David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 326 pp., $24.99 (paperback).
Matthew Levendusky, The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 184 pp., $19.00 (paperback).
Partisan conflict since the Clinton presidency has generated dramatic--and for many troubling--events. Congressional Republicans organized Clinton's House impeachment and his Senate trial in defiance of public opinion and a likely bipartisan majority for censure instead of impeachment. The health care reform of 2009-10 has been an all-Democrat venture, and it split the public by the time it passed in early 2010. Calls for bipartisan cooperation across vital policy domains--health care reform, macroeconomic stimulus, even deficit reduction--have little effect. Political demonization today haunts the capital and the Capitol. Think of the GOP House leadership rallying health care protesters at the Capitol on November 5, 2009, as some in the crowd held placards that portrayed President Obama and congressional Democrats as Nazis.
Such fierce division has been a shot in the arm for the political science of parties. A new cohort of party scholars has responded to the revolution in party dynamics with fresh ways of describing and conceptualizing the salience of political parties. They have revitalized such familiar staples of the literature as parties-as-organizations, parties-in-the-electorate, and party-group linkages.
Thus Daniel Galvin traces a previously unknown relationship between presidents and the organizational health of the parties to which they are affiliated. Over the last 58 years Republican occupants of the Oval Office built a party organization which can readily contact the GOP party base. Only a decade ago did Democrats begin to match the GOP's party-building, late in the Clinton presidency. In fact, President Obama has yet to extend Clinton's efforts and commit to matching a fully matured Republican effort. But Obama may well do so in the wake of likely Democratic losses in the 2010 elections.
Focusing on parties-in-the-electorate, Matthew Levendusky shows that voters take their partisan attachments seriously enough to adjust their perceptions of issues, outcomes, and candidates. They become liberals or conservatives as they acquire or update their Democratic or Republican partisan identities--a process which Levendusky calls "sorting." Levendusky gives us a better sense of why the term "base" refers to something real in party competition and provides insight into the attitudinal world of a party base.
David Karol, for his part, outlines a new account of the relationships between groups and party politicians--demonstrating that politicians adapt to group coalitional demands. In the process, they recast what their parties--and sometimes their opposition-stand for. For example, at one time being a Democrat implied support for free trade. But as Democratic politicians responded to trade union demands for protection, being a Democrat meant favoring the more protectionist stance of "fair" trade. Democratic politicians changed what being a Democrat meant in response to a group demand.
Karol's findings have implications for the spatial model of legislatures. Currently most political scientists think that the meaning of liberalism or conservatism evolves along with the replacement of congressional incumbents by new politicians. In Keith Poole's famous phrase, "members of Congress die in their ideological boots." (1) In contrast, Karol asks us to consider how issue adaptation by congressional incumbents--through reversal, conversion, or entrepreneurial innovation--instead drives what parties stand for. For every Strom Thurmond or Richard Shelby who switches parties there are as many, perhaps more Robert Byrds who move along with their parties and thereby stay in their partisan homes. Or think here of John McCain announcing, in response to the challenge to his seat from J.D. Hayworth, that he is not a "maverick." Yet McCain spent much of the last decade telling us the opposite. Now he is a conservative, however, because he has to be. In 2007 and 2008 there was no Tea Party, Glenn Beck was not as prominent as now, and Sarah Palin did not roam the country with Michele Bachmann.
Indeed, the sorting analyzed by Levendusky has an intricate connection with such adaptation by party politicians. If voters adjust their ideologies in response to partisan elite cues, then they will not punish politicians' reversal or modification of issue stances in response to allied group demands. Democratic and Republican voters make the change, too. In effect, groups which belong to a party's coalition are recasting ideology for its voters via politicians' management (as Karol puts it) of groups' issue demands.
All of this is fresh and fascinating work--and there is something of a forest here as well as three trees. Taken as a whole, these works illuminate much of where we are in American political development. They open up a perhaps disquieting glimpse into our political future.
