Trump’s Electoral Coalition as Extension of the Long-term Republican Realignment

• In Event: Radical Right Populism and Class Politics: Europe and USA

Abstract

In 2013, we mapped the incremental, long-term realignment of the US party system in an APSA paper within a comparative theoretical framework that highlighted both the similarities of the American party system transformation with those of other postindustrial polities, as well as the specific “exceptionalist” differences of the American party system, when compared to these reference cases. Based on the U.S. 2016 National Election Studies, with data release expected in spring of 2017, we plan a continuation and extension of this research agenda.

We expect to find that the Trump election does not represent a break with previous trends, but only a reinforcement and stronger articulation of the cumulative developments in partisan realignment we already tracked in our previous paper. Trump is thus not so much a unique and disruptive phenomenon, but a consistent and consequential step in radicalizing and polarizing political alignments already visible in all previous 21st century U.S. presidential elections.

In other words, the proposed paper’s predecessor in 2013 serves as template and pre-commitment to a research strategy and to hypotheses that were “registered” through the existing papers and will be replicated and extended in the new paper. Overall, the investigation expects to find that both economic as well as socio-cultural preferences shape electoral constituencies’ vote choice, but with the latter incrementally gaining more weight. Moreover, it is not social class or income, per se, that constitute the most important socio-economic experiences shaping political preferences and vote choices, but occupational practice. As an indirect tracer of differential occupational groupings, we use the interaction of education and labor market power, revealed by market incomes. The socio-economic category that has emerged as the most militantly united in supporting the Republican presidential candidate are higher income, lower education white voters, particularly those in positions of self-employment. The group most ardently supporting the Democratic presidential candidate, by contrast, encompasses high-education low-income voters, dominant in socio-cultural professions. The interaction of low education/low income experiences, a configuration that taps voter constituencies most often described in class terms as blue collar workers and routine white collar clerical employees, is more divided in partisan loyalties, as it tends to support conservative socio-cultural policies, but is divided in its support of redistributive or conservative market-liberal economic and social policy agendas. We do expect, however, to identify a further marginal shift of this group in favor of the Republicans and against the Democrats in the 2016 election, as the cultural divides in the electorate become more sharply articulated. Conversely, the group of high education and high income voters that is concentrated in managerial and liberal professions, continues its transition into the Democratic partisan camp beyond the long-term tendency of already rising average Democratic support levels over the preceding sequence of presidential elections.

The theoretical underpinnings of the analysis are grounded in arguments about both political demand, induced by the economic transformation of the occupational structure, as well as partisan supply, based on the incentives vote and office-seeking politicians face in different party systems to embrace programmatic appeals that foster policy polarization or convergence in inter-party competition.

Authors

• Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University

• Philipp Rehm, Ohio State University