A delayed return to historical norms: Congressional party polarization after the second World War

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 505-531

  Han, Hahrie ^a   Brady, David W ^b  

^a WELLESLEY COLLEGE   (United States)

^b STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250007991     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123407000269     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. David Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1991); Robert Van Houweling, Legislators' Personal Policy Preferences and Partisan Legislative Organization (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2003); Gary C. Jacobson, 'Explaining the Ideological Polarization of the Congressional Parties since the 1970s', in David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, eds, Process, Party, and Policy Making: Further New Perspectives on the History of Congress (Stanford, Calif.; Stanford University Press, forthcoming); Jason Roberts and Steven Smith, 'Procedural Contexts, Party Strategy, and Conditional Party Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1971-2000', American Journal of Political Science, 47 (2003), 305-17.
2. Jamie L. Carson, Michael H. Crespin, Charles J. Finocchiaro and David Rohde, 'Linking Congressional Districts across Time: Redistricting and Party Polarization in Congress' (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 2003); Gary W. Cox and Jonathan N. Katz, Elbridge Gerry's Salamander: The Electoral Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
3. Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Political Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
4. Jeffrey M. Stonecash, Mark D. Brewer and Mack D. Mariani, Diverging Parties: Realignment, Social Change, and Political Polarization (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002).
5. Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House; Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Sean Theriault, 'The Case of the Vanishing Moderates: Party Polarization in the Modern Congress' (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 2003).
6. It is important to note that this article focuses on explaining the rise in polarization in the latter decades of the twentieth century. We argue that this rise in polarization can only be understood in its historical context and thus reference the decline in polarization in the 1950s. This article does not, however, explain the decline in polarization in the 1950s - a separate project focuses on that.
7. E.g. Gary C. Jacobson, 'Party Polarization in National Politics: The Electoral Connection', in Jon Bond and Richard Fleischer, eds, Polarized Politics: The President and Congress in a Partisan Era (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2000); Gary C. Jacobson, 'Explaining the Ideological Polarization of the Congressional Parties', Conference on the History of Congress, San Diego, 2003; Eric Schickler, 'Institutional Change in the House of Representatives, 1867-1998: A Test of Partisan and Ideological Power Balance Models', American Political Science Review, 94 (2000), 269-88; David W. Brady, Joseph Cooper and Patricia Hurley, 'The Decline of Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1887-1968', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 4 (1979), 381-407; Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, 'The Polarization of American Politics', Journal of Politics, 46 (1984), 1061-79; Stephen Ansolabehere, James M. Snyder Jr and Charles Stewart III, 'Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections', American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 136-59; McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal, Polarized America.
8. Stonecash, Brewer and Mariani, Diverging Parties.
9. This graph mirrors a graph found in Schickler, 'Institutional Change in the House of Representatives, 1867-1998'. Schickler focuses only on the House, however, and this graph also examines the Senate.
10. The results are consistent with using ADA scores. The only difference is that ADA scores do not begin until 1947 and they show a greater degree of non-South overlap among Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s.
11. Roberts and Smith, 'Procedural Contexts, Party Strategy, and Conditional Party Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1971-2000'.
12. E.g. Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House; Patricia Hurley and Rick K. Wilson, 'Partisan Voting Patterns in the U.S. Senate, 1877-1986', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 14 (1989), 225-50; Brady, Cooper and Hurley, 'The Decline of Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1887-1968'.
13. Although the Senate experienced some rule changes in the early 1970s, they did not have nearly the same effect as similar changes in the House (Barbara Sinclair, 'The Distribution of Committee Positions in the U.S. Senate: Explaining Institutional Change', American Journal of Political Science, 32 (1988), 276-301; Barbara Sinclair, The Transformation of the U.S. Senate (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House; Kenneth A. Shepsle, 'The Changing Textbook Congress', in John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson, Can the Government Govern? (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1989), pp. 238-66). In her analysis of committee assignments in the Senate, Sinclair notes that, 'The [redistributive provisions of the 1970 Reorganization Act] were modest in design and even more modest in impact' (p. 293). In other words, the impact of the 1970 Reorganization Act in the Senate was more limited than the House.
14. E.g. Jacobson, 'Party Polarization in National Politics'; Jacobson, 'Explaining the Ideological Polarization of the Congressional Parties since the 1970s'; Schickler, 'Institutional Change in the House of Representatives, 1867-1998'; Brady, Cooper and Hurley, 'The Decline of Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1887-1968'; Poole and Rosenthal, 'The Polarization of American Politics'.