The unsettling vista is this: viewed in long-run historical perspective, we may be in a phase of strong party competition and conflict that is unlike any we have had and without a way out if it proves socially costly. After all, in contrast to the last great era of strong party politics, there is no intellectual countermovement to tame parties. The great Progressives--Jane Addams, Herbert Croly, Robert LaFollette, Hiram Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson--probably turn in their graves today because no one resembling them is on the scene. Civic engagement is perhaps our leading public intellectual preoccupation, not nonpartisan leadership and public administration. Witness the scorn that has been heaped upon President Obama, both from right and left, for his ostentatious efforts to cultivate bipartisanship. His efforts have been depicted either as futile and cloying, or as a cynical sham.
Ironically, not too long ago political scientists were convinced that the Progressives had succeeded quite well in permanently weakening political parties. As Levendusky writes, "An observer studying the American electorate in the 1970s might well have concluded that party was on the wane ... scholars--and popular commentators-argued that party no longer had much relevance to ordinary Americans." (1) Worry over the Progressive triumph indeed first surfaced in the 1950 manifesto issued by the American Political Science Association (APSA), Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System: A Report of the Committee on Political Parties. (2)
But the great anti-party project of the Progressives began a slow-motion collapse in the late 1970s, as the NOMINATE data pioneered by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal show. (3) By now we have gotten more or less what the 1950 APSA report invited 60 years ago.4 Beyond hand-wringing among pundits and some unease among political scientists, polarized party politics operates unimpeded by broad philosophical or popular opposition. On the contrary, as MoveOn and the Tea Party movements suggest, such polarization excites rather broad citizen involvement in lively (or, depending on your point of view, scary) grass-roots efforts to seize control of the parties and direct their polarization.
The metaphor of an S-curve process may be appropriate for what we are going through as a country. For every additional unit of time, say every biennial Congress, the corresponding "unit" in party strengthening--defined as a deepening and extension of party differences and greater internal cohesion--seems to have been stronger than the previous unit. But when does leveling off happen? If we are below the level-off point, how much further do we have to go?
IS THE MODERN PRESIDENCY BAD FOR STRONG PARTIES?
One reason for why it is hard to know how much further party strengthening will go is that after reading Daniel Galvin one sees that the presidency does not--as has often been supposed--stand in the way of strong parties. Working in presidential and party organizational archives Daniel Galvin has unearthed a path-dependent process of Republican party-building dating to Eisenhower's presidency. Galvin has also discovered that until very recently Democratic presidents were wholly indifferent to the organizational health of their parties and regularly cannibalized the partisan organizational resources available to them. But that too has begun to change.
Galvin's scholarship reframes the claim--formulated particularly clearly in the scholarship of Sidney Milkis--that since the New Deal the presidency and partisan strength have been in serious tension. (5) Presidents, on this account, have cared much more about the effective administration of social and regulatory policy legacies, regardless of their administrators' prior party careers, and about the inclusion of previously marginal constituencies and social movements on the left or the right. They have been willing to circumvent or even to attack congressional, state, and local parties in order to accomplish these goals. Galvin's answer to this view, though, is that it depends on which presidents and parties one is talking about, and at what point in time.
As Galvin points out, we normally think of presidents as interested in policy--not party-building--legacies. But what if you were Dwight D. Eisenhower sitting in the Oval Office ca. 1953 and you knew that leaving a major policy legacy--beyond civil rights--might mean turning the GOP into a wrecking crew for the New Deal? What would be the alternative to that?
The answer for Eisenhower was to address the disparity between the two parties in partisan identification among the electorate--since after all that imbalance underwrote imbalance in Congress, the state legislatures, and the governorships. Republican party-building began long before Ronald Reagan entered the White House.
Galvin focuses on six facets of organization-building by Eisenhower and succeeding Republican presidents, with the exception--for a period--of Richard Nixon. All were conscious of the structural, minority-party position of the GOP and all invested scarce time and presidential prestige on the development of campaign services (for example the GOP Campaign School operated in both 1955 and 1958), the building of human capital, such as promoting training sessions held after the Republican Leadership Conference of 1975, the recruitment of candidates, through, for example presidential backing of the development of GOP regional field directors in 1974, GOP presidential work on the development of voter contact-and-mobilization organizational capacities, through, among other changes, the creation of county party organizations in the early 1980s, the presidential development of ample finances for party (as opposed to presidential candidate) operations, and vigorous Oval Office support for "internal activities," e.g., investment in party-operated computer technology, polling services, and video teleconferencing in the early 1980s.
