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Title: The Ideological Nationalization of Party Constituencies in the American States

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: Since the mid-20th century, elite political behavior has increasingly nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call vot- ing has become increasingly one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing liter- ature finds that citizens have displayed only a delayed and attenuated echo of elite trends. We show, however, that a different picture emerges if we focus not on individ- ual citizens but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat and Republican in each state-year 1946–2014, we demonstrate a surprisingly close cor- respondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has increased dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) ideological variation across state-party publics is now almost completely explained by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate, and finally, (3) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across state-party publics, just as they have across members of Congress.

Url: http://cwarshaw.scripts.mit.edu/papers/CDW_Polarization-171215.pdf

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Authors: Caughey, Devin; Dunham, James; Warshaw, Christopher

Publisher: MIT

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

Countries: United States