15. James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991).
16. To corroborate these indices, we checked them against Stimson's findings. We aggregated the individual scores to create mean scores for Republicans versus Democrats in each presidential election year. Looking at the mean differences between parties over time on issues related to race and the role of government, we see a basic historical pattern: the voters converged on key issues in the 1950s, but patterns of polarization began to re-emerge in the 1960s. These results are largely consistent with Stimson's results (Stimson, Public Opinion in America, Figs. 4.4 and 4.5).
17. See Matthew S. Levendusky, 'Sorting in the U.S. Mass Electorate' (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 2005), for more details on historical sorting processes in the electorate. This pattern of divergence between presidential and congressional elections is also clear using three alternative approaches. If we measure respondent ideology using either (1) the seven-point ANES party identification or (2) the seven-point liberal-conservative scale (scale begins in 1972), we see convergence before the mid-1960s and divergence thereafter. In other words, regardless of how we measure respondent ideology, voters exhibit similar levels of cross-party voting in congressional and presidential elections prior to the mid- 1960s. After 1964, the level of cross-party voting in presidential elections declines, while cross-party voting in congressional elections stays relatively constant. A third approach regresses the probability of voting Democratic in presidential and congressional elections on respondent opinions on race and the role of government. The same pattern emerges. Predicted probabilities from presidential and congressional vote choice regressions parallel each other until the early 1960s. In 1964, 1972 and from 1980 onward, the number of conservatives voting Democratic for president averages less than 5 per cent. In contrast, conservative votes for House candidates average over 27 per cent from 1964 onward and over 20 per cent in the Senate.
18. This explains why we still see an increase in partisan overlap in Congress even after 1964. Figure 2 shows that overlap among House Republicans and both parties in the Senate increased in the late 1960s, as almost a third of voters continued to choose congressional candidates who did not necessarily support their views on issues like race and the role of government in society through the early 1970s. Thus, in many states, the Senate constituencies continued to pull legislators in more moderate directions than their national parties. For instance, six Senate Republicans were in the overlap region in 1967 who were not there in 1965. Of these six members, three members, first elected to the Senate prior to 1964, moved into the overlap region as the national parties polarized and they felt contrarian pulls from their constituents. The three newly elected members were all Rockefeller Republicans, carried into office with the unique political circumstances of the 1966 elections (similar patterns hold true for the 1968 elections, and then we begin to see the decline in numbers thereafter). In addition, there are several reasons why we would expect the Senate to be slower to react to changes in national party politics than the House. First, the size of Senate constituencies creates more heterogeneous bases of support, making it harder for sweeping change to occur (Frances E. Lee and Bruce Oppenheimer, Sizing up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)). In addition, because only a third of the Senate is up for re-election every two years, we do not see the same wholesale change in the Senate as we do in the House. Finally, the special circumstances of the 1968 election, in which anti-Johnson sentiment propelled a number of liberal Republicans into office, also contributed to this pattern. Thus, we begin to see the decline in overlap in the mid-1970s, which is the same time we witness a decline in cross-party voting in Congress among voters. This comports with our subsequent analyses of electoral replacement, where the patterns begin to emerge in the 1960s but become really clear in the 1970s and 1980s, as congressional polarization begins to re-emerge. We are indebted to Alan Ware on this point.
19. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960); V. O. Key Jr, 'Secular Realignment and the Party System', Journal of Politics, 17 (1959), 198-210; V. O. Key, A Theory of Critical Elections (New York: Irvington, 1958); Robert R. Alford, Party and Society: The Anglo-American Democracies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964).
20. Earle Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, 'Issue Evolution, Population Replacement, and Normal Partisan Change', American Political Science Review, 75 (1981), 107-18.
21. Robert S. Erikson, 'Malapportionment, Gerrymandering, and Party Fortunes in Congressional Elections', American Political Science Review, 66 (1972), 1234-45; Andrew Gelman and Gary King, 'Estimating Incumbency Advantage without Bias', American Journal of Political Science, 34 (1990), 1142-64; Stephen Ansolabehere, James M. Snyder Jr and Charles Stewart III, 'Old Voters, New Voters, and the Personal Vote: Using Redistricting to Measure the Incumbency Advantage', American Journal of Political Science, 44 (2000), 17-34; John R. Alford and David W. Brady, 'Personal and Partisan Advantage in U.S. Congressional Elections, 1846-1990', in Lawrence Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, eds, Congress Reconsidered (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1993); Gary C. Jacobson, 'The Marginals Never Vanished: Incumbency and Competition in Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, 1952-82', American Journal of Political Science, 31 (1987), 126-41; Bruce E. Cain, John Ferejohn and Morris P. Fiorina, The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
22. The sophomore surge is calculated as the difference between the winning vote shares of candidates running as incumbents for the first time, versus their winning vote share in the previous election. The retirement slump is the mean decrease in the party's vote from an election in which an incumbent was running, to an election in which the incumbent retires and the seat is open. See Gary C. Jacobson, The Politics of Congressional Elections, 5th edn (New York: Longman, 2001); Alford and Brady, 'Personal and Partisan Advantage in U.S. Congressional Elections, 1846-1990'.
