As each presidential election passes into the history books, debate renews over the status of the New Deal Party System. This article addresses part of that debate by examining changes in the electorate's assessment of New Deal issues. Despite the vast literature on realignment, there have been few efforts to see whether issues associated with the New Deal still shape the political attitudes of the American electorate. Using the NES's open-ended like/dislike questions on parties and candidates from 1952 to 1988, I show that New Deal issues remain central to the partisan attitudes of the public. These findings show that the agenda of the New Deal remains an integral part of how the American public thinks about their candidates and parties. There, of course, has been much change over the last four decades, but these results suggest, in general, that at least parts of the New Deal Party System remain intact.
Political Behavior publishes original research in the general fields of political behavior, broadly construed to include institutions, processes, and policies as well as individual-level political behavior. As an interdisciplinary journal, Political Behavior encourages the integration of approaches across disciplinary lines and across different levels of theoretical abstraction and analysis. Political Behavior incorporates economic approaches to understanding political behavior (preference structuring, bargaining), psychological approaches (attitude formation and change, motivations, perceptions), and sociological approaches (roles, group, class), as well as those more explicitly political in orientation. Articles focus on the political behavior (conventional or unconventional) of the individual person or small group, or of large organizations that participate in the political process, such as parties, interest groups, political action committees, governmental agencies, and mass media.
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Political Behavior
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