RELIGIOUS VOTING IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: TESTING ALTERNATIVE THEORIES

Scholars of American electoral politics have documented the recent partisan realignment of religious groups. Indeed, careful analysts often find that religious variables are better predictors of partisan choice than classic socioeconomic divisions. Still, there has been relatively little effort to put this religious realignment in both theoretical and historical perspective. In this article, we update our previous work on the historical evolution of religious partisanship, demonstrating the continued relevance of ethnocultural (or ethnoreligious) theory, utilized by political historians, and restructuring theory, an important sociological perspective. Both viewpoints help us understand presidential elections since the 1930s, as we demonstrate with data from a wide range of surveys. After utilizing the 2020 Cooperative Election Study to examine the contemporary voting of ethnoreligious groups in greater detail, we test the impact of religious variables controlling for other demographic, attitudinal, and partisan influences and find that religious identities and orientations often retain independent influence even under stringent controls for other factors shaping the presidential vote.

The New Era of Toxic Politics

This chapter looks at the new era of toxic politics, when a fully-nationalized, fully-sorted two-party system emerged, divided over increasingly existential questions over the fate of American national identity. American national politics is so dysfunctional because it has two disciplined, non-overlapping parties, each constantly seeking to win a narrow majority. The institutions are set up to require compromise and coalition-building. However, electoral politics now push against compromise and coalition-building. Parties have no incentive to work together. And voters, increasingly convinced the fate of the nation is at stake with every election, now actively punish compromise. The result is toxic politics and political disaster. Though these trends have been building for decades, it was only in the 2010s that they reached their full expression. It was in the 2010s that political opposition fully became political obstructionism, and that political opponents became political enemies. Finally, the 2010s marked the completion of the half-century partisan realignment that began with the civil rights revolution, with one party (the Democrats) fully becoming the party of diversity and cosmopolitan values, and one party (the Republicans) fully becoming the party of white, Christian America and traditionalist America. This is the kind of political conflict that can destroy democracy.

Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era

White American voters have realigned among the two dominant parties by income and education levels. This article argues that the interaction of education and income provides a more insightful—and stark—display of this change than treating them individually. Each group of voters is associated with distinctive “first dimension” views of economic redistribution and “second dimension” preferences concerning salient sociopolitical issues of civic and cultural liberties, race, and immigration. Macro-level hypotheses are developed about the changing voting behavior of education-income voting groups along with micro-level hypotheses about the propensity of vote switching. The hypotheses are tested with data from the American National Election Studies 1952–2016. A profound realignment is revealed between (groups of) white voters and the two main US parties that is consistent with the theoretical expectations developed in the article.

Mugwumps and never trumps : the rhetoric of party bolting and party repair

Political partisanship has long occupied a central position in the study of American political rhetoric, but scholarly understanding of intraparty political communication has lagged behind that of interparty conflict. While disputes between Republicans and Democrats are a significant animating factor in 21st century political life, our understanding of what moves and defines these institutions has largely been left to the rigid empiricism of political science or the functionalism characteristic of much of historiography. This dissertation proposes party repair as a new theory of partisanship and partisan realignment rooted in the study of intraparty political factions and organizational and constitutive rhetoric. Party bolters in the elections of 1884, 1948, and 2016 provide a brief glimpse into the complexities of partisan identification and disidentification occurring outside the traditional framework of critical elections.

The polarisation of energy policy in the US Congress

Although energy policy used to be a nonpartisan issue in Congress, partisan conflicts over energy policies are intense these days. To examine how a nonpartisan issue became a highly partisan one, we create and use a new measure of energy policy positions of members of Congress. Our analyses of member behaviour show that, in addition to partisan realignment in the South, energy policy-specific factors – rising oil prices, the climate change debate since 1988, and the salience of energy policy in Congress – are significantly related to increasing party polarisation over energy policy. We also find that the increasing convergence between energy policy and environmental policy has significantly contributed to party polarisation over energy issues. The study thus provides important understanding of this specific policy area as well as insights into the party polarisation literature by demonstrating how policy-specific events and policy convergence transform a nonpartisan issue into a highly partisan one.

Antiracism Without Antiracists

This pivotal chapter draws on the insights of city delegation theory and uses a mixed-methods approach to help explain one of the most important changes in American political history—the midcentury partisan realignment in response to civil rights. Using a wide range of evidence and analysis, this chapter illustrates how city representatives, including those with all-white constituencies who were not particularly supportive of civil rights, were cohesively supportive of a new approach to national race relations. Throughout the Long New Deal, city representatives—especially those from cities with strong local institutions of horizontal integration—were the most supportive of civil rights liberalism. This account forces a reconsideration of the forces behind political change and examines how local institutions can build alliances to support inclusive policies and politics, even when the constituencies behind such coalitions are not natural allies.

Using US Senate Delegations from the Same State as Paired Comparisons: Evidence for a Reagan Realignment

ABSTRACTThe fact that two senators are elected from each state offers the potential for natural paired comparisons. In particular, examining historical and geographic patterns in terms of changes in the number of divided US Senate delegations (i.e., states whose two senators are of different parties) is a useful route to testing competing models of American politics, including theories of split-ticket voting, party polarization, and realignment. Brunell and Grofman (1998) used divided Senate delegations to indirectly examine evidence for realignment. We hypothesized that a partisan realignment will necessarily lead to a cyclical pattern in the number of divided Senate delegations. We predicted that the number of divided Senate delegations at the state level would decline after 1996 because we conjectured that there had been a realignment cusp around 1980. We tested this prediction with data from 1952–2016 and our prediction was confirmed.