By comparing and contrasting Republican and Democratic presidents, and by crisply limiting the conceptualization of party-building to strengthening the party-as-organization, Galvin presents a startling contrast between the two parties and their presidents. All Republican presidents, from Eisenhower on, have thrown themselves into party-building on these six dimensions. Nixon did circumvent his party in preparation for 1972 with CREEP, the Committee to Reelect the President, and his separate fund-raising operation, but he also took scarce time to work on party-building before and after 1972.
In contrast, all previous Democratic presidents, including Clinton, have engaged in "party predation"--that is, subordinating party finance and organization to personal re-election needs. The assumption shared by Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton was simple: party organizational and financial resources self-evidently existed for the short-run goal of re-election so that Democratic presidents could continue pressing for Democratic policy legacies.
As a result, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was long chronically in debt and, by comparison to its GOP counterpart, technologically backward, with no voter database and in a ramshackle condition. This only began to change when it became obvious to President Clinton in the wake of the Gingrich Revolution that Republican control of Congress was a major constraint for Democrats.
But locking in Democratic presidential party-building--in a way that would match the Republican presidential party-building which "locked in" for the GOP long ago--appears currently uncertain. Obama's campaign volunteer operation, Organizing for America (OFA), is formally housed at the DNC, to be sure. But OFA has so far been used only for publicizing policy initiatives, not for the same kind of party-building that Republicans have pursued for nearly 60 years.
Writing on the Encyclopedia Britannica blog this past November, Galvin agreed that "the organizational apparatus of OFA is here to stay." But "will it, at some point, transition into electoral-support mode? This transition is by no means guaranteed ... Calling congressmen and holding neighborhood rallies is not the same thing as training activists to conduct voter registration, get-out-the-vote, fundraising, and candidate-support campaigns in local, state, and congressional Democratic races in 2010." Galvin added, "it's not at all clear that Obama will want it to make that transition. The temptation to keep OFA apart from the nitty-gritty of local electoral politics next year in order to preserve its strength for the national campaign in 2012 could be quite strong." (6) Interestingly, the January 14, 2010 OFA report did not clear up whether and how the Obama White House will resist this "temptation," even as that report actually explicitly responded to Galvin's November 2009 blog post. (7)
The spatial model and the convergence result of the median voter theorem naturally incline political scientists to assume that the major parties are inevitably organizationally symmetrical. (8) They're not. Galvin conclusively shows that the assumption, while understandable, is false and has been false for many decades.
But Galvin also suggests that organizational convergence lies in our future. Certainly if Democrats suffer a major loss in the 2010 elections, OFA will very likely be decisively turned to party-building. Just as Clinton turned to party-building after the Gingrich Revolution, Obama will too if there is a Cantor or Boehner Revolution.
THE EMERGENCE OF PARTISAN-IDEOLOGICAL BASES
Moreover, such presidential party-building has quite interesting attitudinal correlates. Matthew Levendusky's simple, powerful idea of "sorting" shows them to us. "Sorting" refers to an alignment over time between two things. The first is individual partisan identification. In the classic formulation of the The American Voter, partisan identification is an "affective orientation" (emphasis added) toward a "group in the environment," i.e., a major political party. (9) Ideological beliefs make up the other half of the alignment. Significantly these are not a set of issue positions but instead a fairly clear sense in the individual's mind of the connections among issue stances, i.e., knowing "what goes with what" when it comes to being either a liberal or a conservative in the U.S.
Through careful use of American National Elections Studies panel data from three waves of panels, and through a Knowledge Networks Internet survey experiment, Levendusky convincingly establishes that this alignment has strengthened along a left-right dimension and that it results from partisan elite polarization. That is, voters have responded to elite cues about what it means to be a Democrat or a Republican. But, crucially, the scope of sorting is far from matching the scope of elite polarization. Indeed, it would be very odd if such matching had occurred. Most people are most of the time enormously politically inattentive. It has taken a lot of polarized partisan elite cuing for mass sorting to become identifiable.
"Sorting" and mass polarization are obviously related. Levendusky states that the difference is a matter of degree. But in principle voters could stay sorted and never polarize in the way that party politicians or activists are polarized. Activists--as we all have seen in the past few years--adopt more extreme versions of liberalism or conservatism and affectively they are more passionate. Sorting is much milder. In a sorted electorate there are, in terms of absolute numbers, lots of "leaners" and genuine independents, even as liberals have come to side more with the Democratic party and conservatives more with the Republican party. There is still a consequential middle.
