The movement of new social forces into the political system is one of the central themes in the study of American political development on both the national and local levels. For example, Samuel P. Huntington has characterized the realignment of 1800 as marking “the ascendancy of the agrarian Republicans over the mercantile Federalists, 1860 the ascendancy of the industrializing North over the plantation South, and 1932 the ascendancy of the urban working class over the previously dominant business groups.” And the process of ethnic succession—the coming to power of Irish and German immigrants, followed by the Italians and Jews, and then by blacks and Hispanics—is a major focus of most analyses of the development of American urban politics.
