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Chicago Studies in American Politics
The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans
As Washington elites drifted toward ideological poles over the past few decades, did ordinary Americans follow their lead? In The Partisan Sort, Matthew Levendusky reveals that we have responded to this trend—but not, for the most part, by becoming more extreme ourselves. While polarization has filtered down to a small minority of voters, it also has had the more significant effect of reconfiguring the way we sort ourselves into political parties.
In a marked realignment since the 1970s—when partisan affiliation did not depend on ideology and both major parties had strong liberal and conservative factions—liberals today overwhelmingly identify with Democrats, as conservatives do with Republicans. This “sorting,” Levendusky contends, results directly from the increasingly polarized terms in which political leaders define their parties. Exploring its far-reaching implications for the American political landscape, he demonstrates that sorting makes voters more loyally partisan, allowing campaigns to focus more attention on mobilizing committed supporters. Ultimately, Levendusky concludes, this new link between party and ideology represents a sea change in American politics.
In a marked realignment since the 1970s—when partisan affiliation did not depend on ideology and both major parties had strong liberal and conservative factions—liberals today overwhelmingly identify with Democrats, as conservatives do with Republicans. This “sorting,” Levendusky contends, results directly from the increasingly polarized terms in which political leaders define their parties. Exploring its far-reaching implications for the American political landscape, he demonstrates that sorting makes voters more loyally partisan, allowing campaigns to focus more attention on mobilizing committed supporters. Ultimately, Levendusky concludes, this new link between party and ideology represents a sea change in American politics.
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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July 2, 2011
I think I expected too much out of this book when I picked it up. Its pretty bog-standard political science, and reads like a journal article that became a book because the author has gone tenure track. Which is fine, so far as it goes, but those sorts of books never go far enough for me. My biggest complaint? Although the author does a fine job exploring the difference between what it means for parties to sort and to polarize, he almost entirely ignores the question of why this all happened. Yes, political elites have polarized over the last 30-40 years, and yes, as Zaller has taught us, this has led to a fairly dramatic sorting out of the electorate. But why did elites polarize? The author doesn't say. Which may sound like I'm criticizing an author for not writing the book I wanted them to write, but that's only partially true.
The growing political science literature on parties as networks (see The Party Decides), for example, calls on us to radically rethink what we mean when we say "political elites," and bringing that literature to bear here would have been enormously helpful. After all, once you realize that the millions of people who volunteer for and donate to political parties can and should be considered part of the "political elite," then claiming that the polarization of elites drove the sorting out of partisans just doesn't make much sense. The party networks literature, in short, blows a huge hole in the explanation offered here, collapsing the dependent and independent variables into an inextricable mess.
And the book's strengths? First off, it does demonstrate how sorting produces much stronger party identification, which can by extension be used to account for increases in party voting and the decline of split-tickets. This won't be of any interest to a lay reader, but it will be of interest to political scientists. Second, it demonstrates how as more voters are sorted, the size of the party base increases, which by extension increases the return for parties and candidates to run to their base instead of the center. This is producing a very fundamental transformation of American politics that as of 2011 most members of the media simply do not understand. As the author writes, "a more participatory politics is also a more partisan politics." Like it or not, the centrist, bipartisan politics of the mid to late-20th century is gone. For my money, although this book fails to convincingly explain why this has happened, it does a great job of demonstrating empirically how. And for that it get 3 stars.
The growing political science literature on parties as networks (see The Party Decides), for example, calls on us to radically rethink what we mean when we say "political elites," and bringing that literature to bear here would have been enormously helpful. After all, once you realize that the millions of people who volunteer for and donate to political parties can and should be considered part of the "political elite," then claiming that the polarization of elites drove the sorting out of partisans just doesn't make much sense. The party networks literature, in short, blows a huge hole in the explanation offered here, collapsing the dependent and independent variables into an inextricable mess.
And the book's strengths? First off, it does demonstrate how sorting produces much stronger party identification, which can by extension be used to account for increases in party voting and the decline of split-tickets. This won't be of any interest to a lay reader, but it will be of interest to political scientists. Second, it demonstrates how as more voters are sorted, the size of the party base increases, which by extension increases the return for parties and candidates to run to their base instead of the center. This is producing a very fundamental transformation of American politics that as of 2011 most members of the media simply do not understand. As the author writes, "a more participatory politics is also a more partisan politics." Like it or not, the centrist, bipartisan politics of the mid to late-20th century is gone. For my money, although this book fails to convincingly explain why this has happened, it does a great job of demonstrating empirically how. And for that it get 3 stars.
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