Existing Views on the Mass Response to Elite Partisan Change

Some scholars contend that the growth of elite-level ideological polarization has led to a similar outcome at the mass level: an "ideological realignment" of the par­ties' electoral coalitions characterized by increased lib­eral-conservative polarization (Abramowitz and Saunders 1998, 2000; Levine, Carmines, and Huckfeldt 1997; Putz and Shepherd 2001). However, these research­ers employ unidimensional indicators of mass ideology, thus assuming (rather than demonstrating) that mass at­titudes toward various policy issues are structured along the same single liberal-conservative dimension that de­fines elite-level party conflict.

That description runs counter to traditional per­spectives on mass partisan change, which typically argue that party conflict is dominated by—and party polariza­tion takes shape on—a single policy agenda (Key 1955; Schattschneider 1960; Burnham 1970; Riker 1982; Sundquist 1983; Carmines and Stimson 1989). During periods of stable party alignment, the parties' mass coali­tions are structured around that agenda, with each coali­tion unified by its attitudes toward the dominant issues but potentially divided on other issues that remain in the political background. Thus, when a new issue agenda that cuts across the existing line of party cleavage emerges, party polarization on the new agenda should result in a decline in party conflict on the old agenda. As Sundquist argues, "the characteristic that identifies a party realignment [is] ... the displacement of one con­flict by another" (1983,13, emphasis in the original).

Both viewpoints provide insight into the recent be­havior of the parties in the electorate, but neither ac­count is complete or satisfactory. The conflict displace­ment perspective's focus on the inherent tension between older and newer issue agendas comports well with the substantive differences among the three issue agendas in contemporary domestic politics and the empirical reality that citizens' attitudes toward them are distinct and, to some extent, cross-cutting (Knoke 1979; Abramowitz 1994; Shafer and Claggett 1995; Carmines and Layman

1997). Racial and social welfare issues do pose a similar philosophical question—should the government take an active role in furthering social and economic equality among its citizens?—which helps account for the rela­tionship some researchers find between attitudes on them (Kinder and Sanders 1996). However, Democratic racial liberalism triggered mass defections from the party's traditional base in the white South, and racial concerns continue to divide the Democratic coalition both in and outside of the South (Huckfeldt and Kohfeld 1989; Carmines and Layman 1998). The philosophical question motivating cultural issues-should the govern­ment take an active role in promoting traditional notions of morality and social order?-differs from that of the other two agendas, and it is cultural conservatives, not liberals, who favor government activism. Consequently, groups that tend to be conservative on social welfare is­sues are often liberal on cultural issues, and vice versa (Ladd and Hadley 1975; Layman 2001).

Yet, the conflict displacement outlook assumes that "the old cleavage must be played down if the new conflict is to be exploited" (Schattschneider 1960, 63). Thus, it fails to anticipate party elites polarizing on two or more cross-cutting issue dimensions, as they recently have done. In contrast, the ideological realignment perspective recognizes that party elites have grown increasingly po­larized on multiple issue agendas, but, by modeling the mass response as taking shape along a single liberal-conservative continuum, it ignores the multidimensional structure of mass issue attitudes.

More generally, both perspectives offer over­simplified accounts of the mass response to elite-level change. The traditional realignment viewpoint does not anticipate that party elite change on issues may lead indi­vidual voters to alter their views on issues. Instead, it typically assumes that the only individual-level response to party elite polarization is issue-based change in party identification—either party identifiers switching their party allegiances (Erikson and Tedin 1981; Sundquist 1983) or independents choosing a party affiliation based on the new source of partisan conflict (Andersen 1979; Clubb, Flanigan, and Zingale 1980). If citizens' issue atti­tudes are fixed as such, then issue dimensions such as so­cial welfare and culture that are initially orthogonal to (uncorrelated with) each other will remain so. Then, even if party elites grow more polarized on both dimen­sions, increased mass party polarization on one issue agenda necessarily results in decreased polarization on the other.

We contend that such an outcome is unlikely because the alternative positions championed by party elites struc­ture the political choices offered to the mass public and

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thus play an important role in the development and ex­pression of citizens' views. When Democratic and Repub­lican elites present distinct viewpoints on multiple issues, those issues are, to some extent, packaged together for public consumption. In other words, the policy positions of the two parties help determine "what goes with what" in public policy debates and in the policy attitudes of citi­zens who receive political cues from party elites (Car­mines and Stimson 1989; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991; Zaller 1992; Shafer and Claggett 1995). In recent de­cades, the choice increasingly offered to voters is one be­tween a Republican party taking consistently conservative positions on social welfare, racial, and cultural issues and a Democratic party that is consistently liberal on all three agendas. In this context, it is reasonable to expect some citizens to adopt consistently liberal or consistently con­servative positions themselves.

The ideological realignment account correctly per­ceives that elite policy positions do structure mass policy attitudes and that the growing ideological consistency of party elite stands on social welfare, racial, and cultural is­sues should lead to increases in mass attitude constraint. However, it envisions a large and uniform response across citizens to elite ideological polarization. In order for mass ideology to become defined by the single lib­eral-conservative dimension assumed by ideological re­alignment, it would be necessary for most citizens to fol­low the lead of party elites and stake out uniformly liberal or uniformly conservative positions on all three domestic issue agendas.

Such a widespread increase in attitudinal coherence is unlikely for a number of reasons. First, there remain clear substantive differences between the three domestic agendas, and the major sociodemographic factors associ­ated with attitudes on social welfare, racial, and cultural issues—social class, race, and religion, respectively—are themselves cross-cutting. Second, Converse (1964) and others show that many, if not most, citizens do not ex­hibit much consistency in their attitudes toward even is­sues within the same policy agenda, much less toward different agendas. Third, the individuals who do have highly constrained attitudes toward the issues in one di­mension are often members of "issue publics" who care deeply about a particular issue or issue agenda, but find other issues to be much less salient and thus lack coher­ent views on them (Converse 1964; Krosnick 1990). Fi­nally, and most importantly for this article, many, and perhaps most, citizens are unlikely to respond to political cues provided by party elites because they pay little atten­tion to elite-level politics, because they have no ties or only weak ties to a political party, or both.