Partisan Hearts and Gall Bladders: Retrospection and Realignment

We have argued elsewhere that retrospective voting is often causally unsophisticated, ideologically confused, and highly myopic (Achen and Bartels 2002; 2004). Here, we extend those assertions to party realignments, arguing that they, too, depend far less on ideological shifts than on the simple cumulation of myopic retrospections in election years. We examine voters ’ responses to the most farreaching economic disaster in the history of democratic politics, the Great Depression. In contrast to Key (1958) and others who have interpreted the New Deal realignment in the U.S. as “a popular ratification of the broad features of new public policy, ” we show that Democratic gains in the 1930s were based primarily on short-term income gains and losses, which cumulated willy-nilly into a durable Democratic majority in the electorate. This interpretation is bolstered by comparison with other democracies in which voters produced equally significant and durable partisan realignments— and equally successful economic recoveries—by punishing whoever was in office at the time--liberal incumbents (Britain, Australia), conservative and then liberal incumbents (Sweden), liberal and then conservative incumbents (Canada), anti-nationalist incumbents (Ireland), or coalitions including many or all of the mainstream parties (Weimar Germany). We also document the role of economic discontent in the Irish realignment, which previous scholars have interpreted as a triumph of nationalist ideology. Finally, we describe the rise of the Social Credit Party in the Canadian province of Alberta, which dramatizes the vulnerability of democratic electorates to demagogues and ideological extremists in times of economic distress.

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