From the perspective of the S-curve metaphor, Levendusky's book is tantalizing. If voters are sorted, and will stay sorted but not polarized, then leveling off is behind us. If voters are sorted, however, and will become polarized, then the level-off is still ahead of us.
In a fascinating concluding exercise, Levendusky's book also focuses on how sorting has happened and who tends to choose one or another sorting path. Consider a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican. Noticing the elite cues that being a Democrat means also being liberal, the conservative Democrat could update her beliefs and become a liberal Democrat, and by the same logic the liberal Republican would become a conservative Republican. Where once she tolerated abortion or thought that she could approve of same sex marriage, she instead becomes opposed to them. Ideological beliefs come into line with party ID.
But the liberal Republican or conservative Democrat could also switch parties. Party ID has long been thought to be a very strongly affective orientation. But what if you are a voter who concludes that your party has betrayed your deepest beliefs? By a later point in time the conservative Democrat has become a conservative Republican, and the liberal Republican has become a liberal Democrat. In this scenario, the ideology matters more than the partisanship, causing a change in partisan identification. The classic example here might be the conservative Southern Democrat (and Levendusky indeed finds that this sort of adjustment happened for Southern whites in the early 1970s, though not afterward).
If you know anything about the Michigan model of voters (succinctly summarized by Levendusky at pp. 112-113), you already suspect which of the two kinds of adjustment turns out to be more common: it would be the adjustment of one's ideological beliefs to fit the new meaning of what it means to have one or the other partisan identification. The only voters who might change their party ID because of their beliefs, besides white Southerners, in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights and voting rights revolutions, or, say, pro-life voters, are highly educated voters.
But the findings regarding white Southerners and pro-life voters stand in contrast with the actual result for educational attainment (reported at p. 114): "education--or any other measure of political sophistication--plays no conditioning role." When one considers that education is in so many ways a major independent variable across a wide range of social science analyses, this is a striking finding.
Gut-level, core beliefs about which one has very strong affect (abortion or race) will generate party switching. But having gone to college or being politically well-informed (as measured by scales for political knowledge) will not. Most voters appear, in fact, to be using party identification efficiently. They are using it to acquire a conceptual framework--a sense of "what goes with what." That adjustment, in turn, must order their political perceptions of existing and new issues regardless of what their education might instead cue them to look for, appreciate, and grasp. In particular they will rationalize away information that they don't care for.
This is precisely why the Progressives--Addams, Croly, LaFollette, Roosevelt, and Wilson--are spinning in their graves. The rationalizing voter is, for instance, the reason why at high levels of education and information consumption conservative Republicans would not in the late 1990s acknowledge that the federal budget was in balance. (10) Levendusky is, on the whole, sanguine about this sort of thing. He comes to an optimistic assessment of what sorting means for democratic citizenship. Although he doesn't explicitly discuss rationalization, his equanimity about his findings suggest that for him voter rationalization is the price we all pay for somewhat greater citizen engagement with the issues of the day. He rightly says that the Progressive ideal of educated, "correct," and nonpartisan engagement with the issues is impossible. Spin on, Progressives of yesteryear!
On the other hand seeing voter rationalization as part of a reasonable trade-off may be avoiding all of its implications. As John Zaller pointed out in 1992, in The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, politically aware citizens filter out information that conflicts with their ideological dispositions. To be sure, it's not clear that on average sorted voters are more politically aware than voters once were, prior to sorting. But if sorted voters are more politically aware than unsorted voters of yesteryear, then they have acquired more of what Zaller called "partisan resistance." (11)
If "partisan resistance" has grown, furthermore, then citizens (and the elites behind whose partisan banners they gather) are likely to have more trouble agreeing on basic political--or even scientific--facts (about, say, fiscal balance, growing income inequality, man-made climate change, or evolution). And if that is the case, then governance, public education, and necessary policy reforms are inevitably harder and more contested.
If indeed such a problem of heightened "partisan resistance" currently exists, might it get worse? Reading David Karol with this question in mind, one has to consider that, yes, it might.
