Partisan Dealignment

9 Key excerpts on "Partisan Dealignment"

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  Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies

  Realignment or Dealignment?

  • Russell J. Dalton, Scott E. Flanagan(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  FOUR Patterns of Dealignment Paul Allen Beck This section presents five cases covering seven nations in which recent changes in electoral politics exhibit characteristics of dealignment. A dealignment is a decay in the preexisting mass bases of support for the political parties— that is, an erosion of the mass party coalitions. Where partisanship reflects a long-term standing decision to support a party, dealignment is identified most easily, for it will be manifested in a decrease in the party-affiliated portion of the electorate. The decay that constitutes dealignment alternatively may be hidden behind the facade of an electorate that appears to be highly partisan, if partisanship is merely an expression of momentary vote choice. Highly variable voting patterns, the rapid rise and then demise of new (flash) parties, a shift toward nonpartisan forms of political participation, and breakdowns in party support among key social groups also may signify dealignment. In one way or another, all of the nations examined in this section have experienced the kind of decay in the traditional alignments of mass politics that constitutes a dealignment. None have yet witnessed a coalescence of electoral groupings around new lines of cleavage that is widespread enough to signal a partisan realignment. There are some signs of realignment-type change in at least one of the cases, but it is not yet sufficient to bring an end to the period of dealignment. Scholars have not agreed on whether dealignment is a new type of democratic politics or merely a prealignment stage in the electoral cycle. In either event, a focus on dealignment as a distinct type is required. The most direct evidence of dealignment is found in the United States, where partisanship is a meaningful and enduring group identification for most voters. Using both trend and panel data from 1952 to 1980, Paul Allen Beck shows that the partisan share of the American electorate declined precipitously after 1964.

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  The post-crisis Irish voter

  Voting behaviour in the Irish 2016 general election

  • Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell, Theresa Reidy, Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell, Theresa Reidy(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Party identification in the wake of the crisis: A nascent realignment? Rory Costello Introduction

  Many commentators have sounded the death knell for party identification. For example, Dalton claims that we are witnessing a general process of Partisan Dealignment and that this trend ‘reflects long-term and enduring characteristics of advanced industrial societies’ (Dalton, 2002 : 29). Like many other countries, Ireland experienced a sustained period of political dealignment, beginning in the 1970s (or earlier) and continuing right through to the new millennium. In Eurobarometer polls taken in the late 1970s, approximately two thirds of Irish respondents described themselves as being close to a political party; this had declined to 40 per cent by the mid-1990s (Mair and Marsh, 2004 : 242). As reported below, just over one quarter of respondents admitted to feeling close to a party in Irish National Election Study (INES) surveys conducted in 2002 and 2007, and this fell even further in 2011.

  This is an important and, for many observers, worrying development. Partisanship is associated with political engagement, and is also seen by some as providing the stability necessary for a functioning representative democracy. As Rosenblum argues, ‘Partisans are carriers of a more extended story about the party than may be told by the candidates of the moment.’ Their long-term focus and attention to their party, even outside election years, acts as a ‘check on short-term, arrant, political considerations’ by their party, as well as providing support and sustenance to the party following electoral defeat (Rosenblum, 2010 : 355). A dealigned electorate, by contrast, is usually associated with disengagement, the growth of anti-establishment populism, and, above all, political instability (Green, Palmquist and Schickler, 2004 : 222; Mair, 2013

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  Polarized

  Making Sense of a Divided America

  • James E. Campbell(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  51 Since there had been significant growth in the 1970s of those reporting to be in the “independent leaning to the Democrats” and “independent leaning to the Republicans” categories, counting these Americans as independents inflated the extent of dealignment.

  The dealignment, however, was not entirely a misinterpretation of a measurement. It was real and substantial. Measuring the strength of the electorate’s partisanship as the percentage of strong party identifiers minus the percentage of pure independents, partisanship in the overall electorate dropped from about a 30% net level in the 1950s and early 1960s to about a 10% net level in the early and mid-1970s.52 This was a major development, but even in the depths of the dealignment, the electorate remained more partisan than not.

  There are three reasons why the dealignment was temporary, a phase in the realignment. First, the conversion and generational replacement of Democrats into Republicans required a good deal of time. People do not abandon important lifelong self-identifications easily or quickly.53 Second, as already noted, the building of a viable Republican Party in the South was a lengthy process.54 Finally, many elected Democrats were able to fend off Republican challengers through the many advantages of incumbency, from credit-claiming and constituency service to helpful gerrymandering and well-heeled campaign financing.55

