Party Polarization and "Conflict Extension" in the American Electorate

Geoffrey C. Layman; Thomas M. Carsey

American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 46, No. 4. (Oct., 2002), pp. 786-802.

_STOR

Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0092-5853%28200210%2946%3A4%3C786%3APPA%22EI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

American Journal of Political Science is currently published by Midwest Political Science Association.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/mpsa.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org Sat Feb 17 05:01:58 2007

Party Polarization and "Conflict Extension" in the American Electorate

Geoffrey C. Layman Vanderbilt University Thomas M. Carsey Florida State University

In recent decades, Democratic and Republican party elites have grown increasingly polarized on all three of the major domestic policy agendas: social welfare, racial, and cultural issues. We contend that the mass response has been characterized not by the traditional expectation of "con­flict displacement" or the more recent account of "ideological realignment," but by what we term "conflict exten­sion." Mass attitudes toward the three agendas have remained distinct, but the parties in the electorate have grown more polarized on all three. Conflict extension, rather than conflict displacement or ideological realign­ment, has occurred because there has been a limited mass response to the growth of elite-level party polar­ization. Only party identifiers who are aware of party elite polarization on each of the issue dimensions have brought their social welfare, racial, and cultural issue attitudes toward the consistently liberal or consistently conservative stands of Democratic and Republican elites. Analyses using data from the 1972 through 2000 National Election Studies sup­port both the aggregate- and indi­vidual-level predictions of the conflict extension perspective.

An expanding body of research suggests that political party elites in the United States have grown increasingly polarized along a single ideological dimension (Rohde 1991; Aldrich 1995; Poole and Rosenthal 1997; Collie and Mason 2000; Jacobson 2000; Fleisher and Bond 2000; Hetherington 2001). In Congress, racial issues such as civil rights and racial equality and cultural issues such as abortion, homosexual rights, and school prayer initially divided the parties internally, not externally. However, congressional Republicans grew more conservative than Demo­crats on racial issues in the 1960s (Carmines and Stimson 1989) and on cultural issues in the 1980s and 1990s (Adams 1997; Layman 2001), draw­ing these formerly cross-cutting issue agendas into the dominant liberal-conservative dimension (Poole and Rosenthal 1997). Meanwhile, the elec­tions of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and a Republican congressional majority in 1994 repolarized party debate on the social welfare issues that have structured party conflict since the New Deal (Rohde 1991; Abramowitz and Saunders 1998). There is also considerable evidence that the parties' convention delegates and grassroots-level activists have grown more polar­ized on social welfare, racial, and cultural issues (Stone, Rapoport, and Abramowitz 1990; Layman and Carsey 2000).

Such definitive changes in party elite ideology generally spark a re­sponse from the mass electorate (Zaller 1992; Nie, Verba, and Petrocik 1976; Carmines and Stimson 1989). In this article, we contend that there should be a limited mass response—confined largely to party identifiers who are aware of party polarization on all three of the domestic issue agen­das—which should produce an aggregate result that we call "conflict exten­sion." Citizens' domestic policy attitudes should remain divided into sepa­rate dimensions, but party conflict—in the form of increased party

Geoffrey C. Layman is Associate Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235 (geoff.layman@vanderbilt.edu). Thomas M. Carsey is Associate Professor of Political Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2230 (tcarsey@garnet.acns.fsu.edu).

A previous version of this article was presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. We wish to thank Ted Carmines, John Geer, Bruce Oppenheimer, Paul Sniderman, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. The data used in this study were obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The Consortium bears no re­sponsibility for their use.

American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 46, No. 4, October 2002, Pp. 786-802 ©2002 by the Midwest Political Science Association ISSN 0092-5853

786

CONFLICT EXTENSION IN THE U. S. ELECTORATE

787

polarization—should extend to each of these dimen­sions. After considering the existing perspectives on the mass response to elite-level ideological change, we de­velop our conflict extension argument. We then evaluate it empirically by examining aggregate-level electoral patterns from 1972 through 2000 and by testing our individual-level explanations for these patterns.