Origins of the Culture War: Social Issues in State Party Platforms, 1960-2016

• In Event: Contours of American Political Parties

Abstract

Partisan polarization has become the central story in American party politics over the last generation. Beginning sometime in the late 20th century, social issues that previously had played little role in party division came to separate one party from the other. Republican and Democratic elites staked out opposing positions on a range of issues--including abortion, gay rights, the role of religion in the public sphere, and gun control--and party electorates today are sharply polarized over these issues. But where and when did this divide begin?

Our focus in this paper is on the politics of abortion and gay rights. We test the proposition that--by the time national parties and elites took positions on social issues--the parties were already constrained by state-level position-taking, that the origins of social issues in the states came earlier than in national platforms, and that the Democratic party initiated this process. Drawing on a massive new dataset, drawn from over 600 state political party platforms between 1960 and 2016, most of them newly discovered, we argue that the groundwork for this partisan divide was not laid by presidential candidates or national parties. Rather, it was the product of years of fermentation at the state level. It was a bottom-up social revolution.

Authors

• Matthew Carr, Columbia University

• Gerald Gamm, University of Rochester

• Justin Phillips, Columbia University