Political realignment theory Essay Example

both form and timing. V. O. Key originally defined a critical election as one “in which the depth and intensity of community and in which new and durable electoral groupings are formed” (1955, p. 4). This definition is very well known, and it is often cited by political scientists. Less often cited is the fact that Key used 1928 instead of 1932 to show as a critical election. According to Key, the fissures and the shifts that brought about the durable New Deal party system actually first manifested themselves four years before Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the presidency. In terms of modern presidential politics, the 1964 election seems to mirror 1928.

The salience of a new, more conservative agenda in 1964, and the defection of the South to Barry Goldwater that year clearly presaged the dawn of an “emerging Republican majority” (Phillips, 1970) and the success of Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. To Key’s 1964 created enduring change in relations of power and electoral groupings pertaining to presidential politics. Republicans have won five of the six presidential elections since 1964, and they have done so in part through the successful exploitation of strategic opportunities first recognized during that critical year.

Walter Dean Burnham would describe those opportunities, “emergent tensions in society…not adequately controlled by the organization or outputs of party politics as usual, escalate to a flash point” (1970, p. 10). More specifically, race, law and order, and other so-called social issues divided the Democratic Party, and at the presidential level created a new Republican majority. The fact that this majority is composed of “behavioral presidential Republicans” and not sociopsychological party identifiers has

misled political scientists into believing that it is not a durable electoral grouping.

This new majority has formed thirty-six years after Franklin Roosevelt first constructed New Deal coalition, reflecting with remarkable precision the realignment “periodicity” emphasized by Burnham (1970, p. 8). Viewed from this perspective, the post-1964 presidential “party system” can be compared favorably, from the viewpoint of what realignment theory predicts, with any of the earlier party systems in American electoral history. The new agenda items, the cross-cutting cleavages, the split and subsequent decline of a powerful coalition and the emergence of a new electoral majority are all consistent with traditional realignment theory.

These developments are more than consistent with the theory: they are, in part at least, results of it. Since 1964 “realignment” has referred not only to a theory of political change, but also to the goal of innovative strategies in national electoral politics. Conservative activists from Kevin Phillips, William Rusher and Patrick Buchanan to Richard Vigueriem Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich have identified new issues and purposefully devised new political strategies for the purpose of exacerbating tensions and rivalry within the New Deal collation.

Their long-term strategy was to effect a realignment of the party system by molding Democratic selectors and newly mobilized voters into a transformed national Republican party. These self-styled movement conservatives did not achieve all the policy changes they sought, but they did play a role in establishing a powerful Republican hold on the American Presidency. The problem is that this realignment of presidential politics was not reflected at other levels of the political system.

The Democrats retained a comfortable majority in the House

of Representatives, a decisive edge at local and state levels, and a durable advantage in terms of partisan identification. As a result, the yearning of political scientists and other interested observers went unfulfilled. As this yearning yielded to resignation the theoretical discussion turned to the matter of explaining why a realignment of the entire American party system had not taken place. One answer is the prospects for a full-scale realignment have been frustrated by the power and durability of congressional incumbents.

The phenomenon of vanishing marginals (Mayhew, 1974) has given Democratic party an almost unassailable advantage in congressional politics and this advantage is insulated Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, from the tensions and fissures that have proved so disruptive in presidential politics. Even Thomas Mann, a scholar who does not accept the thesis that marginal seats are vanishing, ahs referred to the “insulation of House elections from national politics” in explaining the Republican’s failure to build on their success at the presidential level (1987, p. 76). The congressional incumbency effect does partially explain the subdivision of the American party system and the failure of that system to realign fully. Students of the American presidency have also offered an explanation for these developments, and their explanation has received little attention. They have argued that the New Deal era produced a new presidency and a new set of relationships between hat presidency and other political institutions.

As a group these scholars contend that the modern presidency is characterized by an intimate exclusive relationship between the incumbent and the public that has separated the presidency from congressional and local politics. As a result, it is

no longer safe to assume that changes in presidential politics will be r elected throughout the rest of the electoral system. Samuel Kernell (1986), Jeffrey Tulis (1987) and Theodore Lowi (1985) have offered particularly persuasive analyses of this new American presidency, and of the distance that now exists between presidential politics and the rest of the political process.

