The Politics of Cultural Differences

Social Change and Voter Mobilization Strategies in the Post-New Deal Period

David C. Leege, Kenneth D. Wald, Brian S. Krueger, Paul D. Mueller

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400825400
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Campagne ed elezioni politiche

How did Republicans manage to hold the White House through much of the past half century even as the Democratic Party held the hearts of most American voters? The authors of this groundbreaking study argue that they did so by doing what Democrats have also excelled at: triggering psychological mechanisms that deepen cultural divisions in the other party's coalition, thereby leading many of its voters either to choose the opposing ticket or to stay home. The Politics of Cultural Differences is the first book to develop and carefully test a general theory of cultural politics in the United States, one that offers a compelling new perspective on America's changing political order and political conflict in the post-New Deal period (1960-1996). David Leege, Kenneth Wald, Brian Krueger, and Paul Mueller move beyond existing scholarship by formulating a theory of campaign strategies that emphasizes cultural conflict regarding patriotism, race, gender, and religion. Drawing on National Election Studies data, they find that Republican politicians deployed powerful symbols (e.g., "tax and spend liberals") to channel targeted voters toward the minority party. And as partisanship approached parity in the 1990s, Democratic leaders proved as adept at deploying their own symbols, such as "a woman's right to choose, " to disassemble the Republican coalition. A blend of sophisticated theory and advanced empirical tools, this book lays bare the cultural dimensions of American political life.

PARTONE

Cultural Theory and Recent American Politics

This section develops a cultural theory of American electoral politics and applies it to campaign strategy. Chapter 1 presents the puzzle and discusses limitations in the customary theories that mainstream American voting behavior specialists have developed to understand elections. It previews a theory of cultural conflict and campaign dynamics, lists assumptions, and offers caveats. Chapter 2 initiates development of a cultural theory by looking at recent campaigns. It argues that the political mobilization of cultural differences did not begin with the Republican convention of 1992 but has been characteristic of the politics of the entire post–New Deal period, 1960–1996. The chapter makes rudimentary distinctions between economic and cultural politics and looks to the nature of discourse about “a way of living,” moral order, as the key to cultural appeals. It suggests what is and what is not cultural politics. It concludes with a discussion of reasons for the rise of cultural politics in recent years and previews the instruments of cultural politics.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 take us into the components of a cultural theory.Chapter 3 explores the problem of predictability in life and the ways in which culture builds on science and religion to offer solutions to questions of identity, norms, and boundaries in society. It then addresses the uses of politics to resolve competition among values, with attention to the instrumental uses of sanctions, compensations, and ideology. Value differences result from the variety of groups and social identities in any society. Whether political conflict occurs depends on the salience of competing values at different times, group cohesion, and the ambitions of politicians. Social heuristics undergird cultural appeals.

Chapter 4 looks at elections as important rituals in a democracy and describes the president as the most significant cultural icon in the United States. Elections legitimate the ruler-ruled social hierarchy, and campaign rituals are built around symbols that reaffirm collective values and attribute blame for societal dysfunctions. They reduce uncertainty. The campaigners must respond to long-term social change that disturbs the moral order. Typically this is done in relationship to a variety of ideological movements. But campaigners must also respond to sudden or episodic events. The campaign is often a mosaic of symbols that manipulate a group’s sense of relative deprivation, structure group consciousness, heighten the perception of threat, offer symbolic and material rewards, hive off parts of the opposition to build a winning coalition, purify an unwieldy coalition, and forestall a nascent coalition.

Chapter 5 explores the psychological mechanisms that operate in political campaigns. It is anchored in the notion that political parties are composed of core groups and “owned” issues. For the most part, party identifications, once established, remain stable through life. But turnout varies, and susceptibility to appeals to defect fluctuates. In any given campaign, voters are cognitive misers, gathering only enough information, often through social attribution, to settle on a course of action. Campaign strategy is a mix of turning out the faithful, discouraging turnout among the opposition, and converting wavering groups among the opposition’s identifiers.

Each of these chapters discusses the general contours of the theory, offers illustrations from recent America presidential politics, and concludes with testable propositions and generalizations. Many of the propositions and generalizations will be tested in the three case studies of Part 2. Many will not, but we offer them in the hope that they will stimulate both further research on the cultural politics of the era and the development of additional datasets that will yield fruitful empirical tests.

CHAPTERONE

Anomalies of Post–New Deal Politics

SCIENTISTS LOVE TO solve puzzles. Over the last three decades, political scientists who examine American voting behavior and party politics have faced an unusual challenge. The tools they have developed to analyze an almost unbroken string of fifty years of data from the National Election Studies have yielded strong, but only partial, solutions. Some pieces interlock, but others do not.

