Electoral Realignment: How Are Parties Constrained in Coalition Building?

An underlying premise of this book is that parties are able to engage in activities that enable them to construct a national winning coalition in the long term: They are actors in a process that can influence electoral outcomes, and they are not merely institutions that respond to conditions in the electorate. They are constrained in numerous ways, but they are not reduced to mere reaction to an exogenously determined partisan electorate. This involves a rejection of the argument, often associated with those who analyze American parties in respect of “critical elections” or “realigning elections”, that interest aggregation by parties is an activity that is always circumscribed by periodic (but major) shifts in the distribution of partisanship within the electorate. That I do not use these terms in this context is significant because it reflects my rejection of an entire way of thinking about the situation of both victorious and defeated parties, a way of thinking that has dominated the study of American political parties since the 1960s. To understand this, it is necessary to begin by explaining the intellectual origins of the “realigning election”. It represents a coming together of two principal sets of ideas about America's parties.