No development in postwar American politics has been more dramatic than the reversal of the parties' relative positions on racial issues. This historic shift merits close study for multiple reasons. The parties' reversal on matters of race is the most important change in politics since the rise of the New Deal coalition in the 1930s. Yet beyond the shift's undoubted real-world importance, racial politics has assumed a central role in the theorizing about party position change since Carmines and Stimson (1989) used the issue to illustrate what they intended as a general theory of issue evolution. However, as I show, developments in this issue area are complicated in ways that differ in key respects from the account offered by these and other scholars.

The changes in the politics of race, by which I mean chiefly policies relating to the civil rights of African Americans, are not fully captured by one of the three models I develop in this book. Rather, the changes in parties' positioning on race are best understood as a mix of coalition maintenance and coalition group incorporation. Nor is the race issue unique in being characterized by multiple dynamics.