Policies And Issues Affect Partisanship

The changes between the parties have become more distinctive throughout the years. Some of these changes include preferences, behavior, increasing homogeneous districts, and increasing alignment between ideology and partisanship among voters.

Over the past three decades, parties and partisan organizations have evolved to become key features of today’s House of Representatives; the two are now essential to congressional policy and the member’s careers. In the article “Presentation of Partisanship: Constituency Connections and Partisan Congressional Activity,” published in the Social Science Quarterly (2009), Scott R. Meinke investigates how House members explain and frame their participation in partisan activity to constituency representation. In simpler terms, Meinke examines the role of partisanship in strategic home-style choices. The author uses data from the 107th, 109th, and 110th Congresses, with a focus on the member’s public websites and how they present leadership activity to conclude that Congressional parties have an impact beyond electoral outcomes and the policy process. Meinke discovers that there exists a significant difference in the extent to which members of the House publicize their activity.

"Over the past 30 to 40 years, growing partisan polarization...has been driven by generational replacement as new entrants evinced greater party-issue constraint than did

Election of 1968, It was 1968 and LBJ just announced that he would no longer run for President. Suddenly the Democratic party had to move things around and come up with a new representative for them. They found Robert Kennedy, he was loved by everyone and became the frontrunner of

I would consider partisanship to be volatile. It’s volatile because it isn’t a stable marker for voting behavior or political leanings. The instability of partisanship can be attributed to multiple factors one of them being realignment. Realignment is the shift from “one party system to another”. (75) The United States through its history in terms of political parties has gone through five that are distinguishable based on the different parties that existed and the relationships between those parties.

Several reasons are behind the increased partisanship. The first reason is the natural demographic and attitudinal uniformity arising in districts. Certain demographics are concentrated in particular areas resulting in increased polarization of those elected to Congress. Such have translated to increased party homogeneity with leaders of each divide tending to be more extreme (Soliman 109). Another reason behind the current polarization is the controversial nature of the recent presidents.

Sometimes this takes the form of wooing legislators, including legislators of another political party or ideological persuasion. When polarization and partisanship make such wooing hard if not impossible, that same ambition is likely to take the form of aiding the election of candidates who can be counted on to support one's

According to the Pew Research Center, partisan polarization has been an issue for many Americans for a long period of time. Meaning, that those Americans are not in complete agreement with either republican or democratic parties, their ideas, and standards. In response, the Pew Research Center made an anonymous survey in an attempt to find and categorize people’s typology. If one were to take the quiz, their answers would create the their new typology and show how it may correspond with either partisan parties. When I took the Pew Research Center quiz, I found out that I am in the Faith and Family Left typology category. I agree with my given typology to a certain extent. Due to the limited number of answers of the quiz and the way questions were worded, it forced me to make uncomfortable choices, which weakened my ability to agree with my results. Although, the quiz did include all government issues and involvements, I think the most prominent issue is foreign involvement, specifically, the Islamic State in which the government will have to become more active and continue to be involved in with the Islamic State.

The Democratic Party’s voting base had shifted towards the anti-war and youth vote going into the 1968 election due to the anti-war rhetoric by Robert Kennedy and MLK. However, much of the youth vote was displeased at the current initiatives of the Johnson administration and its inability to stop the Vietnam War. This caused the Youth International Party to protest outside of the Democratic National Convention to demonstrate against the undemocratic nature of the party and the Vietnam War. This spurred on a riot and violence between the protestors and the police. This event specifically symbolized how the Democratic Party lost its voting base, allowing for Nixon to win the 1968(Henretta 921). This collapse of the Democratic party and the southern strategy by the Republican party caused the federal government to shift towards the Republican Party and back to conservative rule. This brought to an end a majority of the social service initiatives and reemphasized the importance of state’s rights over the protectionist policies of the federal

In modern American politics it is incredibly difficult for a President to legislate due to the fact that Congress has become incredibly polarized. Obama and other Presidents in the past ran their campaigns stating that they would unite divided government in order for both parties to work together to get legislation passed. What Obama and many other Presidents have found out is that because both parties are sticking to their ideologies the prospects for compromise has lowered and the only way to legislate is to work within one’s party. While political scientist such as Matthew J. Dickson have suggested focusing on issues that will bring bipartisanship and going public, it is clear in the wake of such polarization that change is needed to combat

Both the political parties had to cope with the growing of pressure groups and those best able to use the media to attract attention to their causes. The refusal of Johnson to stand for re-election together with the assassination of Robert Kennedy

Events during that time period, such as the civil war, reconstruction, and the great depression, caused voting patterns and demographics to shift towards the Democratic Party. During the mid-1800’s, the democratic and republican

In order to understand the concept of political polarization one must first understand the meaning of ideology. Ideology is defined as “a manner or…content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.”(Merriam-Webster) Voting based on ones ideology is considered a rather recent phenomenon. Prior to the rise of ideological based voting, candidates were selected and scrutinized based on their own personal attributes and characteristics rather than their ideas. Prior to the 1970’s, there was not a huge difference in ideology between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. For example, take for instance the House and Senate votes on the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935. In this vote both Democrats and Republicans were widely in support of its passage. (SSA) This is in stark contrast to today when neither party can agree on the future of Social Security. Another example would be the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act

Since the birth of America men have divided themselves into different parties to come up with ideas that would better the nation and themselves. George Washington, in his farewell address, warned Americans about the problems that would accompany political parties, but no one listened. Instead many different political parties began to slowly develop overtime causing many major and minor divisions. The rise of the Republican Party came about at the nation’s darkest and most divided hour, but they began the hard, war-torn steps of putting the Union back together.

Studies conclude that citizens who tend to classify themselves as either conservative or liberal tend to have opposing political and policy views (p. 571). This means that social opinions alone does not have a significant or resilient influence in elite or mass polarization. This leads us to our next variable, partisan elections.