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Party Realignment and the Transformation of the Political Agenda: The House of Representatives, 1925—1938*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Barbara Deckard Sinclair
Barbara Deckard Sinclair*
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Abstract

According to Walter Dean Burnham, party realignments “result in significant transformation in the general shape of policy.” Through the analysis of House roll-call data, the New Deal realignment is examined to determine whether, in fact, a significant transformation took place and, if so, what its characteristics were. It was hypothesized that if a new political agenda emerged at that time, at least some of the stable policy dimensions which Aage Clausen finds as characterizing the modern Congress should have developed during the New Deal period. In terms of content and level of partisan voting evoked, the government management and the agricultural policy dimensions do take their modern form during the New Deal. A social welfare dimension developed but had not, by the late 1930s, taken its modern shape. It is argued that a major transformation of policy did take place and that, in the process, the ideological distance between the parties increased. This realignment, however, did not immediately change regional voting patterns within each party.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , September 1977 , pp. 940 - 953
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the Academic Senate of the University of California, Riverside, for an intramural grant which facilitated this research and the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research for the roll-call data.

References

1 See Burnham, Walter Dean, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1970)Google Scholar; Sundquist, James, Dynamics of the Party System (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1973)Google Scholar; Pomper, Gerald M., Elections in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1970)Google Scholar; Ladd, Everett Carl Jr., American Political Parties: Social Change and Political Response (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1970)Google Scholar; Phillips, Kevin P., The Emerging Republican Majority (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1970)Google Scholar; Blank, Robert H., “Party Realignment and Congressional Elections,” paper presented at the 1975 Meeting of the Western Political Science Association Google Scholar.

2 Burnham, p. 10.

3 Ibid., p. 10. Sundquist and Ladd do discuss the transformation of policy, but neither undertakes a detailed analysis.

4 Ladd, p. 2.

5 Clausen, Aage, How Congressmen Decide: A Policy Focus (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973)Google Scholar. See also Clausen, , “Measurement Identity in the Longitudinal Analysis of Legislative Voting,” American Political Science Review, 60 (12, 1967), 1020–1035 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Clausen, and Cheney, Richard B., “A Comparative Analysis of Senate-House Voting on Economic and Welfare Policy, 1953–1964,” American Political Science Review, 64 (03, 1970), 138–152 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For a description of Clausen's method see Clausen and Cheney. For the Johnson technique see Johnson, Steve, “Hierarchical Clustering Schemes,” Psychometrika, 32 (09, 1967), 241–254 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

7 The regional categorization is that used by the Survey Research Center.

8 For a more detailed analysis of the change in the Democrats' constituency base, see Brady, David W., “Critical Elections, Congressional Parties and Clusters of Policy Changes: A Comparison of the 1896 and 1932 Realignment Eras,” paper delivered at the 1975 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Clausen, , How Congressmen Decide, pp. 49–50 Google Scholar.

10 Amendment to H.R. 5959. 69th Congress, Jan. 4, 1926, CR–67–2–1439.

11 S.3740. 70th Congress, April 24, 1928, CR–69–7–7124.

12 H. J. Res. 73. 69th Congress, February 2, 1927, CR–68–3–2845.

13 H.R. 853. 71st Congress, January 18, 1930, CR–72–2–1920.

14 H.R. 8927. 70th Congress, April, 1928, CR–69–6–6047.

15 H.R. 6491. 70th Congress, February 1, 1928, CR–69–3–2339.

16 See, for example, debate on H.R. 10288, a bill regulating buses in interstate transportation, 71st Congress, February 24,1930, CR–72–6–6028.

17 H.R. 8141. 70th Congress, March 20–21, 1928, CR–69–5–5066, 5112.

18 Burner, David, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition 1918–1932 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 162–164 Google Scholar.

19 See roll calls on H.R. 1, 70th Congress, December 15, 1927, CR–69–1–715, 715.

20 H.J. Res. 192.

21 H.R. 7835.

22 H.R. 8974, 74th Congress.

23 H.R. 12395, 74th Congress.

24 S416, 75th Congress.

25 For a good description of the controversy, see Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), pp. 302–325 Google Scholar.

26 The SPSS stepwise regression program was used. See Nie, Norman, Bent, Dale, and Hull, C. Hadlai, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), Chapter 15Google Scholar. Tables presenting the regression results in full are available from the author.

27 Included are a number of roll calls on tax measures and several on bills which would indirectly relax antimonopoly laws in certain cases. See notes 14, 15 and 19.

28 These findings confirm those of Turner. See Turner, Julius, Party and Constituency: Pressures on Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1951), p. 136 Google Scholar.

29 For a good brief discussion of the farm situation and the various legislative remedies proposed, see Hicks, John D., Republican Ascendancy 1921–1933 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), pp. 193–200 Google Scholar.

30 H.R. 13991, a fairly comprehensive agriculture bill, was passed in the House on January 12, 1933, but died in the Senate. There was only one roll call vote on the bill.

31 For a discussion of this legislation, see Chamberlain, Lawrence Henry, The President, Congress and Legislation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), pp. 252–268 Google Scholar.

32 For Clausen's definition of the social welfare domain see How Congressmen Decide, p. 46.

33 For an overview of pre-New Deal labor legislation, see Chamberlain, , President, Congress and Legislation, pp. 138–164 Google Scholar.

34 Chafe, William, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 27 Google Scholar.

35 Leuchtenburg, William E., The Perils of Prosperity 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 252 Google Scholar.

36 Herring, E. Pendleton, “First Session of the Seventy-second Congress,” American Political Science Review, 26 (10, 1932), 869–872 Google Scholar for a discussion of the bill and the political controversy surrounding relief spending in that Congress.

37 Quoted in ibid., p. 869.

38 Patterson, James T., Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), especially pp. 169, 175 Google Scholar.

39 Burner, Politics of Provincialism.

40 See Brady, David W. and Lynn, Naomi B., “Switched-Seat Congressional Districts: Their Effect on Party Voting and Public Policy,” American Journal of Political Science, 17 (08, 1973), 528–543 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clausen, , How Congressmen Decide, pp. 231–232 Google Scholar. Weinbaum, Marvin G. and Judd, Dennis R., “In Search of a Mandated Congress,” Midwestern Journal of Political Science, 14 (05, 1970), 302 Google Scholar; Hinckley, Barbara, “Interpreting House Midterm Elections: Toward a Measurement of the In-Party's ‘Expected’ Loss of Seats,” American Political Science Review, 61 (09, 1967), 697–699 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 But see Brady, “Critical Elections,” especially Table 23. On a general measure of party support, Brady finds that, in the 73rd Congress, switched-seat Democrats are more loyal than nonswitched-seat Democrats.

42 Chamberlain, , President, Congress and Legislation. See especially his summary, pp. 448–464 Google Scholar.

43 Key, V. O., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics, 17 (02, 1955), 3–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Sundquist, Dynamics, Chapters 11 and 12.

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