The decline of partisanship in the United States: A reexamination of the neutrality hypothesis (original) (raw)

Partisan mobilization, cognitive mobilization and the changing American electorate

Electoral Studies, 2007

One can arguably claim that party identification is the most important concept in modern electoral behavior research. 1 The early analyses of the Michigan election studies demonstrated how partisanship was a core element in political identities and behavior (Campbell et al. 1960, 1966). Since then, party identification is routinely a predictor in a wide array of analyses, ranging from voting to participation to predicting issue positions. Indeed, the developers of the concept stressed its functional importance: The present analysis of party identification is based on the assumption that the ... parties serve as standard-setting groups for a significant proportion of the people in this country. In other words, it is assumed that many people associate themselves psychologically with one or the other of the parties, and that this identification has predictable relationships with their perceptions, evaluations, and actions. (Campbell, Gurin and Miller 1954: 90) But just as the authors of The American Voter were demonstrating the analytic and predictive power of partisan identification as a concept, these ties began to weaken. At first, researchers asked if this was a temporary response to the political controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Converse 1976; Abramson 1979). But now, a quarter century later, partisan attachments remain weaker than during the "stable state" period of The American Voter studies. Indeed, partisanship reached a new low point in the 2000 American National Election Study (ANES); only 41 percent of respondents claimed to be independents in 2000, compared to barely 25 percent in the 1950s. These trends of weakening partisanship are well documented in American electoral research, but their meaning and interpretation remain widely debated. Some analysts discount the significance of these trends, or even the reality of partisan dealignment (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Bartels 2000; Keith et al. 1992). Others discuss weakening partisanship as due to the depoliticization of the electoral politics (Dimock 1998; Milner 2002), consistent with Putnam's thesis of Americans' decreasing social engagement (Putnam 2000). This research tests an alternative explanation that begins with the functional theory of partisanship that underlies The American Voter model, and then asks how the socioeconomic transformation of American society during the later half of the 20 th century may have altered this logic. Using the long data series from the American National Election Studies (ANES), we

State Party Activists and State Party Polarization

State of the Parties, 2007

In recent years American political parties have become increasingly po larized. Numerous studies of party activists and elected officials have shown that the degree of ideological homogeneity within each party across issues has increased significantly since the mid-I 970s (Aldrich 1995; Carsey and Layman 2002). Some have gone so far as to argue that American parties have become as ideologically coherent and programmatic as their European counterparts (Pomper 2003). Moreover, the rise in the ideological differ ences between the parties coincides with substantial increases in the organi zational strength of the parties. American party organizations have more money, staff, and technology and have been making efforts to coordinate their activities down the to county and precinct level (Aldrich 2000; More house and Jewell 2003b; Clark and Prysby 2004). Changes in mass public opinion, however, do not appear to be the guid ing force behind the polarization of the parties. Fiorina (2005), for example, finds that on most issues, differences between the views of Democrats and Republicans in the electorate are modest at best and do not appear to be increasing over time. However, there is some disagreement on this point. For example, Abramowitz and Saunders (1998), Bartels (2000), and Hethering ton (200 I) all have found evidence that increases in elite polarization have increased the public's awareness of partisan differences, which has in turn increased the salience of party identification for the mass public, leading to less split-ticket voting and increases in party attachment. At the same time, however, the high degree of polarization among elites cannot be fully ex plained by what have been modest increases in partisanship in the general public. For example, several studies have shown that party unity scores and the ideological differences between party members in Congress are at their highest levels in nearly a century (Poole and Rosenthal 1997; Pomper 2003). In contrast, in 2004, while 76 percent of citizens believe that there are impor tant differences between the parties-the highest proportion in nearly fifty years of National Election Studies-the percentage of citizens who strongly This material is copyrighted (2007) and posted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Federal Parties and Polarization

State of the Parties, 2014

I N AN ERA OF INTENSE POLARIZATION, it is easy to look beyond the federal nature of the American party system. As previous chapters have shown, American parties and their identifiers have vastly different policy views and also have much more negative feelings toward their opponents than at any other time in recent memory. Indeed, many citizens have tuned out of poli• tics, dismissing partisan rhetoric as empty attacks on the opposition. Is there, however, evidence that parties are not monolithic? Do parties stand for more than just "talking points"? How does Martin Van Buren's decentralized party system fit into a modern, nationally polarized system (Ceaser I 979; Goldman I 994)? Historically, American parties stood out as organizations with mild ideo logical differences in comparison to European political parties. This view persists despite growing evidence that American parties are now as polarized as many major European parties. Does this mean that the "big-tent" parties of the 1950s, so despised by the writers of the APSA report (Green and Her rnson 2002), have disappeared? American parties, it is worth remembering, evolved and adapted to fit the institutional framework of a federal political system. To gain a sharper un derstanding of polarization, it is worth looking more closely at parties at the subnational level. Regional differences, once large enough to tear the nation in two and still strong enough to color accents and lifestyles, could be less important in the face of such intense polarization. For example, some studies of elite polarization indicate that regions are no longer as important in ex plaining national polarization (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006). Indeed,

Toward A More Responsible Two-Party Voter: The Evolving Bases of Partisanship

2000

The 1950 APSA Report hoped that its proposed reforms "would prompt those who identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats" to base their support on "a national program." To assess the realization of that hope, we examine changes in the foundations of partisanship over the past five decades, using two connected research designs. First, we employ a logistic regression model on individual level data to predict first the presence, and then the direction of partisanship. We assess the relative importance of traditional party loyalty inherited from parents (affective partisanship) as compared to gross perceptions of differences in party issue positions (cognitive partisanship). Perception of party differences has increased substantially and persistently. These perceptions are now a better predictor of party loyalty than parental loyalty. The second approach employs a time-series cross-section model with a binary dependent variable to assess the relative impact of political and non-political explanations on the aggregate level of these changed perceptions of party differences. We assess the relative importance of education, as a proxy for non-political factors, and the level of party unity in Congress, as a proxy for political factors. We provide evidence that, although non-political factors are significant, political factors are more important and are essential in constructing an appropriate model of the aggregate change in the perception of party differences. Party combat has provided a learning experience for voters, making them more aware of political realities. By connecting party programs to electoral behavior, these changed perceptions move American politics closer to the goals of the APSA Report.

Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States

American Political Science Review, 2003

I n this paper, we contend that party realignments occur due to the interaction of candidates and activists. We examine independent party candidates who are motivated primarily to win elections but who use activist contributions to increase vote shares. In a two-dimensional policy space, such candidates will on occasion engage in "flanking" moves so as to enlist coalitions of disaffected voters, at the risk of alienating some of their traditional activist supporters. We argue that a result of such "flanking" moves, in the early part of the century, has been a shift in emphasis from an underlying social dimension to the economic dimension. In recent decades, electoral salience has shifted back to the social dimension. The net result is that the party cleavage line is much as it was a century ago-but the parties have switched sides.

The Polarization of American Politics

The Journal of Politics, 1984

Elected officials in the United States appear to represent relatively extreme support coalitions rather than the interests of middle-of-the-road voters. This contention is supported by analysis of variance of liberal-conservative positions in the United States Senate from 1959 to 1980. Within both the Democratic and the Republican parties, there is considerable variation in liberal-conservative positions, but two senators from the same state and party tend to be very similar. In contrast, two senators from the same state but from different parties are highly dissimilar, suggesting that each party represents an extreme support coalition in the state. Moreover, the distribution of senators is now consistent with the hypothesis that, in the long run, both parties are equally likely to win any seat in the Senate. This result suggests that there is now competition between equally balanced but extreme support coalitions throughout most of the United States.