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  Critical Elections

  British Parties and Voters in Long-term Perspective

  • Geoffrey Evans, Pippa Norris, Geoffrey Evans, Pippa Norris(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Two crucial concepts are 'dealignment ' and 'realignment '. By dealignment is meant a weakening of partisan loyalty to one or both major parties. Evidence of dealignment from a party would include, for example, a weakening in its supporters' identifi-cation and constancy or a drop in its nominal and active membership. For the party in office it would include an exceptionally sharp fall in its vote at the various mid-term elections (local, European and parliamentary by-elections); for the main Opposition party, it would include a failure to improve on its previous general election performance at mid-term elections. By realignment is meant an enduring change in the normal level of electoral support for one or both main parties, accompanied by a shift in the social and ideological basis of party support. This change might affect the balance of support between one major party and the other (without necessarily implying a reversal), or between the two parties combined and one or more minor parties, or elements of both. Evidence for a realignment would be based on long-term levels of party identification or on voting at a series of 66 Critical Elections elections (not only general elections) or support in regular opinion pol ls -and on their social and ideological correlates. The Contrasting Characteristics of Deviating and Realigning Elections In the American literature the identification of realigning and deviating elections has been based on the pattern of relationships between party identification and the vote, and on trends in these relationships over time. No single critical test can determine decisively the status of a very recent election, but pairs of contrasting propositions, based on the classical model of realignment, can be formulated which, when tested against the evidence, enable us to judge the 1 997 election's potential as a realigning election.

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  Political Parties and Electoral Change

  Party Responses to Electoral Markets

  • Peter Mair, Wolfgang C Müller, Fritz Plasser, Peter Mair, Wolfgang C Müller, Fritz Plasser(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Sources : 1968–87: Nuvoli and Spreafico (1990); 1992–2001: Electoral Service of the Italian Ministry for Internal Affairs electorate. It is very unlikely that without the scandals parties such as the DC or even the PSI would have collapsed as a result of just one unfavourable election. Party perceptions of electoral dealignment We have seen that dealignment cannot be considered a widely noticeable phenomenon until the mid-1970s. Coherent with the data, a generalized party preoccupation with dealignment is not noticeable until the early 1980s, mostly as a reaction to declining electoral turnout. But individual parties’ electoral trends were much more discernible throughout the whole period. Consequently, for most of the postwar period parties reacted individually to the ups and downs in their own electoral fortunes rather than to any wider manifestations of dealignment in general. In some cases party strategies were deeply affected by such concerns. This is certainly true of Italy’s two major parties, the DC and the PCI and, to a lesser extent, of the PSI. Two major departures from the past characterize perceptions of dealignment in the 1990s: first, coalitions compete for the same available electorate, which now seems to be mainly concentrated near the centre of the political spectrum; in the past dealignment mostly concerned contiguous parties competing in pairs for limited and selected portions of the electorate situated along the whole political spectrum; secondly, individual parties are now more concerned with within-bloc dealignment than in the past, in that their relative strengths are important for their position within the coalition as well as for their influence on coalition leadership selection. The post-1992 transformation left all political parties, old and new, with per-ceptions of persistent high voter mobility. These impressions are reinforced by the continuing realignment in the party system.

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  Change In British Politics

  • Hugh Berrington(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Electorate: Partisan Dealignment Ten Years On

  Ivor Crewe

  In the mid 1970s observers of British elections began to revise their assumptions about the nature of the electorate. The 1970 election, it was argued, marked the close of a quarter-century of ‘stable two party voting’; the two elections of 1974 the beginning of a new era of ‘Partisan Dealignment’.1 These two labels were convenient shorthand for a series of loosely linked propositions about voting patterns and the working of the electoral system. The first referred to a relatively neat and tidy dovetailing of party, class and ideological allegiances into two electoral blocks, converted into parliamentary parties by the simple plurality electoral system. The second referred to an electorate with weaker and less cumulative allegiances which the same electoral system forced into a two-party mould only with increasing difficulty. Chart 1 summarises these two views of the British electorate.

  CHART 1

  THE ERA OF STABLE TWO-PARTY VOTING AND THE ERA OF Partisan Dealignment

  The initial diagnosis of Partisan Dealignment was inevitably tentative because there were only two elections, held a mere eight months apart, on which to rely for evidence. The fact that the first of these, in February 1974, was precipitated by a double crisis of economy (the three-day week) and constitution (strikes versus government legislation) and accompanied by an unusual degree of industrial and party conflict made firm conclusions particularly difficult. There was no knowing at the time whether it signified a minor byway or major juncture in the history of British elections. Nonetheless, in electoral commentary hesitant revisionism soon turned into new orthodoxy: ‘increasing volatility’, ‘consumer voting’, the ‘decline of class’ all entered the common currency.

  All reports on the electorate are interim; none can ever be final. But the passing of two more general elections, in 1979 and 1983, provides an opportunity to re-examine the central tenets of Partisan Dealignment. Indeed, it offers a valuable test. Since the mid 1970s the economy has gone into deep recession, marked by burgeoning unemployment and sharp cuts in public services, and the two major parties have each moved to a more fundamentalist position. These circumstances might be thought more conducive to partisan consolidation than Partisan Dealignment. Whether this is so will emerge from examining each pair of propositions in Chart 1

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  Developments in German Politics 4