GROUPS AND PARTY POSITION CHANGE
The problem of social disagreement on basic facts and big policy questions deepens somewhat when one puts preference intensity into party politics--as David Karol does. Party scholars such as John Aldrich have insisted on the role of party activists in generating partisan divergence in issue space. Karol takes that insistence several steps further. He does so by offering a far-reaching redefinition of what parties are. On Karol's view, political parties are "coalitions of groups with intense preferences on issues managed by politicians" (p. 7). By a group, Karol means "a selfaware collection of individuals who share intense concerns about a particular policy area" and--as in the example of the "religious right"--"may support numerous organizations, without being reducible to any one of them" (p. 9).
Not all issues have strong groups, and some can even lack groups altogether (Karol calls these "groupless issues"). So politicians can have considerable autonomy with respect to those issues (particularly defense, foreign, and national security policy). Politicians therefore do pretty much what they think is right on these groupless or "weak group" issues. Think here of John Kerry's decision to take a strongly pro-war stance in 2004, or how Obama has perpetuated the national security positions of his predecessor, infuriating the ACLU.
But politicians value party-group linkages, and when these are strong and well-established politicians will ignore public opinion in a policy domain that contradicts group policy preferences. Politicians value party-group linkages partly because groups aid politicians in campaigns, partly because groups will intervene in candidate recruitment, and partly because long-standing alliances are taken as more or less fixed features of any politician's career within one or the other party.
All of this means that politicians are ideologically creative over time. They adjust what the issue content of their party affiliation means. This happens most directly and straightforwardly in one of the three kinds of party-group linkages which Karol analyzes, what he calls "coalition maintenance."
Thus, when in the 1980s the AFL-CIO, a longstanding Democratic coalition member, asked Democrats to stand up for "fair trade," they did. Democrats did so to maintain the coalition. Liberalism turned on a dime.
However, the issue content of liberalism or conservatism can also slowly evolve. This happened for Democrats as the party of white supremacy brought in civil rights groups over the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. That group incorporation over time was aided by group extrusion. Republicans played a role in pushing civil rights groups away from the GOP, engaging in coalition maintenance as Democrats engaged in coalition expansion. Business groups sought relief from the implications of civil rights for labor market regulation and employment practices; gradually the GOP grew opposed to affirmative action. In the process it attracted new conservative groups into its coalition (though Karol does not mention this case), such as the Federalist Society.
In all, Karol richly illustrates the repackaging of liberalism and conservatism on a range of issues--trade, civil rights, abortion, gun control, defense policy, and fiscal policy. He does so with a combination of stories and clever quantitative analysis (e.g., application to congressional cohorts of a formula which accounts for the relative importance of replacement and convergence in a population, allowing him to estimate the degree of politicians' conversion on issues, development of issue scales from factor analysis of roll calls, and calculation of issue differences between the congressional parties using simple differences of means in support across time for an issue, say, abortion or gun control).
The bottom line is that just as voters adjust what it means to be liberal or conservative in response to party elite cues, so do politicians, albeit for different reasons and undoubtedly more self-consciously. The difference is in who is cueing whom. Politicians often get their cues to update from organized groups with intense policy preferences. Politicians then "update" their liberalism or conservatism--which cues the partisan bases to do the same. In response, voters will--due to reluctance to switch their party ID--rationalize. That is, they change their understanding of "what goes with what" if one is a Republican or a Democrat. If being a Republican comes to mean being against same-sex marriage, due to a Focus on the Family demand that the GOP protect traditional marriage, then a Republican voter--one who might have been, before 2000 or 2004, less aware of the issue--will come to adopt the party line on it. Similarly, a Democrat will support gay marriage as Democratic politicians attend to Human Rights Campaign policy stances. In the process the Republican or Democrat updates what being "conservative" or "liberal" means to her.
Putting Levendusky and Karol together, one comes to appreciate how groups play key roles--at one level removed--in recasting ideology for voters. Groups do much to set the terms of citizens' ideological engagement. They do so via politicians' management of groups' issue demands.
