The transformation of the new deal party system: Social groups,political ideology,and changing partisanship among northern whites, 1972–1988

This paper examines the partisanship of a neglected segment of the American electorate—white northerners. Like their southern counterparts, northern whites have moved toward the GOP (Grand Old Party) and away from the Democratic party during the last two decades. In fact, a substantial plurality of northern whites now identify with the Republican party. Moreover, Democratic losses and Republican gains have not been confined to particular categories of social groups but have cut across groups traditionally identified with the parties. However, political ideology is closely related to the changing partisanship of northern whites. Liberals have become more Democratic and conservatives have become substantially more Republican since 1972. Moreover, the relationship between ideology and changing partisanship occurs within most categories of social group membership, suggesting that ideological orientations now override social group ties in the formation of partisanship. The northern white electorate, in sum, is undergoing an ideological transformation that is reshaping the contours of American politics.     

An analysis of the changing social bases of America's political parties: Group support in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections

In this note I address two questions: 1.) what were the group bases of the U.S. electoral coalitions in 2012 and 2016? 2.) how have the group bases of support changed in the past decades? I determine social group memberships significantly influence individual partisanship with a multivariate analysis using ANES data. I then measure how many votes each politically relevant social group contributed to the party coalitions in each presidential election between 1972 to 2016. I go on to discuss how group contributions have changed and discuss the demographic and behavioral forces driving these changes. The defection of college educated whites from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party was the most pronounced change from 2012 to 2016, but the Democratic Party's steadily increasing reliance on ethnic and racial minority groups remains the most important long-term trend. Overall, I find that the party coalitions in 2012 and 2016 were relatively stable and most changes were continuations of decades long trends, despite perceptions there has been a sudden realignment.     

Party registration and party self-identification: Exploring the role of electoral institutions in attitudes and behaviors

How do electoral institutions affect self-identified partisanship? I hypothesize that party registration acts to anchor a person's party identification, tying a person to a political party even when their underlying preferences may align them with the other party. Estimating a random effects multinomial logit model, I find individuals registered with a party are more likely to self-identify with that party and away from the other party. Party registration also affects voting in presidential elections but not in House elections, leading to greater defection in the former where voters have more information about the candidates. These insights illuminate varying rates of electoral realignment, particularly among southern states, and the makeup of primary electorates in states with and without party registration.     

The Party Faithful: Partisan Images,Candidate Religion,and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification

We argue that the factors shaping the impact of partisanship on vote choice—“partisan voting”—depend on the nature of party identification. Because party identification is partly based on images of the social group characteristics of the parties, the social profiles of political candidates should affect levels of partisan voting. A candidate's religious affiliation enables a test of this hypothesis. Using survey experiments which vary a hypothetical candidate's religious affiliation, we find strong evidence that candidates’ religions can affect partisan voting. Identifying a candidate as an evangelical (a group viewed as Republican) increases Republican support for, and Democratic opposition to, the candidate, while identifying the candidate as a Catholic (a group lacking a clear partisan profile) has no bearing on partisan voting. Importantly, the conditional effect of candidate religion on partisan voting requires the group to have a salient partisan image and holds with controls for respondents’ own religious affiliations and ideologies.     

Partisanship and Preference Formation: Competing Motivations,Elite Polarization,and Issue Importance

An enduring and increasingly acute concern—in an age of polarized parties—is that people’s partisan attachments distort preference formation at the expense of relevant information. For example, research suggests that a Democrat may support a policy proposed by Democrats, but oppose the same policy if proposed by Republicans. However, a related body of literature suggests that how people respond to information and form preferences is distorted by their prior issue attitudes. In neither instance is information even-handedly evaluated, rather, it is interpreted in light of partisanship or existing issue opinions. Both effects are well documented in isolation, but in most political scenarios individuals consider both partisanship and prior opinions—yet, these dynamics may or may not pull toward the same preference. Using nationally representative experiments focused on tax and education policies, I introduce and test a theory that isolates when: partisanship dominates preference formation, partisanship and issue opinions reinforce or offset each other, and issue attitudes trump partisanship. The findings make clear that the public does not blindly follow party elites. Depending on elite positions, the level of partisan polarization, and personal importance of issues, the public can be attentive to information and shirk the influence of party elites. The results have broad implications for political parties and citizen competence in contemporary democratic politics.     

It Takes an Outsider: Extralegislative Organization and Partisanship in the California Assembly, 1849–2006

Why are American politicians “single‐minded seekers of reelection” in some decades and fierce ideological warriors in others? This article argues that the key to understanding the behavior of members inside a legislative chamber is to follow the actions of key figures outside the chamber. These outsiders—activists, interest groups, and party bosses—use their control over party nominations, conditioned on institutional rules, to ensure ideological behavior among officeholders. To understand how vital these outsiders are to legislative partisanship, this article takes advantage of a particular natural experiment: the state of California's experience with cross‐filing (1914–59), under which institutional rules prevented outsiders from influencing party nominations. Under cross‐filing, legislative partisanship collapsed, demonstrating that incumbents tend to prefer nonpartisanship or fake partisanship to actual ideological combat. Partisanship quickly returned once these outsiders could again dominate nominations. Several other historical examples reveal extralegislative actors exerting considerably greater influence over members' voting behavior than intralegislative party institutions did. These results suggest that candidates and legislators are the agents of activists and others who coordinate at the community level to control party nominations.     

Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South

Our focus is the regional political realignment that has occurred among whites over the past four decades. We hypothesize that the South's shift to the Republican party has been driven to a significant degree by racial conservatism in addition to a harmonizing of partisanship with general ideological conservatism. General Social Survey and National Election Studies data from the 1970s to the present indicate that whites residing in the old Confederacy continue to display more racial antagonism and ideological conservatism than non-Southern whites. Racial conservatism has become linked more closely to presidential voting and party identification over time in the white South, while its impact has remained constant elsewhere. This stronger association between racial antagonism and partisanship in the South compared to other regions cannot be explained by regional differences in nonracial ideology or nonracial policy preferences, or by the effects of those variables on partisanship.     

Institutional Context, Cognitive Resources and Party Attachments Across Democracies

e-mail: jdh39{at}columbia.edu e-mail: gck2001{at}columbia.edu e-mail: ell2002{at}columbia.edu This paper develops and tests arguments about how national-levelsocial and institutional factors shape the propensity of individualsto form attachments to political parties. Our tests employ atwo-step estimation procedure that has attractive propertieswhen there is a binary dependent variable in the first stageand when the number of second-level units is relatively small.We find that voters are most likely to form party attachmentswhen group identities are salient and complimentary. We alsofind that institutions that assist voters in retrospectivelyevaluating parties—specifically, strong party disciplineand few parties in government—increase partisanship. Theseinstitutions matter most for those individuals with the fewestcognitive resources, measured here by education.     

Partisanship and Incumbency in Presidential Elections

Party identification is a standard part of our understanding of presidential voting, but the effects of presidential incumbency on presidential voting have not been recognized in most voting models. Democratic candidates in the twentieth century received 10 percent more of the two-party vote when Democratic incumbents were running for reelection than when Republican incumbents were running. National Election Studies surveys show that the effect of incumbency varies with individual partisanship, with the greatest effect, as expected, among independents. Opposition party identifiers defect at a higher rate than incumbent party identifiers when the incumbent is running for reelection. Even after controlling for retrospective and prospective economic voting, a 6 percent effect is found for incumbency. Incumbency thus conditions the impact of partisanship on presidential voting.     

Representative Bureaucracy and Partisanship: The Implementation of Election Law

Studies of representative bureaucracy argue that public administrators hold attitudes that are generally representative of the public and will implement policy in accordance with those attitudes. However, studies of representative bureaucracy generally have not considered the partisanship of local administrators. Many local election officials affiliate with a political party, and there is concern that partisan officials will manipulate election procedures to help their party. The authors analyze a survey of local election officials about their attitudes toward provisional voting. Findings show that Democratic local election officials have significantly more positive attitudes toward provisional voting programs in highly Democratic jurisdictions and significantly less positive attitudes in highly Republican jurisdictions. No such relationship occurs for Republican administrators. In addition, positive attitudes toward provisional voting are associated with more provisional votes being cast and counted in the 2004 presidential election. This work questions whether representative bureaucracy—when it concerns partisanship—is always a desirable outcome.     

Partisan Development in Post-Soviet Ukraine

ABSTRACT

The development of mass partisanship and party identification in post-Soviet societies is a controversial subject of scholarly research. One prevalent view argues that post-Soviet citizens are distrustful of parties and that it will take generations for party identification to appear in these societies. Others argue that partisanship is emerging as a result of citizens perceiving meaningful differences between the parties. If party identification is forming, partisanship should be relatively stable across time at the individual level. This study takes a rare look at 1999 panel data from Ukraine to determine the degree of partisan stability. The findings demonstrate that meaningful party identification appears to be emerging for a significant proportion of the population due to political information and this partisanship is influencing election decision making among Ukrainian voters.     

A new context for presidential politics: The Reagan legacy

This analysis of electoral politics in the U.S. during the Reagan years includes discussion of what hasnot happened, with particular attention to the fact that the American electorate hasnot become more conservative in recent years; the fact that the younger members of the electorate havenot led the national swing away from the Democrats in favor of the Republicans; and the fact that Republican political elites havenot become more representative of the issue preferences of the national electorate. The study also notes some of the generally recognized changes in political life, including the recent sharp decline of the Democrats' margin, or plurality, among parly identifiers and the new dominance of the right wing among Republican party elites. Finally, the study introduces some previously unexamined evidence concerning the nature of various changes relating to partisanship, issue voting, and political leadership that have implications not anticipated either by conventional or unconventional wisdom.     

Partisan change in the Mountain West

During the 1980s partisanship in the Mountain West shifted dramatically toward the Republican Party. This change was the result of issue-based conversion rather than group mobilization. Specifically, we trace this surge to Reagan's transformation of the issues connected with the Republican Party. Previous discussions of issue-based conversion have assumed that this force influences all voters equally. One of the issues behind the Mountain West's changed partisanship follows this pattern: Individualism (or limiting government influence on the individual) was behind both the Mountain West surge (and decline) in Republicanism and the nationwide growth in that party. But the second issue did not follow this pattern: Abortion influenced the Mountain West selectively. We conclude that partisan change can be the result of uniform influence of issue change, but that it can also be the result of issue changes that influence different groups of voters differentially.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1992 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.     

