IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v79y1985i01p28-49_22.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Reevaluation of Realignments in American Politics: Evidence from the House of Representatives

Author

Listed:
  • Brady, David W.

Abstract

This article reevaluates American realignment literature based on Clubb, Flanigan, and Zingale's (1980) admonition to focus on control of government and political leadership rather than electoral results. I put forward a theory of policy change in the House of Representatives which shows, like Sinclair (1977), that the effect of electoral realignments is to create a strong and unified majority party in the Congress. However, unlike other work that focuses on electoral courses, I show that structural features of elections created the new majority party in both the Civil War and the 1890s realignments. Specifically, I argue that in these two realignments a strong regional seats-to-votes distortion created the Republican majorities that enacted the policy changes associated with these realignments.

Suggested Citation

  • Brady, David W., 1985. "A Reevaluation of Realignments in American Politics: Evidence from the House of Representatives," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 79(1), pages 28-49, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:79:y:1985:i:01:p:28-49_22
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055400225276/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. A S Clark, 1995. "A Comparison of the Reagan and Thatcher Administrations' Efforts to Reform Social Security in the United States and the United Kingdom," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 13(3), pages 335-350, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:79:y:1985:i:01:p:28-49_22. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.