By Matthew Levendusky
As Washington elites drifted towards ideological poles during the last few a long time, did usual americans stick with their lead? within the Partisan variety, Matthew Levendusky unearths that we've got answered to this trend—but now not, for the main half, via turning into extra severe ourselves. whereas polarization has filtered all the way down to a small minority of electorate, it additionally has had the extra major impression of reconfiguring the way in which we variety ourselves into political events. In a marked realignment because the 1970s—when partisan association didn't rely on ideology and either significant events had powerful liberal and conservative factions—liberals at the present time overwhelmingly establish with Democrats, as conservatives do with Republicans. This “sorting,” Levendusky contends, effects at once from the more and more polarized phrases during which political leaders outline their events. Exploring its far-reaching implications for the yank political panorama, he demonstrates that sorting makes citizens extra loyally partisan, permitting campaigns to concentration extra awareness on mobilizing devoted supporters. finally, Levendusky concludes, this new hyperlink among get together and beliefs represents a sea swap in American politics.
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Extra resources for The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans (Chicago Studies in American Politics)
Example text
First, for the positions taken by the presidential candidates, I code the issues each candidate discussed in his acceptance speech at the party convention, and I supplement this with an analysis of campaign coverage in CQ Weekly Report (later, CQ Weekly). I do a similar qualitative coding of the party platforms to provide additional information about where the parties stand on the issues. The argument is not that people actually read the party platforms: they do not. 9 Taken together, these sources will give an excellent overview of where the nominees stood on the key issues over time.
First, given this need for repetition, in most circumstances there will be a lag between elite-level changes and mass response. Voters will update, but they will do it slowly, thereby generating a lag. My theory does not give any predictions about the length of this lag, but it is clear it typically will exist. But there is also an important caveat to this general rule. Certain elite events dramatically shift the signal parties send to voters, and as a result, voters will not need to see as much repetition.
A number of studies have shown that ideological thinking is somewhat weaker in the United States than in Western European nations (Barnes et al. 1979; Fuchs and Klingemann 1990; Niemi and Westholm 1984). This literature, however, overlooks the endogeneity of ideological thinking (Sniderman and Levendusky 2007). When elites offer voters stark, ideological choices—which they did to a greater extent in Western Europe than in the United States, at least in the 1970s and 1980s—voters will think in more ideological terms.
