Programmatic Change in Disarticulated Times: Experts and the Postwar Remaking of U.S. Party Politics

• In Event: 4322 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. The Political Sociology of Parties

Abstract

From the 1960s to the 1980s, both the Democratic and Republican parties took notable programmatic turns to the right. Notably, these rightward turns occurred at a time when voters were by-and-large “disarticulated” from party politics. Existing literature suggests these changes may have resulted from organized labor’s post-industrial decline, mimetic isomorphism, or voter demand. However, none of these accounts stand up to historical examination. Alternatively, we extend the “articulation” school to argue that transformations in party-expert relations drove changes in Democratic and Republican programs by century’s end. In the Democratic case civil rights and New Left movements fractured the Democratic base, prompting a “nationalization” of the Democratic Party. In the 1970s, meanwhile, Keynesian economists’ authority came into question in the Carter years. Following organizational changes in the 1980s, Democrats increasingly lost control of the nomination process, creating space for a new class of political strategists and policy wonks. On the Republican side, the consolidation of the conservative intellectual movement in the 1960s granted legitimacy to libertarian programs while organizational reforms motivated by new voting patterns and social unrest in the 1970s facilitated the replacement of moderates with conservative office holders. The emergence of a national network of conservative think tanks and advocacy organizations in the 1980s solidified conservative leadership within the GOP, providing the intellectual infrastructure and material resources to champion a new anti-tax, libertarian, and small-government program by the 1980s. This analysis contributes to the resurgent sociology of parties by bridging it with scholarship on the political effects of professionals in American politics. It also improves the articulation approach by breaking with the long-standing binary notion of the party-society relationship.

Authors

• Stephanie L. Mudge, University of California-Davis

• Johnnie Anne Lotesta, Brown University