Critical Elections and Political Realignments in the USA: 1860–2000
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
| Author | Norman Schofield,Andrew Martin,Gary Miller |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-923X.00181-i1 |
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Critical Elections and Political
Realignments in the USA: 1860–2000
Norman Schofield, Gary Miller and Andrew Martin
Washington University
The sequence of US presidential elections from 1964 to 1972 is generally regarded as heralding a
fundamental political realignment, during which time civil rights became as important a cleavage
as economic rights. In certain respects, this realignment mirrored the transformation of politics
that occurred in the period before the Civil War. Formal models of voting (based on assumptions
of rational voters, and plurality-maximizing candidates) have typically been unable to provide an
account of such realignments. In this paper, we propose that US politics necessarily involves two
dimensions of policy. Whatever positions US presidential candidates adopt, there will always be
two groups of disaffected voters. Such voters may be mobilized by third party candidates, and may
eventually be absorbed into one or other of the two dominant party coalitions. The policy com-
promise, or change, required of the successful presidential candidate then triggers the political
realignment. A formal activist-voter model is presented, as a first step in understanding such a
dynamic equilibrium between parties and voters.
In 1860 Abraham Lincoln, the Republican contender, won the presidential elec-
tion by capturing a majority of the popular vote in 15 northern and western states.
The Whig or ‘Conservative Union’ candidate, Bell, only won three states (Virginia,
Kentucky and Tennessee) while the two Democrat candidates, Douglas and
Breckinridge, took the ten states of the South. (New Jersey split its electoral college
vote between Lincoln and Douglas.) From 1836 to 1852, Democrat and Whig vote
shares had been roughly comparable (Ransom, 1989), with neither party gaining
an overwhelming preponderance in the North or South. Thus, between 1852,
when the Democrat (Pierce) won the presidency and 1860, the American political
system was transformed by a fundamental ‘realignment’ of electoral support.1
The sequence of presidential elections between 1964 and 1972 also has features
of a political transformation, where the race or civil rights issue again played a
fundamental role. Except for the war-hero, Eisenhower, Democrats had held the
presidency since 1932. The 1964 election, in particular, had been a landslide in
favor of Lyndon Johnson. By 1972, this imbalance in favor of the Democrats was
completely transformed. The Republican candidate, Nixon, took 60 per cent of the
popular votes, while his Democrat opponent, McGovern, only won the electoral
college votes of Massachusetts and Washington DC.
In between, of course, was the three-way election of 1968, among Humphrey,
Nixon, and Wallace. In some respects, this election parallels the 1856 election
between Buchanan, Fremont, and Fillmore.2 Nixon won about 56 percent of the
vote in 1968, but Humphrey had pluralities in seven of the northern ‘core’ states,
as well as Washington DC, Hawaii, and West Virginia. The southern Democrat,
© Political Studies Association, 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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N . S C H O F I E L D , G . M I L L E R , A . M A R T I N
Wallace, with only about 9 percent of the popular vote, won six of the states of
the old Confederacy.
It is intuitively obvious that, in some sense, Humphrey and McGovern can be
likened to Fremont and Lincoln, at least in terms of the ‘civil rights’ policies that
they represented, while Wallace and Goldwater resemble Breckinridge. It is equally
clear that the elections of 1968 and 1972 were ‘critical’ in some sense, since they
heralded a dramatic transformation of electoral politics that mirrored the changes
of 1856–60. In both cases parties increasingly differentiated themselves on the basis
of a civil rights dimension, rather than the economic dimension of politics. This
raises the question about why Republican policy concerns circa 1860 should be
similar to Democrat positions circa 1972.
When Schattschneider (1960) first discussed the issue of electoral realignments, he
framed it in terms of strategic calculations by party elites. For example, in discussing
the election of 1896, Schattschneider argued that the Populist, William Jennings
Bryan, instigated a radical agrarian movement which, in economic terms, could be
interpreted as anti-capital. To counter this, the Republican Party became aggres-
sively pro-capital. Because conservative Democrat interests feared populism, they
revived the sectional cleavage of the civil war era, and implicitly accepted the
Republican dominance of the North. According to Schattschneider, this ‘system
of 1896’ contributed to the dominance of the Republican Party until the later
transformation of politics brought about in the midst of the Depression by FD
Roosevelt.
