Key Changes [Book Review]

Abstract

The notion that electoral history may be divided into long periods of stability broken periodically by major shocks has been the central organizing motif of American political history for a generation. Drawing on the simple empirical observation that the balance of electoral support for the major American political parties across geographic units remained roughly the same for a sequence of contests, and then shifted rather suddenly into a new and lasting pattern, V. 0. Key, Jr., Lee Benson, Walter Dean Burnham, and others sought to do more than provide descriptive tags for conventional historical "eras." They attempted, by relating political to social cleavages, to explain why voters' decisions stood for so long (for instance, in Benson's "ethnocultural thesis"), and to show how wars, depressions, institutional changes, or intraparty struggles undermined these stable voting configurations (for instance, in Paul Kleppner's view that a common revulsion to the Democrats' failure to avoid economic depression combined with a differentiated voter response to Bryan's fundamentalist Protestant zeal shifted the social correlates of politics in the 1890s). Realizing that since it was based on aggregate election data, their hypothesis of stability and change was susceptible to the "ecological fallacy" of inferring individual behavior from measures available only for collectivities, the critical elections theorists tried, in effect, to supplement aggregate returns for the past with evidence of the long-term stability of party identification drawn from recent surveys. Focusing attention more closely on certain crucial variables and contests, encouraging political scientists to escape their parochial habit of presentmindedness and historians to overcome their predilection for concentrating too much on details and too little on basic patterns, the concept of normal elections broken by swift realignments has been beneficial to both disciplines.

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