From Realignment to Dealignment : The Changing Electoral Behavior in the United States

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 9 (1999) : 3-16. From Realignment to Dealignment: The Changing Electoral Behavior in the United States Stefano Luconi This article provides a critical survey of the literature concerning the notion of realignment and examines to what an extent this theory can still account for electoral changes in present-day United States. Specifically, it checks the views of the major works on this topic against political developments and argues that, despite significant revisions, such a formulation no longer holds and adealignment perspective better reflects the contemporary dynamics of the American party system. When V.O. Key Jr. elaborated the concept of realignment in 1955, he offered a model to interpret the history of US voting behavior in terms of cycles of election outcomes. By causing a sizeable and persisting alteration in the partisan alignment of voters under the stimuli of cross-cutting issues, what he called “critical elections” determine a long-term turnabout in the existing power relationship between the two major political parties and influence voting trends for about one third of a century (“A Theory of Critical Elections”). The realignment theory placed the analysis of US politics within a new perspective. The prevailing interpretation in the mid-1950s emphasized continuity. Key himself initially shared this approach. In the first edition of Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups(1942), he maintained that US electoral history could be divided into different periods on the basis of the changes in the names of the two major parties that shaped the political system. However, variations in partisan labels did not imply relevant discontinuities in the polarization of the electorate because each new party generally relied on the great bulk of the same cohorts of voters of its predecessor (263, 270, 272). Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups came out when the majority of the American electorate had not yet revealed its long-term Democratic allegiance of the New Deal and the post-Depression years. Only in 1948 did the extension of the Democratic hold over the presidency to one quarter of a century highlight the role of the entrenchment of voters’ partisan loyalties in shaping US politics. The mechanics of the creation and the persistence of the Roosevelt coalition paved the way for the elaboration of the realignment theory. This latter draws on the concept of the long-term durability of the new polarization of the voters after a major switch of party affiliations, as happened for the lasting cohesion of the New Deal majority (Key, “A Theory of Critical Elections” 4-11). The Failure of a Post-New Deal Realignment Since the New Deal party system provided Key with a model to shape the concept of realignment, it is hardly surprising that his theory has undergone increasing criticism after the demise of the electoral coalition that Franklin D. Roosevelt aggregated in the 1930s and Harry Truman revitalized in 1948 (Ladd, “Like Waiting for Godot”). The main challenge to the realignment theory has been the failure of the dynamics of the New Deal party system to represent the whole course of the twentieth-century American electoral history and to serve as a paradigm to analyze contemporary US politics. In the mid- and late 1930s, unified government ruled American politics and the Democratic Party even succeeded in making inroads into pre-Depression Republican strongholds in state and local elections (Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System 240-268). Key assumed that a remarkable sense of party allegiance characterized US voters because the existence of cycles of election outcomes needed consistency in voting trends. Yet the New Deal witnessed only a short-lived reversal of the rise in ticket-splitting and the decline in partisanship that had emerged at the turn of the century and have reappeared since the 1960s (Burnham, “The Changing Shape”). Such phenomena have led to divided government as the norm in contemporary American politics, have blurred voting trends, and have made it troublesome to identify a clearly recognizable post-New Deal realignment. This latter was overdue by the late 1960s according to the periodization of US electoral history through cycles of about thirty-four years (Burnham, Critical Elections 11-33). The recapture of a majority in both the Senate and the House by the Democratic Party in 1972, despite Richard M. Nixon’s reelection, and Jimmy Carter’s 1976 successful bid for the White House impaired Kevin Phillips’ claim that the 1968 presidential race marked the establishment of a conservative new majority of white fundamentalist Protestants, white southerners, and suburbanites that replaced the New Deal liberal coalition. Similarly, the failure of the GOP to succeed in congressional and state elections in the years of the Republican hold on the presidency in the 1980s challenged the thesis that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory over Carter brought about a post-New Deal Republican realignment (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1980 Elections 231-34; Miller, “The Election of 1984” 303-10; Ginsberg and Shefter). Some scholars have nonetheless tried to rescue at least the framework of the realignment theory. It has been suggested that a “split-level” realignment resulted from the consolidation of the Republican majority in presidential elections and the pro-Democratic polarization of voters in congressional races (Chubb and Peterson; Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1984 Elections 287). Conversely, Walter Dean Burnham has argued that the American electorate did in fact realign between 1968 and 1972. But this later realignment was “non-partisanchanneled.” The enduring transformation in the present-day political system has not been a massive shift in the traditional party loyalties of the participating electorate with the ensuing emergence of a new majority party, as happened for previous realignments. Rather, the seismic change in contemporary US politics has arisen from the very demise of the partisan roots of voting behavior following the erosion of voters’ sense of partisanship (“Critical Realignment” 106-07, 115-16, 125-27). As the ratio of the participating electorate in presidential races fell from 62.8 percent in 1960 to 49.0 percent in 1996 (Doppelt and Shearer), the thesis of the disenchantment of the American people with politics has become conventional wisdom (Dionne). Yet the last two decades have witnessed a substantial gridlock in the decomposition of partisanship. The balance in political allegiance has overall remained stable (Miller, “Party Identification”) and shifts have affected less changes in affiliation than the degree of loyalty to the same party (Rice and Hilton). Moreover, the ratio of the independents in party identification in 1992 (38 percent) was as high as it had been in 1978 (Flanigan and Zingale 63). It fluctuated below that level in the (...truncated)