Electoral Realignments

Mayhew, David R.

doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.3.1.449

Cited by 49 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…Moreover, as Jessop notes, "the unity of the state" is itself a "project" that results from the promotion of party spirit that, in turn, gives shape to the state and links it to the national popular imagination by framing it in particular ways (1990:364). Inspired by these critiques of the state autonomy approach, we argue that (in certain contexts) political parties define the axes along which the expansion 1 For a review of the realignment literature, see Mayhew (2000). 2 There are, however, important exceptions to the foregoing approaches.…”

Section: State Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey

Leon

Desai

Tuğal

2009

Sociological Theory

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Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community. Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how "political articulation" has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline.This article examines three contemporary political projects: white racial formation and suburbanization in the United States, Islamic mobilization in Turkey, and Hindu nationalism in India. The outcome in each case has been a racialized or ethnoreligious bloc. Our research question attempts to illuminate the decisive processes that are common to all three cases. To that end we ask simply: Why these particular social formations and not others?Despite the fact that each of these projects is often identified with a specific political party-the Republican Party in the United States, the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India-much of the literature fails to systematically elaborate the role of parties in the construction of these * Address correspondence to: Cihan Tugal,

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Section: State Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey

Leon

Desai

Tuğal

2009

Sociological Theory

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“…Since 2002, many of the efforts to chart realignments in the United States also represent rebuttals to David Mayhew's () critical assessment of the realignment literature. In response, these studies define realignments to a “new pattern of electoral outcomes” (Paulson, , p. 148) or a durable “shift in the parties’ national electoral balance” (Campbell, , p. 361), and use trend‐based analyses of congressional and/or presidential election outcomes at the national level (Campbell, ; Norpoth and Rusk, ) and across states (Paulson, ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 In the mid-1960s, scholars from the Michigan school conceptually linked party identification to the normal vote (Campbell, 1966;Converse, 1966), ushering in 30 years of party realignment research focusing on changes in party identification using survey data (Abramowitz and Saunders, 1998;Burnham, 1970Burnham, , 1982Carmines andStimson, 1981, 1986;Clubb, Flanigan, and Zingale, 1980;Petrocik, 1981Petrocik, , 1987Sundquist, 1983). Even though these studies provided a number of important insights, critics of this realignment research noted that the detection and classification of realignments, dealignments, critical realignments, secular realignments, and dynamic realignments proved to be more difficult than the theory would suggest (Carmines and Stimson, 1989;Mayhew, 2002;Shafer, 1991, pp. 21-23).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Structured Partisan Competition: A Vote Shares Model of Party Alignments and Realignments*

Aistrup

2012

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective. This study develops and tests an aggregate “vote shares” model of party alignments and realignments, building a theoretical framework around “structured political composition” (Rabinowitz, Gurian, and Macdonald, 1984, p. 6). The vote shares model conceptualizes party alignments as latent class constructs, or factors, and changes in these latent class constructs as party realignments. Methods. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model with bias corrected bootstrap estimates and standard errors is used where the cases are counties and the variables are aggregate election outcomes. The data come from Kansas from 1900 to 2010. Results. Comparing the findings of the vote‐shares approach to those of Nardulli (2005) and Sundquist (1983) suggests that the vote shares model provides a greater depth of understanding and a more accurate portrait of the timing of realignments and the partisan bias of new alignments in Kansas. The vote shares model also overcomes the major problem of false positives associated with landslide elections, a problem that plagued most previous aggregate voting models. Conclusion. The vote‐shares model of party alignments and realignments provides a viable alternative for analyzing historic and current election returns where the votes are aggregated by a geographically defined government jurisdiction (parish, county, city, or district).

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“…a scandal, a fancy, a blunder, a depression, or a world war may come along and swerve voters." 7 But for Mayhew, disputes about periodization go only so far. Writing at the apex of the stock market boom and enthusiasm for the New Democrats' "third way," he presses a broader claim: that the "master narrative" at the heart of realignment theory "does not come close to working"-specifically, its insistence that "American political history had been a continuing, zero-sum contest between, on the one hand, an acquisitive and domineering business class and, on the other, a chiefly lower-bracket coalition of farmers and laborers bent on curbing those mercantile or capitalist propensities."…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite Mayhew's claim that he has "not seen a serious defense of the idea" that Jackson's election in 1828 involved realignment, we think that there is no point in pursuing discussions that do not acknowledge, right at the start, that both that era and the Civil War mark clear realignments. 18 Yes, the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democrats also competed in the early years of the Republic. But that episode ran into the sand.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%