Southern realignment, party sorting, and the polarization of American primary electorates, 1958–2012

Abstract

Many scholars have argued that primary elections are an important factor in the polarization of the American Congress. Yet little research measures change in the policy preferences of primary electorates to evaluate the connection directly. We create the first explicit measures of the preferences of primary voters over the last 60 years using a Bayesian item-response theory model. Although the overall distribution of population preferences has changed little, the preferences of primary voters are now much more related to the party of the primary that they attend. We show that liberals are much more likely to turn out in Democratic primaries and conservatives are much more likely to turn out in Republican primaries. We estimate that the divergence of primary from general electorates is six times larger in 2012 than in 1958 owing to this "primary sorting". This trend began with the emergence of the Southern Republicans. As the Republican party became viable, conservative Southerners switched to Republican primaries leading to a leftward shift in Democratic primary electorates. Nationwide, primary sorting began sometime after it began in the South. We speculate that Southern Realignment played a clarifying role that contributed to subsequent sorting of primary electorates nationwide.

Who Wants to Run? How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization

“…Recent work estimating the policy preferences of primary voters supports this view (Hill and Tausanovitch 2016 Another way primaries might affect polarization relates to the strategic behavior of candidates. If moderate candidates anticipate that the primary election won't be favorable to them, they may not run in the first place.…”

Party Polarization and Trust in Science: What about Democrats?

“…In the 1970s, conservative Republicans alone made up 47 percent of their party, but by the 2010s, that proportion had increased to 63 percent. Some of these trends, particularly among the more ideologically committed subgroups (conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats) may be due to gradual processes of ideological sorting, among other forces (Fiorina and Abrams 2008; Hill and Tausanovitch 2018).…”

Sidestepping primary reform: political action in response to institutional change

“…There is disagreement in the literature as to how consequential are primary reforms (e.g., Gerber and Morton, 1998; Hirano et al , 2010; Bullock and Clinton, 2011; McGhee et al , 2014; Hill, 2015; Kousser, 2015; McGhee and Shor, 2017; Kousser et al , 2018), even if primary elections are consequential (e.g. Brady et al , 2007; Boatright, 2013; Hill and Tausanovitch, 2018). The evidence of sidestepping reform here suggests that to understand party polarization and the consequences of institutional reform requires analysis of the many competing mechanisms of reform together.…”