23. Barry C. Burden and David C. Kimball, Why Americans Split Their Tickets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
24. Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder Jr, 'The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections: An Analysis of State and Federal Offices, 1942-2000', Election Law Journal, 1 (2002), 315-28.
25. Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher, eds., Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2000); Richard Fleisher and Jon R. Bond, 'The President in a More Partisan Legislative Arena', Political Research Quarterly, 49 (1996), 729-48.
26. Note that cross-pressuring can arise from the districts moving or the parties moving. For example, a Democrat from a relatively conservative district could become cross-pressured if the Democratic party in Congress becomes more liberal and the constituency stays the same. Alternately, demographic changes could lead the constituency to become more conservative and the national party could stay the same. In either case (or the case in which both the party and the constituency moves), cross-pressuring, or a mismatch between constituency and party preferences, emerges.
27. Richard Fleischer and Jon R. Bond, 'The Shrinking Middle in the Us Congress', British Journal of Political Science, 34 (2004), 429-51.
28. Timothy Nokken, 'Dynamics of Congressional Loyalty: Party Defection and Roll-Call Behavior, 1947-97', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 25 (2000), 417-44.
29. Gary C. Jacobson and Sam Kernell, Strategy and Choice in Congressional Elections (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).
30. By 'personal vote,' we are referring to the portion of the candidate's vote margin that is attributed to factors personal to the candidate, not the candidate's party. Thus, a candidate can generate a personal vote from a variety of sources - including constituency services, pork barrel politics or issue-based alignment with the constituency - but the sources of the candidate's personal vote are always located in the candidate's geographic constituency.
31. A rich body of research has explored the strategies legislators can use to increase the personal vote. See, for example, Cain, Ferejohn and Fiorina, The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence; Morris P. Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).
32. Brandice Canes-Wrone, David W. Brady and John F. Cogan, 'Out of Step, Out of Office: Electoral Accountability and House Members' Voting', American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 127-40; Ansolabehere, Snyder and Stewart, 'Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections'; Roberts. Erikson and Gerald C. Wright, 'Voters, Candidates, and Issues in Congressional Elections', in Lawrence Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, eds, Congress Reconsidered (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1997), pp. 132-61.
33. Based on work in Canes-Wrone, Brady and Cogan, 'Out of Step', we also develop alternative measures of constituency liberalism that hold a variety of economic and demographic variables constant and find the results to be the same. It is possible that there are members who are cross-pressured because their constituencies consistently vote with the opposite party at the presidential level, but do not meet our 45-55 criteria. We use this standard of measuring cross-pressuring. however, because it is a more conservative test.
34. See Nokken, 'Dynamics of Congressional Loyalty', for more discussion of these cases.
35. Canes-Wrone, Brady and Cogan, 'Out of Step, Out of Office'; Ansolabehere, Snyder and Stewart, 'Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections'; Erikson and Wright, 'Voters, Candidates, and Issues in Congressional Elections'.
36. Canes-Wrone, Brady and Cogan, 'Out of Step, Out of Office'.
37. We also ran the analysis using ADA scores and found the results to be the same.
38. Jacobson, 'Explaining the Ideological Polarization of the Congressional Parties since the 1970s'; Theriault, 'The Case of the Vanishing Moderates'.
39. Jacobson, 'Explaining the Ideological Polarization of the Congressional Parties since the 1970s'.
40. Robert Axelrod, 'Where the Vote Comes From: An Analysis of Electoral Coalitions, 1952-1968', American Political Science Review, 66 (1972). 11-20; Robert Axelrod, 'Presidential Election Coalitions in 1984', American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 281-4.
41. McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal, Polarized America.
42. Ronde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House; Black and Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans.
43. Cox and Katz, Elbridge Gerry's Salamander.
44. Carson et al., Linking Congressional Districts across Time.
45. Stonecash, Brewer and Mariani, Diverging Parties.