Partisan Hearts and Gall Bladders: Retrospection and Realignment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".