The Cultural Realignment of State White Electorates in the 21st Century
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The Cultural Realignment of State White Electorates in the 21st Century Benjamin Highton1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Since the beginning of the new millennium, the partisan leanings and presidential voting of state white electorates have been changing. Drawing on party realignment theories and analyses of cultural politics, this paper hypothesizes that cultural issues may be the dimension along which the realignment is occurring. The empirical findings are consistent with this view. The cultural issue preferences of state white electorates are strongly related to change in partisanship from 2000 to 2016. Further, only cultural issue attitudes have become a stronger predictor of state white presidential voting over this period. The apparent effects of partisanship, economic issue attitudes, and racial attitudes have either declined over time or been substantial in some elections and less so in others. Keywords Party realignment · Partisanship · Cultural attitudes · Presidential elections For more than 150 years, while the major parties’ names in American politics have remained the same, what they stand for has undergone substantial change. This paper analyzes how the most recent changes have contributed to the ongoing transformation of partisanship and presidential voting in the mass public (Adams 1997;
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2018 annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association. Thanks to Ryan Claassen, Chris Hare, Bob Huckfeldt, Spencer Piston, Ricardo Ramirez, John Sides, and Walt Stone for useful comments on this paper. A research grant from the UC Davis Academic Senate facilitated this research. Information, code, and data for replicating the analyses reported in this paper are available at the Political Behavior Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KKUZXW. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-019-09590-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Benjamin Highton [email protected] 1
Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, CA 95616‑8682, USA
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Carmines and Stimson 1989; Claassen 2015; McCarty et al. 1997, 2006; Layman 2001; Layman et al. 2010; Schickler 2016). Drawing on research on partisan realignments along with work that argues for the centrality of “culture war” issues like abortion and gay rights (Goren and Chapp 2017), I investigate whether cultural issues have been reshaping state electorates across the country, specifically state white electorates.1 The paper reports two central findings, which in combination suggest that a major and possibly enduring cultural realignment is taking place. First, cultural issue attitudes of state white electorates in 2000 have strong predictive power for state white partisanship in 2016. Over time, state partisanship has come into alignment with
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