Recently, Mayhew (2000), has questioned the validity of the concepts of a ‘criti-
cal election’ and of ‘electoral realignment’ as presented by Schattschneider and
many later writers (such as Key, 1955; Burnham, 1970; Sundquist, 1973). Indeed,
it is true that one fundamental difficulty with this literature on realignment is that
its principal analytical mode has been macro-political, depending on empirical
analysis of shifting electoral preferences. In general, the literature has not provided
a theoretical basis for understanding the changes in political preferences. Electoral
choices are, after all, derived from voters’ perceptions of party positions.
Schattschneider implied that these party (or candidate) positions are themselves
strategically chosen in response to perceptions by the party elite of the social and
economic beliefs of the electorate.
Formally speaking, this implies that politics is a ‘game’. Individual voters have
underlying preferences that can be defined in terms of policies, and they perceive
parties in terms of these policies. Party strategists receive information of a general
kind, and form conjectures about the nature of aggregate electoral response to
policy messages. Finally, given the utilities that strategists have concerning the
importance of policy and of electoral success, they advise their candidates how best
to construct ‘utility maximizing’ strategies for the candidates.
An extensive technical literature has developed over the last four decades devoted
to the analysis of such political games. In general, the models that have been pro-
posed assume that the ‘game’ takes place in a policy space, X, say, which is used
to characterize individual voter preferences. Each candidate, j, say, offers a policy
position, zj, to the electorate, chosen so as to maximize the candidate’s utility.
P O L I T I C A L R E A L I G N M E N T S I N T H E U S A
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Typically, this utility is a function of the ‘expected’ vote share of the candidate. It
is also usually assumed that all candidates have similar utilities, in that each one
prefers to win. While there are many variants of this model, almost all reach a
similar conclusion: candidates will adopt identical, or almost identical, policy posi-
tions, in a small domain of the policy space, centrally located with respect to the
distribution of voter-preferred points.
Any such formal model has little to contribute to an interpretation of critical elec-
tions or of electoral realignment. From the point of view of this ‘game theoretic’
literature, change can only come about through the transformation of electoral
preferences by some exogenous shock. Even allowing for such shocks, the diver-
gence of party positions observed by Schattschneider can only occur if the per-
ceptions of the various parties’ strategists are radically different. This seems
implausible.
In this paper we propose a variant of the standard spatial model, so that rational
political candidates attempt to balance the need for resources with the need to take
winning policy positions. Voters choose among candidates for both policy and non-
policy reasons. The policy motivations of voters pull candidates toward the center.
However, centrist policies do little to earn the support of party activists, who are
more ideologically extreme than the median voter, and who supply vital electoral
resources. Candidates realize that the resources obtained from party activists make
them more attractive, independent of policy positions. This implies that candidates
must balance the attractiveness of activists’ resources against the centrist tug of
voters.
During most elections there is a stable pattern of partisan cleavages and alliances.
Candidates are in equilibrium that allows them to appeal to one set of partisan
activists or another. But in certain critical elections, candidates realize that they can
improve their electoral prospects by appealing to party activists on new ideologi-
cal dimensions of politics. In the next section we present a sketch of the possible
re-positioning of presidential candidates in the critical elections of 1860, 1896,
1932, and 1968. We then present an overview of the spatial model. The fourth
section gives our variant, involving activists’ choices. In the final two sections, we
draw out some further inferences with a view to providing a deeper understand-
ing of recent political alignments.
A Brief Political History: 1896–2000
Before introducing the model, it will be useful to offer schematic representations
of the ‘critical’ elections between 1860 and 1968 in order to illustrate what it is we
hope to explain....
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