The New Deal: Retrospection, Realignment, or a Reconstituted Polity?

• In Event: Reconsidering the New Deal Legacy and Public Support for Welfare

Abstract

Political scientists and constitutional theorists agree that the New Deal represents a significant change in American political life, but they disagree as to why. In this paper, I analyze early Gallup polls to assess how this era became constitutive. Attitudes towards New Deal social, economic, and foreign policies consistently provide stronger predictions of presidential job approval and vote intention than models of retrospective voting. Most FDR policies also enjoyed broad, bipartisan support, which suggests the public accepted the constitutionality of the New Deal.

Realignment scholars (e.g., Burnham 1970, Caughey, Dougal, and Schickler n.d.) argue 1932 was a critical election that reoriented the constituencies and agendas of the two parties. Recently, Achen and Bartels (2017, 177-211) offered a more cynical interpretation: the New Deal stuck only because it worked. Conventional realignment accounts, they argue (181), “overstate the extent to which Depression-era voters weighed and endorsed the specific policies of the Roosevelt administration.” Legal academicians (e.g., Forbath 2001), by contrast, view the New Deal as constitutionally significant, as the Supreme Court reversed several precedents restricting federal regulatory power. Bruce Ackerman (1991, 1998) goes even further, claiming the American people understood and authorized this change in constitutional law.

The lack of reliable survey research from this period was once a barrier to examining New Deal public opinion, but recent methodological innovations have made Gallup polls from the 1930s–1940s ripe for individual-level analysis (Caughey et al. 2017). Analyzing these polls is essential, as both Ackerman’s and Achen and Bartels’ accounts of the New Deal lack adequate empirical testing. Ackerman (1991, 48) attributes the public endorsement of the modern activist state to the Democratic Party’s electoral strength in the 1930s, but it is difficult to read a clear policy mandate into any election result. Though Achen and Bartels (2017, 177-211) find Democrats fared better in states with stronger income growth, they never evaluate whether economic retrospections predict voting behavior better than opinion of New Deal policies.

I evaluate the relationship between policy attitudes and Democratic approval on twenty economic, social, and foreign policy issues on ten Gallup polls from 1936 to 1940. These polls record public opinion on signature reforms (such as Social Security) as well as less salient issues (like whether President Roosevelt should appoint a female Supreme Court justice). The analysis includes three dependent variables: FDR job approval, presidential vote intention, and congressional vote intention. Across each dependent variable, support for both obscure and well-known New Deal proposals provide greater predictive power than either objective economic indicators or subjective assessments of economic performance.

A recent study (Caughey, Dougal, and Schickler n.d.) argues policy and performance both structured the New Deal realignment. This paper makes an additional contribution by going beyond economic issues and providing individual-level comparisons of policy attitude and economic retrospection models. While I agree that an ideological realignment occurred, I think these findings also suggest—consistent with an emerging literature (Blake 2019)—that the public understood the constitutional significance of the New Deal moment.

References

Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. 2017. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ackerman, Bruce. 1991. We the People: Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

–––––––. 1998. We the People: Transformations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Blake, William D. 2019. “‘Justice Under the Constitution, Not Over It’: Public Perceptions of FDR’s Court-Packing Plan.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 49(1): 204–18.

Burnham, Walter Dean. 1970. Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics. New York: Norton.

Caughey, Devin et al. 2017. “Population Estimation and Calibration Weighting for Nonresponse and Sampling Bias: An Application to Quota-Sampled Opinion Polls, 1936–53.” https://www.dropbox.com/s/qnol9sffrb2bci1/CaugheyEtAl-Weights.pdf?dl=0.

Caughey, Devin, Michael C. Dougal, and Eric Schickler. “Policy and Performance in the New Deal Realignment: Evidence from Old Data and New Methods.” Journal of Politics. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/707305 (January 14, 2020).

Forbath, William E. 2001. “The New Deal Constitution in Exile.” Duke Law Journal 51(1): 165–222.

Author

• William Dawes Blake, University of Maryland, Baltimore County