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

DOI10.1177/0032329219861215
Published date01 September 2019
AuthorHerbert P. Kitschelt,Philipp Rehm
Date01 September 2019
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329219861215
Politics & Society
2019, Vol. 47(3) 425 –479
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032329219861215
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Article
Secular Partisan Realignment
in the United States:
The Socioeconomic
Reconfiguration of White
Partisan Support since the
New Deal Era
Herbert P. Kitschelt
Duke University
Philipp Rehm
Ohio State University
Abstract
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.
Keywords
vote switching, partisan realignment, party politics
Corresponding Author:
Philipp Rehm, Political Science Department, Ohio State University, Derby Hall 2186, Columbus, OH
43210, USA.
Email: rehm.16@osu.edu
861215PASXXX10.1177/0032329219861215Politics & SocietyKitschelt and Rehm
research-article2019
426 Politics & Society 47(3)
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election caught most observers by
surprise. But should it have been surprising? To explore this question, we analyze the
voting behavior of the American electorate during the last half-century. As in every
election, there are particulars to the 2016 contest, but we find that it can be well
described as continuing a long-term process of changing voting behavior of distinctive
socioeconomic groups. The American experience is thus characterized by a theoreti-
cally expected realignment of voters and parties. The traditional New Deal alignment
is gradually being replaced as we transition from an industrial to a knowledge society.
In this article, we describe that process and characterize the emerging alignment.
Our theoretical framework describes the American electorate in terms of income (low
vs. high), education (low vs. high), and—importantly—their interaction. Remarkable
changes over the last four decades in the size and electoral importance of the resulting
four groups—low-education/low-income, low-education/high-income, high-education/
low-income, high-education/high-income—have changed the demands in the electoral
arena. In a process described in this article, the New Deal core constituencies of the two
main US parties—low-education/low-income voters for the Democrats and high-educa-
tion/high-income voters for the Republicans—have become swing groups; the former
swing groups are the parties’ new core constituencies (high-education/low-income voters
for the Democrats and low-education/high-income voters for the Republicans).
Offering a theoretical account of this “polarity reversal” of the American electoral
landscape, empirically tested at both the macro and micro levels, is the main contribu-
tion of this article. Our account relates to several prominent debates in the political
science literature, but it has implications for public controversies about the strategy of
center-left parties such as the Democrats, as well. On the theory side, first, the “what’s
the matter with . . .” debate1 disagrees about how the constituencies of the two main
parties should be described—by income? education? class? geography? locality?—
and how these constituencies may have changed over time. Has the “white working
class” abandoned the Democratic Party? We will argue that this debate can be fruit-
fully advanced with our framework, which characterizes party constituencies by edu-
cation-income groups. Second, the “democracy for realists” perspective paints a
decidedly unflattering picture of citizens. But is it true that programmatic consider-
ations do not motivate vote choice? Are the bonds between voters and parties based on
policy preferences? Or is it all about identity politics?2 We argue that the links between
voters and parties are programmatic and present evidence consistent with such a per-
spective. Third, what happened in 2016? Did economic grievances or racial animus
nudge more citizens than anticipated toward Trump?3 Although we do not directly join
this debate, we will evaluate the uniqueness of the 2016 contest from a long-term his-
torical perspective. And we show that those with whom authoritarian and racist appeals
by presidential candidates resonate most also tend to belong to socioeconomic groups
affected—or prospectively threatened—by economic decline.
The developments we document and discuss in this article are characteristic of all
modern democracies. Everywhere in advanced capitalist democracies, parties on the
center-left and the center-right have undergone major changes. Everywhere, these
changes have prompted public political debates about where and how these parties
Kitschelt and Rehm 427
have to position themselves to win elections. One common dispute is over why the
“working class”—typically understood as lower-income voters—has defected from
center-left parties (or, alternatively, why center-left parties have abandoned the work-
ing class) and how it can be won back (or, alternatively, how it can be replaced).
Our analysis turns the tables on this debate in several ways. First, we show that the
center-left party, in the United States at least, is being abandoned by lower-education/
higher-income voters as much as by the working class (lower-education/lower-
income). Second, we show that lower-income voters are divided sharply into two
groups. One consists of highly educated people whose numbers and support for the
Democratic Party are growing. Its members have become the core of center-left poli-
tics. The other group of low-income voters consists of those with lower education
levels. Its members have drifted toward right-wing politics on the basis of appeals to
authoritarian conceptions of social governance, racism, and xenophobia. But they
have also become a “swing” group, up for grabs by either party, given their redistribu-
tive economic policy preferences. The working class, if anything, has not abandoned
the center-left but become a more fickle, volatile electorate, easily swayed one way or
another depending on the configuration of economic and noneconomic positions the
candidates bundle together. The 2016 Trump election demonstrates this fact.
Our article focuses on American non-Hispanic white voters. Although racial senti-
ment as motivation of voting behavior among whites plays an important role in
American politics—and in our analysis—we do not examine the racial identity of
nonwhite voters. There are several reasons for this narrowing of our empirical focus.
First, African Americans were the only quantitatively relevant nonwhite group of citi-
zens until the turn of the millennium, and they switched to the Democratic Party
almost entirely between the 1930s and 1960s. In other words, African Americans
became almost all Democrats before the major changes occurring with the rise of the
knowledge society since the 1970s and 1980s. The realignment of black voters pre-
dates available data, but it was one of several important precipitants of white realign-
ment to the Republican Party, particularly in the South. By itself, however, it does not
explain the full extent and general pattern of the realignment among distinctive groups
of (white) voters to right-wing parties that can be found outside America as well.
Second, given the high propensity of African American voters to support Democratic
candidates, and given their relatively small share in the electorate, there is simply not
much variance to explore for subgroup analysis.4 Third, the sample restriction increases
the comparability of our results with the existing literature, which usually also focuses
on white respondents when studying similar questions. Finally, we believe that our
theoretical argument has analytical carrying capacity beyond the specific case of the
United States to other advanced capitalist knowledge societies that do not have the
exceptional experience of the United States with slavery and long-term domination of
one ethnic group by another.5
We first present a theoretical framework that lays out the policy space, demand- and
supply-side developments, and the process of electoral realignment. From that frame-
work we derive both macro-level and micro-level hypotheses, which are then empiri-
cally evaluated. In the conclusion, we relate our framework and findings to the three

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