The ideological nationalization of partisan subconstituencies in the American States

Devin Caughey (), James Dunham () and Christopher Warshaw ()
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Devin Caughey: MIT
James Dunham: MIT
Christopher Warshaw: George Washington University

Public Choice, 2018, vol. 176, issue 1, No 8, 133-151

Abstract: Abstract Since the mid-twentieth century, elite political behavior in the United States has become much more nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call voting has become more one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing literature finds that citizens have only weakly and belatedly mimicked elite trends. We show, however, that a different picture emerges if we focus not on individual citizens, but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using biennial estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat and Republican in each state over the past six decades, we demonstrate a surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) ideological variation across senators’ partisan subconstituencies is now explained almost completely by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate; and (3) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across partisan subconstituencies, just as they have across members of Congress. Overall, our findings contradict the reigning consensus that polarization in Congress has proceeded much more rapidly and extensively than polarization in the mass public.

Keywords: Representation; Public opinion; Ideology; Nationalization; Congress; State politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H1 R50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1007/s11127-018-0543-3

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