But the normative problem is obvious: groups can be immoderate. If sorted voters rationalize, i.e., if they change their view of the issue content of either liberalism or conservatism in response to partisan cues, then what are the prospects for public policy reform or innovation? Such issues as whether intelligent design must be taught in the schools, whether man-made global warming is a hoax, or whether huge tax cuts for the rich bring the budget into balance all lie in the hands of conservative groups and their liberal antagonists--not experts or politicians who know how to incorporate expertise and come to agreements.
Not only might the Progressives be spinning in their graves, Madison might be too. The whole point of the constitutional design, James Madison argued, was to live with faction by systematically blocking factional capacity to make the entire polity turn according to factional preferences. Individual states (Rhode Island was the state that particularly alarmed the Founders) might become laboratories for factional preference. But in the "extended republic," with its clever national institutional design, that danger would be forestalled for the country as a whole. The new political science of parties forces the question whether groups have been enthroned in ways that would startle Madison.
Taking time to reflect, one can soon find reasons to relax. If voters never learn and only rationalize, then of course the situation is bleak. But learning does happen. There is also an alternative line of political science which emphasizes that we have a rational public and that every shift in public mood in one direction, left or right, is soon corrected by a shift back. We also know that there is considerable congruence between changes in public opinion and policy change. So the rational public can generate rational policy. Moreover, without passionate groups would we have the civil rights statutes or the
Voting Rights Act?
In the end, too, Levendusky has a good point about the normative implications of sorting: citizens' cognitive engagement with issues is aided by sorting. The vast majority of Americans, after all, only participate via the party system. Madison's extended republic is quite extended. Because it is, there is no mass democratic citizenship without political parties. Parties--and the relatively moderate (so far) but nonetheless distinct ideologies that they provide--are inventions that prevent mass disengagement from public affairs.
Perhaps the best news is that these books underscore that we have a useful political science--one which tells us what's going on with our party system and why. If there are other books like this out there or in the political science pipeline (and there are),12 then we are at least getting the news in rich detail, whether it be good, bad, or mixed.
DOI: 10.1089/elj.2010.9307
Address correspondence to:
Richard M. Valelly
Department of Political Science
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397
E-mail: rvalell1@swarthmore.edu
Richard M. Valelly Richard M. Valelly is Claude C. Smith '14 Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. His most recent book is Princeton Readings in American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2009).
(1) Keith T. Poole, "Changing Minds? Not in Congress!" Jan. 13, 2003, unpublished mss. available at <http://voteview.com/>, under "recent papers."
(2) Essential material on the Report, its impact in the journal literature, and the 50th anniversary commemoration of it can be found at <http://www.apsanet.org/~pop/APSA_Report.htm>.
(3) Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), ch. 2. For an intuitive introduction to NOMINATE, see, Phil Everson, Rick Valelly, and Jim Wiseman, "NOMINATE and American Political History: A Primer," at <http://voteview.com/ nominate_and_political_history_primer.pdf> or at <http://voteview.com/about_this_site.htm>.
(4) For more on the unexpectedly prescient nature of the 1950 APSA Report, see Nicol C. Rae, "Be Careful What You Wish For: The Rise of Responsible Parties in American National Politics," Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 169-191.
(5) Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). I thank Jesse Rhodes for pointing out the Galvin-Milkis contrast to me.
(6) <http://www.britannica.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/blogs/2009/ 11/can-obamas-organizing-for-america-evolve/>.
(7) <http://techpresident.com/OFAYear1>; see, too, Charles Homans, "The Party of Obama: What Are the President's Grass Roots Good For?" Washington Monthly, Jan./Feb. 2010, at <http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.homans.html>.
(8) See especially Daniel J. Galvin, "Parties as Political Institutions: Explaining Asymmetrical Organizational Change in the Democratic and Republican Parties," paper presented at the Institute for Policy Research Colloquium, Northwestern University, Nov. 23, 2009.
(9) Angus Campbell, et al., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), 121.
(10) See Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, "It Feels Like We're Thinking: The Rationalizing Voter and Electoral Democracy," Prepared for Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, Aug. 30-Sept. 3, 2006, available at <http://www.princeton.edu.turing.library.northwestern.edu/bartels/>.
(11) John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 42-48, 267.
(12) Two that I also strongly recommend, though I read them too late for incorporation into this review essay, are Frances E. Lee, Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Lynn Vavreck, The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Gale Document Number:A237534412