Class and Party: Secular Realignment and the Survival of Democrats outside the South

Abstract

A common conclusion is that beginning in the late 1960s the policy stands of Democrats on civil rights and civil liberties issues alienated the white working class. Race is presumed to have driven a wedge between the white and non-white working class, and diminished class voting in American politics. The New Deal coalition has eroded, the South has moved into the Republican column, and class conflict is presumed to have steadily declined since the 1950s. These arguments, however, leave us unable to explain how the Democratic party managed to survive for over forty years as the majority party in Congress, even while it was losing the South. The party survived by steadily increasing its support outside the South. The focus of this analysis is whom the Democrats attracted over time, and what the evidence indicates about the presumed alienation of the white, working class. The conventional wisdom is largely based on analyses that assess class voting using self-identified class. We argue that measure does not capture the economic situation of the respondent. This analysis relies on the relative income situation of voters, which reflects the relative level of resources people have to live their lives. The focus is the relationship between relative income position and support for the Democratic party among non-Southern whites from 1952-1996. The results indicate a steady increase in support for the Democratic party among the less affluent since the 1950s. Differences in voting by income position are not decreasing, but, in fact, have been increasing since the 1970s.

The Continuing Dilemma of Race and Class in the Study of American Political Behavior

“…This focus often ignores how race and class operate among whites and stigmatized people of color. Stonecash et al (2000) and Kenworthy et al (2007), for example, study the partisan affiliation and loyalties of low-income whites. While the former find that lower-income whites have moved steadily toward the Democratic Party since the 1970s, the latter find that working-class whites' identification with the Democratic Party has actually declined.…”

“…Analyses of the dynamics of race and class together have attempted to disentangle the influence of the two by parsing out the ways in which the putative effects of one may actually be explained by the other. When the political consequences of social class are discussed-either in public discourse or in the literature on American political behavior-analyses of the political behavior of the working class often focus exclusively on the "white working class" (e.g., Stonecash et al 2000, Kenworthy et al 2007, Abramowitz & Teixeira 2009, a focus that ignores the realities of increasing class differentiation within communities of color (Harris et al 2005, Hochschild & Weaver 2015.…”

Memories of War: Sources of Vietnam Veteran Pro‐ and Antiwar Political Attitudes

“…These areas of study range from macro theories such as political realignment theory (Brooks ; Chen et al. ; Clubb, Flanagan, and Zingale ; Stimson ), which examines broad partisan shifts, to demographic influences such as race, class, gender, and age (Bartels ; Black and Black ; Brewer and Stonecash ; Clawson and Clark ; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler ; Jewett ; Manza and Brooks ; Stonecash, Brewer, and Peterson ; Walters ), or micro theories such as political socialization theory, which analyzes the development of the individual political identities that are central to mass political behavior (Conover and Searing ; Gimpel and Celeste ; Gimpel, Celeste, and Schuknecht ; Haste and Torney‐Purta ; McFarland and Reuben ; Niemi and Hepburn ; Plutzer ; Sherrod ). Political realignment theory, demographic characteristics, and political socialization are useful for understanding traditional partisan politics or voting patterns, but they do little to capture the process through which political attitudes are constructed through memories of past political events.…”

Explaining Partisan Change among Northeastern Whites

“…The following social group variables were analyzed because the extant literature has identified them as germane to understanding the political behavior of the American electorate (see e.g., Miller and Shanks 1996; Stanley and Niemi 2006): gender, income, urbanism, religion, frequency of church attendance, and political generation (see ). While studies that utilize national samples have, for example, noted the importance of a gender gap (Box‐Steffensmeier, DeBoef, and Lin 2004; Kaufmann and Petrocik 1999; Norrander 1999), social‐class polarization (Brooks and Manza 1997; Stonecash and Mariani 2000; Stonecash et al. 2000; Taylor 1996), and a religiosity divide (Campbell 2002; Layman 1997; Layman and Carmines 1997), there is a very limited understanding of the effect of such social group cleavages in a specific nonsouthern region, such as the Northeast.…”