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Critical Elections, Congressional Parties and Clusters of Policy Changes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

Profound changes in American public policy have occurred only rarely and have been associated with ‘critical’ or ‘realigning’ elections in which ‘more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community’. Since the appearance of V. O. Key's seminal articles on critical elections, an increasing number of political scientists have attributed great importance to such elections. Schatt-schneider views the structure of politics brought into being by critical elections as systems of action. Thus, during realignments, not only voting behavior but institutional roles and policy outputs undergo substantial change. Burnham, perhaps the most important analyst of realignment patterns, alleges the existence of an intimate relationship between realigning elections and ‘transformations in large clusters of policy’.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

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27 The same analysis was run over the minority party members of the two committees and the partisan predispositions of these members increased.

28 The term ‘party leadership’ is intended to include the President as well as House leaders.

29 Clausen, , How Congressmen DecideGoogle Scholar, Chaps, 1 and 2 for the technique to determine issue domains. Product moment correlation was chosen to test the hypotheses because the correlation model assumes strong monotonicity and independence as the null value condition. See Weisberg, Herbert, ‘Models of Statistical Relationships’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 1638–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Moreover in each case reported below regression analysis was run on the same variables to corroborate whether or not real change had taken place. The unstan-dardized Bs in each case changed in the same direction as did the correlation coefficients.

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36 There have been other instances when new majorities and a new president came to Washington, e.g. Eisenhower in 1953. However, in each of these instances Ginsberg's content analysis of issue differences between parties shows little ideological difference between parties.