A central political puzzle persists throughout the period we call post– New Deal , the period beginning with the presidential election of John F.Kennedy. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the character of the period was rather different from the period of depression, New Deal, war mobilization, and readjustment. Nearly three decades after Franklin D.Roosevelt’s New Deal had realigned the electorate and spent its energies, Democratic party identification remained very high, sometimes doubling Republican identification. Even from 1968 to 1988, the Republican party never constituted a majority of party identifiers, and only among nonLatino whites did the party achieve parity or superiority over the Democrats. Yet Republican presidential candidates won five of those six elections. The one loss was by a very narrow margin in the aftermath of the devastating Watergate scandal. During this entire period, Democrats held solid to massive majorities in the House and lost the Senate only for a brief period. Most observers contend, however, that from the first Nixon administration onward, Republican presidents have defined the agenda of American politics, that is, the basic issues and symbols around which political discourse swirls. Curiously, throughout the period, electoral turnout continued to decline, with the exception of a modest recovery in 1992.

In the full period, 1960–1996, Republicans won big, time and again.When they had won as the minority party in the 1950s, it was with a war hero who symbolized unity and normalcy for a nation recovering from the displacements of depression and war; no one knew at first whether he was a Republican or a Democrat, and not many cared. But at the heart of the post–New Deal era, the party won with masterful politicians—Republican politicians—like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and continued with less adept but lifelong politicians like Gerald Ford and George Bush. On the five occasions during the post–New Deal period when Democrats won, three times it was not even by a majority of the popular vote (John F. Kennedy’s and both of Bill Clinton’s elections). Once it was by a very narrow majority (Jimmy Carter), as the country continued to do penance for the collective shame of Watergate. And only once was it by an overwhelming majority (Lyndon Baines Johnson), as a nation wept for its slain prince. For Republicans, however, landslides and clear majorities routinely described the people’s choice. The paradox formed by persistent pluralities in Democratic party identification and Republican presidential victories in the context of declining turnout does not match the expectations of party systems theory (Burnham 1970; Clubb, Flanigan, and Zingale 1980).

Scholarly literature for the period relies on several tools and achieves partial success with the paradox. Party identification (for the classic conceptualization, see Campbell et al. 1960) explains many of the Democratic victories but fails to account for sudden declines in turnout by key blocs of party identifiers or the widespread defection of identifiers on a recurring basis. Theories about the rise of independents (see De Vries and Tarrance 1972) either are based on a measurement artifact or fail to comprehend the size of political generations. With regard to the former, the proportion of independents in the electorate has not risen appreciably when one considers that independents who “lean” toward a party are often more loyal than weak partisans, and they constitute most of the growth in independents (Weisberg 1980). With regard to the latter, Miller and Shanks (1996) have shown how weaker party identification and lower turnout in the electorate are functions of disproportionate generational replacement, but these are concentrated among the less educated and among people who have not yet reached a stage in the life-cycle where they align. Realignment theory looked quite appropriate, given the Nixon and Reagan landslides and the partisan movement of underlying social groups (for a fully developed theory of the processes surrounding partisan alignment, see Beck 1979; for the classic statement, see Key 1955; 1959). Yet scholars have searched in vain for either the cataclysmic event—depression, war—that typically precipitated previous realignments, or even the consistency of voting at lower levels of the ticket that had also accompanied previous realignments (Ladd 1991). Issue voting was thought to be on the rise since the 1964 Goldwater candidacy (recent work on issue voting takes most of its cues from Enelow and Hinich 1984; see Key 1966 for one of the earliest and still germane statements about voters and issue voting). Yet it too has floundered: (1) on the low levels of cognition about issue differences; (2) on voters’ routinely rejecting a candidate whose issue-positions are more consistent with their own positions than with his or her opponent’s positions (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde 1994); (3) on the predominance of image appeals to the sectors of the electorate who defect (Levine 1995; Newman 1994); and (4) on evidence that only small numbers of sophisticated voters can make rational decisions based on “hard issues,” but most voters respond to “easy issues,” a style of response that lends itself to the cultural politics we will shortly describe (Carmines and Stimson 1980). Economic interest voting deriving from rational choice theory (see Downs 1957 for the classic statement of the theory) also appears to be a powerful tool. Yet “pocketbook voting,” where individuals are directly affected by unfavorable economic conditions, seems less evident than “sociotropic voting,” where voters assess the general health of the economy (Kinder and Kiewiet 1981). And often compounded within “economic” language about taxes and benefits are negative symbols of cultural outgroups (Edsall and Edsall 1991; Jacoby 2000) to which the voters are responding.Of the bodies of propositions derived from rational choice theory, perhaps the most powerful has been retrospective voting: voters are cognitive misers who ask simply, “How do I feel about the incumbent?” and, if satisfied, seek no information about the challenger (Fiorina 1983). Paradoxically, the objective economic content one may infer from such decisions may be illusory: retrospective voting accounted for Republican victories precisely at the time when the economic well-being of the working and middle class underwent a steady decline, and they were the voters who shifted in a Republican direction. “Good” performance apparently was rationalized from other dimensions of presidential activity.

Thus, the arsenal of tools to understand post–New Deal elections is often powerful but seems to break down at critical points. We think there are forces even more general than those tapped by these tools that can be understood through the explicit use of cultural theory. In fact, we think of post–New Deal politics as the epitome of cultural politics.

