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Realignment: The Eternal Question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2022

William Schneider
William Schneider*
Affiliation:
American Enterprise Institute
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Extract

Realignment is one of the few political science concepts that have made their way into the popular culture. Writers like Samuel Lubell, Kevin Phillips, and David Broder, borrowing heavily from the political science literature, have made informed political observers aware of the cyclical nature of party dominance in American political history and of the fact that the demise of the so-called “fifth” or New Deal party system has been overdue since about 1968. It is not unusual for political reporters to ask each other after a presidential election whether it was a “critical election” or not. They are, in other words, hip to our jargon.

What most journalists and politicians understand by realignment, however, is a good deal less complex than what political scientists mean. Realignment, to most people in Washington, means a Republican take-over. It means that the GOP will replace the Democrats as the “normal” governing majority in this country for the next generation, just as the Democrats replaced the Republicans as the “normal” governing party after 1932.

Certain facts suggest that things are changing in that direction. The Republicans have won three out of the last four presidential elections. The Democrats have obtained a majority of the presidential vote only twice in nine elections since 1944. The once-Solid South did not hold for the Democrats in 1964, 1968, 1972, or 1980. On the other hand, Democratic predominance has continued at most levels of office-holding below that of president and in party registration figures.

Type
The 1982 Congressional Elections
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Summer 1982 , pp. 449 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1982

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Footnotes

*

Portions of this essay are drawn from previously published papers: “The November 4 Vote for President: What Did It Mean?” ch. 7 in Austin Ranney, ed., The American Elections of 1980 (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1981), and “Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives,” ch. 9 in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Party Coalitions in the 1980s (San Francisco, Calif.: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1981).

References

1 See Key, V. O. Jr., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 17 (February 1955), pp. 3–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Key, , “Secular Realignment and the Party System,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 21 (May 1959), pp. 198–210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 On the definition of position and valence issues, see Stokes, Donald E., “Spatial Models of Party Competition,” in Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., Elections and the Political Order (New York: John Wiley, 1966), pp. 170–71Google Scholar.

3 Data can be found in Schneider, , “The November 4 Vote for President: What Did It Mean?” pp. 253–56Google Scholar.

4 See Petrocik, John R., Party Coalitions: Realignment and the Decline of the New Deal Party System (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 158–61Google Scholar.