POLS 1140

A Realist Theory of Democracy

“The primary sources of partisan loyalties and voting behavior … are social identities, group attachments, and myopic retrospection, not policy preferences or ideological principles.”
“How can we tell in any given case that identity is the key moving force?”
What is a social identity any way?

The Very Basis of Reasons (Chapter 8)

Traces the decline and reemergence of a more “realist” view of democracy with a focus on pluralist group conflict

What explains this decline and re-emergence of groups in political theory and science?
What needs to be done to “develop a modern group-theoretic understanding of political attitudes and behavior”

What explains this decline and re-emergence of groups?

Early scholarship places heavy emphasis on the role of groups in political life
- The Columbia Studies
Pluralism goes out of fashion during social and political unrest
Folk theories emphasizing populist ideals and rational retrospection gain favor
Advances in social psychology provide a theoretical and empircal foundation for understanding pluralist group conflicts through the lens of social identity theory

Evidence of Group Identity (Chapter 9)

Chapter 9 presents evidence of the important of “identities” to understanding political behavior using three types of evidence:

Historical analysis of Catholic voting behavior
Time series cross sectional survey analysis of the partisan identity and policy beliefs of White Southerners
Panel survey analysis of abortion attitudes and partisanship

Historical analysis of Catholic voting behavior

What are the key takeaways from Figure 9.1?
What evidence supports the claims:
- “[T]he impact of Kennedy’s candidacy on Catholic support for the Democratic Party was temporary” (p. 245)
- “It is hard to imagine a clear demonstration of the political impact of group attachments and the trade offs among them” (p. 244)
Why was “the social significance of a Catholic presidential candidacy … no longer sufficient to produce substantial deviations from accustomed voting behavior” (p. 246)

Historical analysis of Catholic voting behavior

The Realignment of Partisan Identities in the South

Achen and Bartels present an alternative interpretation of realignment in the south emphasizing the role of social identities over standard accounts that emphasized partisan policies using the following evidence:

Analyzing trends in PID and Voting overtime (Fig 9.1) and by age cohort (Fig 9.2)
Analyzing trends in PID by policy position (Fig 9.4, 9.5)
Regression analysis predicting PID with feelings toward Southerners over time (Table 9.1)

White Southerners went from solid Democrats to consistent Republicans

But note that votes change much faster than partisan identifications

Issue evolution alone doesn’t explain partisan realignment

Why? If realignment was driven by attitudes about racial policy, what would we expect to see in the figure below?

Regression Analysis

The results indicate that the Democratic partisan advantage in 1964 among white southerners who expressed neutral attitudes toward “southerners” was almost 25 percentage points, while the corresponding advantage among those who expressed very warm feelings toward “southerners” was more than twice as large, almost 55 percentage points