TOWARD A CULTURAL THEORY OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

The argument we propose to develop in this book is as follows: People who identify with different social groups often have different, deeply held perspectives not only on how they should live but also on the scope of the political community and its purposes. They have a sense of a legitimate moral order, and they expect other citizens and their government to further that design. They often dislike and distrust groups with rival perspectives, and they even feel that some groups have no right to participate in democratic politics, much less to have their rivals’ perspectives become binding on society. Parties become anchored in social groups, and political leaders fashion value and interest coalitions for electoral advantage. Campaign strategies involve intricate plans to mobilize the faithful, demobilize parts of the opposition by sowing the seeds of anxiety, and attract defectors from the opposition through negative symbols of the opposition’s leadership. The salience of cultural issues will wax and wane as a function of group identifications, historical events, and coalition needs. Patriotism and nationalism, race, gender, and religion have all been the stuff of one or another campaign in the post–New Deal era. The most efficient campaigns involve themes that bundle several of these cultural bases together in a symbol or code word.

The argument rests on several assumptions. First, at root, political conflict concerns who we are, how we are to behave toward each other, and who or what is not of us (an elegant statement of this position in found in Wildavsky 1987). Other social control mechanisms address these issues, but often they spill over into politics. Seldom is a society sufficiently homogenous and small that divergent views on these cultural matters have not formed. Because citizens think of right and wrong ways of living, because they get enthused and proud, dejected and embarrassed over the course of public life, political elites—i.e., those who seek to lead—will address cultural issues. There is both advantage and risk in doing so. In America, since every presidential outcome is built on an electoral coalition, coalitional structure and loyalty are central to political campaigns. Ambitious elites must solve both the matches and mismatches between group attachments and current party or candidate orientations, mobilizing the electorate along the matches and demobilizing the electorate along the mismatches.

Some observers might argue that there was a declining sense of group identification among Americans during the post–New Deal period. The forces of modernity—mass education, mass communication, geographic and social mobility, economic integration, scientific worldviews—had loosened primal loyalties. Since political conflict may at times reflect such changes and at times lead such changes, it would seem reasonable to expect the attenuation of group bonds. Further, scholars have argued that Americans are less likely nowadays to be “joiners” than they were in Tocqueville’s America (Putnam 2000). As a result, they would have fewer connections to the civic and political orders and be less attentive to the importance of participation.

We argue that although there is strong evidence for both of these trends, it nevertheless does not diminish the strength of an argument based on group approaches to politics. For example, Wuthnow (1988) notes the decline of confessional conflict and the rise of ecumenism in a formerly denominational society. Yet he also notes the burgeoning of new groups that transcend old group boundaries, that have articulated a clear set of values, that mobilize passionately for their political agendas, and that know which other groups’ values they respect and which they view as a threat. Hunter (1991), in particular, argues that the agenda for conflict between rival groups embraces so much of the way we live and has been contested in public life to the point where it has become a virtual culture war. The names and bases of the groups may change, but the phenomena of group identity, loyalty, boundaries, and conflict persist with new bases. Further, Huckfeldt et al. (1995) have argued that informal but regular conversation partners continue to perform all of the mobilization functions attributed to groups. Baumgartner and Leech (1998) document the current relevance of group approaches to political conflict. At both the mass and elite level, Americans continue to differentiate themselves into groups with distinct values and conflicting political agendas.

Some have also questioned whether group analyses of party identification and partisan behavior are useful anymore. Again, we contend that such arguments confuse change in the intensity of historic group attachments to a particular party with the question of whether group members have attachments to parties at all. In a monumental study, Petrocik (1981) showed that it was possible to sensitively follow groups that compose electoral coalitions through electoral history. In a long succession of publications, Niemi and associates (cf. Stanley, Bianco, and Niemi 1986) have documented the changing proportions of group members from the original New Deal Democratic coalition who have remained in that coalition; they have also measured the proportion of a party coalition composed by a given group’s members. Even when change occurs in a given group, analysis of group coalitions within parties remains productive.Further, Manza and Brooks (1999) trace the manner in which recent voter alignments are based on groups representing different class, religion, and gender locations; group differences that have partisan consequences remain stark.

The propensity for party coalitions to represent group conflicts is a durable feature of American politics long after the advent of modernity.In fact, in the next chapter, we will argue that modernity even heightens the propensity. Chapter 3 will show the various ways in which group membership...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• PART ONE Cultural Theory and Recent American Politics
• CHAPTER ONE Anomalies of Post–New Deal Politics
• CHAPTER TWO The Political Mobilization of Cultural Differences
• CHAPTER THREE General Components of Cultural Theory in Political Conflict
• CHAPTER FOUR Election Rituals, Ideological Movements, and Group Politics
• CHAPTER FIVE Psychological Mechanisms and Campaign Strategies
• PART TWO Case Studies of the Political Mobilization of Cultural Differences
• CHAPTER SIX Cultural Strains in the New Deal Coalition
• CHAPTER SEVEN A Methodology for Assessing Cultural Politics
• CHAPTER EIGHT Keeping America Purposeful, Powerful, and Pure
• CHAPTER NINE Race and the Transformation of the Contemporary Party System
• CHAPTER TEN Gender, Religion, and the Second Party Transformation
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Cultural Politics: Some Conclusions and Practical Implications
• References