Historically, Americans’ partisanship has been only loosely connected to their liberal-conservative ideology. Political scientists generally found that most Americans lacked the political interest or expertise to make consistent and meaningful connections between political party labels, ideological abstractions such as beliefs about the role of government in society, and their positions on specific policy issues. Identification with a political party label was often based upon long-standing family affinity, and whether a person felt connected to the social groups that they perceived to be part of that party’s coalition of support. This lack of ideological rigidity permitted political parties the freedom to adjust their policy positions in response to events (as happened on issues of civil rights and race in the 1960s) and also permitted voters to occasionally select candidates who were personally appealing but did not share their party label (as happened with Eisenhower Democrats in the 1950s and Reagan Democrats in the 1980s, for example).
Beginning in the early 1980s, political scientists noticed that Republican voters were increasingly taking conservative positions on a wide range of issues, and Democratic voters were increasingly taking liberal positions (albeit to a somewhat lesser extent). This trend continued throughout the 1990s and picked up steam in the elections of the twenty-first century. More and more Americans are now willing to commit to a political party label, and political parties themselves are becoming more ideological and more polarized. There are now few conservative Democrats in Congress and even fewer liberal Republicans. The number of party-line votes in Congress has continued to rise, as has the number of filibusters.
The causes of this phenomenon are complex. The rise of party primaries (as a replacement for caucuses) as a means for selecting candidates has served to increase the ideological extremity of the candidates who run for office. The mobilization of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and the Christian Right in the 1980s served to politicize many political issues that had not polarized voters in the past. The rise of cable and Internet media has permitted voters to select news sources that match their own ideological leanings (a process known as selective exposure to information). Researchers have also hypothesized that voters’ geographic migration and lifestyle choices have further served to isolate citizens into like-minded neighborhoods and communities, which reinforces their preexisting ideological viewpoints and limits their opportunities for interactions with individuals who hold differing opinions.
See also Culture War; Tea Party Movement
Bishop, Bill. The Big Sort. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.
Fiorina, Morris P., with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. Third ed. Boston: Longman, 2011.
Levendusky, Matthew. The Partisan Sort. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.