Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Mellow, Nicole Elizabeth

Titel

A house divided: Regional conflicts, coalitions, and partisanship in postwar America

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2003

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation provides an explanation for the resurgence of partisanship in the United States that began in the 1970s. From the New Deal realignment until the early 1970s, conflict between the two major parties steadily eroded, leading to the conventional wisdom that parties were in a state of decline. By the mid-1970s, however, signs of partisanship had begun to reemerge, and the level of party conflict, evident in institutions such as the House of Representatives, has risen steadily since then. My principal claim is that the reemergence of congressional party conflict is due to a geographical restructuring of the national party system. I argue that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, regionally differentiated industrial and demographic trends were presenting leaders of both parties with new sets of electoral opportunities and constraints. Their responses hastened the disintegration of the New Deal party system and prompted a reorganization of the parties' geographical bases. As the center of the Democratic party shifted northward and the Republican base moved southward and westward, the parties increasingly promoted concerns characteristic of their new regional growth centers. With regional interests frequently zero-sum, these developments led to the recurrence of partisanship. I trace the geographic and partisan contours of debate in three very different areas of policy-making over time: trade, welfare, and abortion policy. I examine debates from the early 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1990s—different moments on the party conflict timeline. In each case, I advance my argument by combining statistical analyses with archival data from such sources as House debates, newspaper and trade journals, and the papers of congressional party leaders. The dissertation challenges notions of a progressively integrated and homogenous national polity. In establishing the continued saliency of regions, I highlight the potency of geography as a site for the commingling of material and ideational concerns. And in uncovering the regional sources of partisanship, I draw attention to the political usefulness of geography in party coalition building. Born of geographic polarities and political strategies, today's party conflict reflects not national deliberation as much as parochial interpretations about what is best for the polity.