  • Stephen Padgett, William E. Paterson, Reimut Zohlnhöfer, Stephen Padgett, William E. Paterson, Reimut Zohlnhöfer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Many journalists and political experts criticize party politics for its shortcomings, which sends a negative message to the public. In addition, the growing sophisti-cation of the Western electorate may contribute to the weakening of indi-62 Partisan Dealignment and Voting Choice vidual party ties. Similar to the decline of partisanship in the United States, a significant share of younger, politically sophisticated and better educated Germans lack party ties (Dalton, 2012a; 2014). These same individuals are developing self-expressive and post-material values that foster doubts of institutions such as parties. Furthermore, as voters begin to focus on issues as a basis of electoral choice, they are more likely to defect from their normal party predispositions, which erodes these predis-positions in general and makes further defections even more likely. Party politics in the eastern Länder obviously followed a different course. Easterners began their democratic experiences in 1990, so few of them should (or could) display the deep affective partisan loyalties that constitute a sense of ‘party identification’ (Kaase and Klingemann, 1994). Although some research suggests that many Easterners had latent affini-ties for specific parties in the Federal Republic, these were not long-term attachments born of early life experiences that we normally equate with party identification. The tribulations of unification then strained many Easterners’ opinions of the Federal Republic parties and politicians. Regular measurement of partisan attachments did not begin in Eastern surveys until early 1991.

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  The Collapse Of The Democratic Presidential Majority

  Realignment, Dealignment, And Electoral Change From Franklin Roosevelt To Bill Clinton

  • David G Lawrence(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Dealignment theory makes less ambitious claims: it predicts only change. In a dealigned world citizens lack the party identification anchor through which even major new issues produce stability of vote choice over time. Dealignment theory is no less precise than realignment theory on what new issues will emerge, but it is far less specific on what their effects will be and how long the effects might last. An analyst informed by dealignment theory could identify the issue at the source of Republican electoral strength in the 1980s, could observe its failure to establish the party-linked base for long-term Republican dominance, and could combine the insights of dealignment theory with some sense of economic cycles to predict that an advantage based on economic management could not last. But dealignment produces far less guidance than realignment theory about how long an individual issue will dominate the electoral agenda, how it will interact with emergent new issues, and how its period of domination will come to an end.

  Dealignment theory makes good sense of Bill Clinton's election as president in terms of the Republicans' economic failure at a time when they held neither an advantage in ideological issue space nor a secure foundation in mass partisan loyalties. Whether Clinton's 1992 image of moderation could survive the strains of governing, i.e., whether policy activism would inevitably rekindle an image of a governing party as ideologically extreme (as it did for Johnson after 1964 and for Reagan after 1980) was of course one of the key questions that would determine the longevity of the 1992 outcomes; so was the ability of prosperity, buttressed for the Democrats by an accompanying advantage on social welfare and class, to prove a more reliable basis for long-term Democratic success as it was for the Republicans.10

  Clinton's task was clearly not an easy one even before his party's 1994 debacle. Unified control of government in his first two years provided him fewer benefits than it had offered other Democratic presidents in the past: sharing a nominal party affiliation with the congressional majority no longer provides a basis for the legislative triumphs or clear legislative record it allowed Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson. Even if the Democrats had held together well enough to allow implementation of a clear legislative program against Republican opposition, the advanced state of partisan disaggregation in the electorate made the likelihood of generating mass party loyalties that could drive elections for a generation to come would have been slim. Unambiguous personal

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  Party Brands in Crisis

  Partisanship, Brand Dilution, and the Breakdown of Political Parties in Latin America

  • Noam Lupu(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Those breakdowns fragment party systems and make polities vulnerable to outsiders who can undermine democracy. Mass partisanship may not conform to our ideals of democratic preference aggre- gation, but it is an important bulwark protecting democratic societies from instability and democratic erosion. Scholars have expressed similar trepidation toward elite polarization. Studies link the polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States to legislative gridlock, elite incivility, income inequality, and voter disen- gagement (e.g., Hetherington 2009; Layman et al. 2006; McCarty et al. 2006). U.S. voters appear to prefer when their parties cooperate (Hibbing and Theiss- Morse 2002; Ramirez 2009; but see Harbridge and Malhotra 2011). 7 In other contexts, the convention dating back to Sartori (1976) associates polarization with democratic breakdown and, more recently, with corruption and economic decline (Brown et al. 2011; Frye 2002). 7 As an empirical matter, it is striking that despite the conventional wisdom about voters’ preferences for bipartisanship, U.S. legislators are overwhelmingly partisan (e.g., McCarty et al. 2006). As former Democratic leader Dick Gephardt once said, “bipartisanship is abnormal” (quoted in Trubowitz and Mellow 2005: 434). Whether voters outside the United States similarly prefer interparty cooperation is a question that deserves further research. 182 Party brands in crisis In contrast, we often extol politics by consensus. Consociational systems for power-sharing and consensus-based policy making appear to help stabilize deeply divided societies (see Andeweg 2000; Lijphart 1994). Similarly, pacts among diverse elites helped many countries, particularly in Latin America, tran- sition to democracy during the Third Wave (e.g., O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986). Scholars often viewed these pacts as positive solutions to the region’s historic polarization and instability (but see Karl 1990).

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