THE HOLLOW REALIGNMENT PARTISAN CHANGE IN A CANDIDATE-CENTERED ERA

In 1984 identification with the Republican party increased to the point where the plurality of Democrats over Republicans reached its lowest point since such measurements began in 1952. Yet the realignment is a hollow one between two parties who still have a weak image in the public mind and an uncertain role in the future of American government. While the balance of power between the two parties shifted, the importance of political parties to the electorate remained at an historically weak level. Split-ticket voting continued to be high and roughly a third of the electorate had nothing to say-either positive or negative-about both the parties. In short, realignment occurred in 1984 without party revitalization and the reestablishment of the linkage between parties and candidates. As the 1984 election approached, there were ample signs that the longawaited party revitalization and realignment might at last be under way. To some extent these expectations were realized; Republican identification grew in 1984 to the point where the plurality of Democrats over Republicans reached its lowest level since 1952, when such measurements began. Yet such a realignment is hollow when the two parties involved continue to have a weak image in the public mind and an uncertain role in the future of American government. For over three decades prior to 1984 the American public had been drifting away from the two major parties. Once the central guiding forces in American electoral behavior, the parties had by 1980 come to be perceived with almost complete indifference by a large percentage of the population. The decline of public affection for the parties was not due to any greater negative feelings about the Democrats and ReMARTIN P. WATTENBERG is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. The data presented in this article are from the American National Election Studies: 1952-1984 and were provided by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 51:58-74 K 1987 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press / 0033-362X/87/0051-01/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 06:03:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Hollow Realignment 59 publicans but rather to an increasing sense that the parties just no longer matter much in the governmental process. For example, over a third of those interviewed in the 1980 National Election Study exhibited the following response pattern to a series of four open-ended questions about the political parties: Q: What do you like about the Democratic party? A: Nothing. Q: What do you dislike about the Democratic party? A: Nothing. Q: What do you like about the Republican party? A: Nothing. Q: What do you dislike about the Republican party? A: Nothing. When these questions were first asked in 1952, only 10% of the sample responded this way. In the 1950s such indifference usually proved to be part of a more general sense of political apathy and lack of political knowledge; by 1980 it was much more likely to be a specific indicator of apathy and lack of knowledge about the parties themselves. It probably would have been better for the parties if the public had become more negative rather than more neutral toward them. Negative attitudes can easily be turned into positive attitudes by better performance or a change in policies. To make people care about political parties once again is a much more difficult task in the current candidate-centered mass media age. As this paper will argue, even an election with many signs of realignment was not sufficient to reverse the decline in salience of partisan attitudes in the electorate. The Evidence for Realignment: Changing the Balance in Party Identification Since the National Election Studies began in 1952, Democrats have consistently outnumbered Republicans by a ratio of approximately 1.7 to 1.0. As Table 1 shows, this ratio reached an all-time low in 1984, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans by less than 10% for the first time. If one includes the Independent leaners with the respective partisan groups, then the gap is cut even further, with 47.8% identifying with the Democrats, compared to 39.5% for the Republicans. Because Republicans turn out at higher rates than Democrats, this gap is still less among voting participants in 1984, with Democrats having only a 47.4 to 44.6 edge over the Republicans. For the Republican party this is the highest percentage while for the Democratic party it is the lowest ever. Furthermore, despite the increased size of the Republican identifiers, their cohesiveness as a voting bloc was also close to an all-time high in 1984. 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