Home  › The Big Picture: The Dimensions of American Politics

Byron Shafer, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• The recurrent appearance of split partisan control of the institutions of national government;
• The growing polarization of the politically active in Democratic versus Republican circles;
• The disappearance of the great regional exception to all of this, the transformation of the previously "Solid South."

Split partisan control of Congress and the presidency-"divided government"-has been seen before in American politics, but ordinarily as a by-product of the transition between unified control in the hands of one political party and unified control in the hands of the other. Since the late 1960s, however, the world has changed. For 28 of the last 38 years, different parties have held the presidency and at least one house of Congress, an outcome the public itself has come to prefer. Political scientists have worked on (and argued intensely about) the causes and consequences of this split partisan control. Recently, the debate has expanded to include those who believe that the era of divided government is over.

Remarkably, the two major parties have been pulling farther apart-polarizing-during this same period. Once, American political parties were described as "catch-all" vehicles, with conservative Democrats leaning Republican and liberal Republicans leaning Democratic. In our time, Republicans have become more reliably conservative, Democrats more reliably liberal. As a result, despite a close partisan balance in both the House and the Senate, party lines have held in ways not seen during the lifetime of most observers. One might expect that fuzzy, centrist parties would be the ones fostering divided government. In practice, we have seen the opposite, and political scientists have probed (and debated) this unexpected result.

Part of the explanation comes from a third great change in recent American politics, the demise of the "Solid South" and the end of southern exceptionalism. For nearly a hundred years after the Civil War, the South was unfailingly and overwhelmingly a one-party Democratic region. In our time, that solidity has cracked, shattered, and been replaced by Republican majorities. Classic Southern Democrats, once the true "third party" of American politics, have become an endangered species. But whether the region is on its way to a succeeding Republican dominance or just to a partisan balance paralleling the rest of the country remains a question actively engaged by political scientists of both historical and analytic bents.

Other, long-standing aspects of American politics permit constant variation but do not themselves really change at all. There is that vast, ethno-religious diversity to the social base for American politics, with its multiple and cross-cutting divisions. There is that matrix of governmental institutions, rooted in the Constitution, which is more appropriately seen as "separationist" than "presidential." And there is a constant issue evolution in which settled policy questions-in social welfare, foreign affairs, civil rights, and cultural values-are either re-opened or replaced. When divided government, partisan polarization, and regional change are put back together with these three enduring elements, what results is six "dimensions of American politics," those key factors that impart to political life in the United States its distinctiveness-and that America-watchers ignore at their peril.

Byron E. Shafer is Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Chair of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He can be reached at beshafer@facstaff.wisc.edu and 608-263-1909.

Recent Publications on the Dimensions of American Politics

Jacobsen, Gary C. 2007. A Divider Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People. Pearson Longman: New York.

Shafer, Byron E. 2003. The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Stonecash, Jeffrey M. et al. 2003. Diverging Parties: Social Change, Realignment, and Political Polarization.Boulder: Westview Press.

Layman, Geoffrey C. 2001. The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Jones, Charles 0. 1994. The Presidency in a Seperate System. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

Mayhew, David R. 1991. Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946-1990.New Haven: Yale University Press.