Inheritance and the Dynamics of Party Identification

Extensive research efforts notwithstanding, scholars continue to disagree on the nature and meaning of party identification. Traditionalists conceive of partisanship as a largely affective attachment to a political party that emerges in childhood through parental influences and tends to persist throughout life. The revisionist conception of partisanship is that of a running tally of party utilities that is updated based on current party performance. We attempt to reconcile both schools of thought in an individual difference perspective, showing that the party loyalties acquired through parental influences confirm better the traditional view, while the attachments of individuals who did not inherit their parents’ party loyalties exhibit features more closely matching the revisionist predictions. The analysis is facilitated by uniquely suited longitudinal household data emanating from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study that allow to study party identifications of young adults and their parents on an annual basis from 1984 to 2007.     

Seeing Spots: Partisanship,Negativity and the Conditional Receipt of Campaign Advertisements

Changes in the media landscape increasingly put voters in control of the amount and type of political content they consume. We develop a novel experiment to assess the factors that drive this conditional receipt of information. We focus on how party source and tone interact with partisanship to influence the campaign messages voters seek out or avoid, as discretion over self-exposure varies. We randomly expose subjects to comparable positive or negative television ads aired by Democratic or Republican candidates from the 2012 Presidential election, and measure subjects’ propensities to skip, re-watch and share the spots. Partisans avoid out-party ads, albeit asymmetrically: Republicans are more consistent partisan screeners than Democrats. We find more such selectivity as discretion increases, but little evidence that negativity influences self-exposure. Our findings provide greater insight into the forces behind information selectivity, and have important implications for elections in the post-broadcast era.     

The Rich are Different: The Effect of Wealth on Partisanship

Rich voters tend to be Republicans and poor voters tend to be Democrats. Yet, in most settings it is difficult to distinguish the effects of affluence on partisanship from those of closely related variables such as education. To address these concerns I use state lottery and administrative records to examine the effect of changing economic circumstances on the partisanship of over 1,900 registered voters. Winning larger amounts in the lottery produces a small increase in the probability an individual is later a registered Republican, an effect that is larger for those who registered to vote after winning. This suggests that wealth does affect partisanship, particularly for those without preexisting attachments to a political party. Comparing estimates from the lottery to cross-sectional data suggests the latter exaggerates the relationship between wealth and partisanship, although controlling for additional variables produces largely similar estimates.     

Measuring the ideological preferences of U.S. presidents: A proposed (extremely simple) method

Several observations can be made concerning the data presented in the preceding tables. First, as one might expect, not all Democratic or Republican presidents are alike. As shown in Table 3, John Kennedy has a higher cumulative pro-ADA rating than does Lyndon Johnson than does Jimmy Carter. On the Republican side, Dwight Eisenhower comes in at roughly the middle of the ADA liberal/conservative ideological spectrum and considerably to the left of both Ronald Reagan and George Bush.Second, while there appear to be significant differences between the ideological preferences of presidents from the same party, the correlation between a president's annual or cumulative pro-ADA percentage and a dummy variable reflecting the party of the president (Democrats equal unity, Republicans equal zero) is still fairly high. For example, the correlation between the nine post-World War II presidents' cumulative pro-ADA percentages (Table 3) and a party dummy variable is 0.93. The correlation between presidents' annual pro-ADA percentages (Table 2) and a party dummy variable is 0.87. Thus, while a dummy variable reflecting the party of a president may not be the most preferred measure of presidents' ideological preferences, such a variable may be a reasonably accurate substitute for the pro-ADA percentages reported in Tables 2 and 3.     

Mahmud Muhammad Taha and the Rise and Demise of the Jumhuri Movement

Mahmud Muhammad Taha founded the Jumhuri (Republican) Party in 1945 in the context of the fight for Sudan's independence. The nature of the party's ideology went through a radical change after Taha emerged from a mystical retreat in 1951. In the light of this ideology, the party advocated a "neo-Islamist" position committed to a reconciliation of Islam and modernity. Some of Taha's social and political stances are critically examined. Particular attention is paid to the reasons at the root of the demise of the Jumhuri movement after Taha's execution in January of 1985.     

The role and effectiveness of intelligence in Northern Ireland

This article examines the role and effectiveness of counter-terrorist intelligence operations in Northern Ireland. Specifically, it examines the methods of gathering intelligence as well as how the information was used, while also addressing some of the wider moral and legal implications of intelligence activities for a liberal democratic society. It argues that British intelligence was ultimately very effective but at the price of employing some highly dubious methods.

‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once’. 1 1 Quoted in Stewart Tendler and Richard Ford, ‘Seaside Blast May Signal Mainland Bombing Campaign’, The Times, 13 October 1984, p.2. View all notes

Statement by the Provisional Irish Republican Army