Berg -- Realigning Elections -- 3/3/2004
2
the pre-existing cleavage within the electorate.” The result of a critical election is a realignment,
a shift in party loyalties that is likely “to persist for several succeeding elections.”
4
Historically,
such realignments have served as one of the mechanisms by which social struggles have been
translated, in victory or in defeat, into significant policy change: the end of slavery in the 1860s,
the consolidation of the system of corporate capitalism in the 1890s, the expansion of the welfare
state in the 1930s, and, perhaps, the end of legalized racial segregation in the 1960s.
5
Realign-
ments seem to have occurred on a cyclical basis, with a 32-36 year period, a characteristic that
has produced a lot of interest — and debate — among students of American politics.
If the two-party system has congealed into a lump, minor parties are the leaven in that
lump. Their appearance in greater numbers helps to indicate that a realignment may be near, and
their activity helps to trigger that realignment by forcing the major parties to deal with the issues
they would prefer to suppress. For these reasons Walter Dean Burnham has asserted that “the rise
of third-party protests as what might be called protorealignment phenomena would be associated
with the repeated emergence of a rising gap between perceived expectations of the political proc-
ess and its perceived realities over time, diffused among a constantly increasing portion of the
active electorate and perhaps mobilizing many hitherto inactive voters.”
6
Minor party activity
increased before the realigning elections of 1860, 1896, and 1932. Its increase today can thus be
seen as a sign of the potential for another realignment.
In earlier work, I argued that realignments were caused in the immediate sense by the
emergence of one or more issues that cut across the existing party system, and that “such power-
ful crosscutting issues arise, in most cases, because of changes in the economic structure.”
7
Past
realignments were combinations, in varying proportions, of a restructuring in the center of politi-
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4
V. O. Key, Jr., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics 17 (1955): 4.
5
Scholars differ as to whether the 1960s should be counted as a realignment.
6
Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1970), 127.
7
John C. Berg, “Marxism and the Study of U.S. Political Institutions,” Studies in Marxism 8
(2001): 39–60.
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