Origins of the Culture War: Abortion, Homosexuality & State Politics, 1960-2018

• In Event: Culture War Politics in the US States

Abstract

Partisan polarization has become the central story in American 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 social issues, and party electorates today are sharply polarized. Overwhelmingly, research on this subject emphasizes national-level forces, rather than state-level dynamics, and much of the work emphasizes the period since 1980, once these issues show up on the national agenda.

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.

To conduct this analysis, we draw first on a massive new dataset, drawn from over 1,700 state political party platforms between 1960 and 2016, most of them newly discovered. We are drawing also on other newly created bodies of data—records of state party conventions and the process (and politics) of platform-writing, bills introduced into state legislatures, and newspaper accounts of state party activity. Drawing on all these data, we show 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, already well advanced by 1980.

Authors

• Matthew Carr, Columbia University

• Gerald Gamm, University of Rochester

• Justin Phillips, Columbia University