In “Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership”, Kernel defines going public as a “strategy whereby a president promotes himself and his policies in Washington by appealing to the American public for support” (p. 1). Kernell begins with the framer’s dislike for popular leadership, and traces the historical process through which such leadership became the very heart of the modern presidency. He argues that the key to this process was a fundamental shift in the style of American government from “institutionalized pluralism” (p. 4) inhabited by disparate individuals seeking short-term political gain and security. For Kernel this shift amounts to a change in the “essence of presidential leadership” (p. 14). Institutional pluralism had frowned upon “unilateral forms of influence,” but individual pluralism turned prestige and public support into the “currency of power” (p. 36). The former system, as Neustadt saw clearly, required presidents who bargained well (Neustadt, 1980).

The last requires presidents adept at going public. The key to Kernell’s analysis is the distance he posited between the new presidency and the rest of the political system. The bargaining President was by necessity fully immersed in the inner workings of the Washington system, striving always to establish stable relationships with other centers of political power and to cultivate a professional reputation for substantive initiative, reliability,

and the shrewd exercise of formal and informal power.

Presidents may still need good bargaining skills (Bodnick, 1990), but the modern presidency, according to Kernell, is surrounded by an ever greater number of centers independent political power. Indeed, the President is at the center of a political whirlpool in which individual congressmen, bureaucratic officials, and interest group leaders form, disband and reform in what Kernell calls “shaky protocoalitions” (p. 24). In this setting presidents have chosen to tie themselves ever closer to the American public at large, mainly through the skillful use of the mass media.

Given these political conditions, is it any wonder that a classic, system wide realignment has not taken place? The emphasis on “going public” has distanced presidential politics from congressional politics and local politics, and made a realignment such as those that took place in 1860, 1896 or 1932 very unlikely. It has not negated the possibility that the presidential electoral and political process might realign on its own. Jeffrey Tulis in “The Rhetorical Presidency” takes a more constitutional approach to the same basic phenomenon.

Tulis contrasts the founding notion of a presidency carefully and explicitly insulated from the passions of the national public with the modern notion of the presidency as the very embodiment of the national popular will. For Tulis, this change is such a fundamental transformation of the presidential office and of the American governmental system that it warrants talk of a second twentieth century U. S. Constitution. Taking “The Federalist” as his founding document, Tulis argues that the framers deeply feared demagoguery and popular leadership of any kind.

As a result, they

designed a presidency that would be strong enough to check congressional tyranny but would not be so close to the people that it could represent a threat to deliberative government. This perspective led to a particular style of presidential rhetoric that avoided direct emotional exchanges with the people, and that explicitly recognized and respected the constitutional barriers to majority rule. Kernel, Tulis and Lowi have a great deal in common.

Each addresses the modern relationship between the President and the People, and each argues that this relationship has severed or superceded many of the organic ties that used to connect the presidency to other institutions, particularly Congress and the parties. In composite, the three authors argue that a plebiscitary presidency, by going public and focusing primarily on direct communication with the American public, has undermined bargaining, coalition formation, and traditional party politics.

The overall institutional context in which realignment theory was devised and successfully applied no longer pertains. This does not necessarily mean that the party system has dealigned, or that realignment theory has lost its explanatory or predictive value. It could also mean that the American electoral process has split into a presidential party system in which, for another set of reasons, the New Deal regime has endured, and at times prospered. These sub-systems and the ways that they change and develop deserve far more careful analysis.

Recent literature on the presidency suggests that satisfactory analysis of these matters must take into account the development of a distinctly presidential level of American politics. Presidential politics and the congressional and local politics are now two, and perhaps even three, separate processes that

should be approached as substantially distinct theoretical and analytical problems. This is not cause to abandon realignment theory. Rather, it is cause to hope that students of the American electoral processes will take very seriously the work that their colleagues are doing on American political institutions, particularly the presidency.