ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the Alan Keyes 1996 Republican presidential candidacy as a point of departure to develop in a comprehensive and systematic way: an initial theory of African-American presidential convention behavior; and posit this initial theory in such a manner that it can generate testable propositions that may be empirically tested in subsequent studies. African-American delegates were present at the initial founding of the national political conventions as a device to nominate presidential candidates for major and minor political parties. Long before African-American politics evolved into an academic subfield in the discipline, political scientists were developing institutional and individual analysis of national political conventions and their political participants. Embedded in these institutional and individual analyses are some macro- and micro-level theories about African-American convention political behavior. With the focus upon these African-American political candidates that were seeking the Democratic and Republican party nominations arose a new type of study, the impact study.
