The New Deal: Retrospection, Realignment, or a Reconstituted Polity?

Abstract

Roosevelt is the only president we ever had that thought the Constitution belonged to the pore man too. The way they've been areadin' it it seemed like they thought it said, 'Him that's got money shall have the rights to life, freedom and happiness.'.. . Yessir, it took Roosevelt to read in the Constitution and find out them folks way back yonder that made it was talkin' about the pore man right along with the rich one.-George Dobbin 1 Political scientists and constitutional theorists agree that the New Deal represents a significant change to American life, but they disagree as to why. Realignment scholars argue 1932 was a critical election that reoriented the makeup and agendas of the two parties. New constituencies formed around each party according to support for their respective policies. 2 Recently, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels offered a more pessimistic interpretation of the political legacy of this era: voters engaged in "myopic retrospection" and grew to support the New Deal only because it succeeded. Conventional realignment accounts, they argue, "overstate the extent to which Depression-era voters weighed and endorsed the specific policies of the Roosevelt administration." 3 Legal academicians, by contrast, view the New Deal as constitutionally significant because it marked a turning point in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on federal regulatory power. 4 One theory of constitutional development, proposed by Bruce Ackerman, contends that ordinary Americans played a role in this legal transformation. Until now, data limitations and differences in methodological preferences have kept these literatures out of conversation with each other. In this chapter, I provide a first attempt at evaluating the relative persuasiveness of the traditional realignment, economic retrospection, and constitutional development theories of the New Deal. I leverage early Gallup polls that gauged public opinion on specific New Deal policies, proposed constitutional amendments, and economic perceptions. These surveys, along with data on state income growth, allow for a