde, 1991; Cox and McCubbins, 1993; Sinclair, 1995). For the most part, these characteristics seem to have been generated endogenously. National American parties are certainly distinctive from the parties of parliamentary democracies or societies with sharp class and ethnic cleavages, but our research shows them to be hierarchical and cohesive enough to allow their leaders to initiate the kind of doctrinal change that greatly influences mass and local political behavior.