Conclusion

We have argued that neither the traditional "conflict dis­placement" view of mass partisan change nor the more recent work on mass "ideological realignment" provides a satisfactory explanation of how the electorate should react to increasingly unidimensional and ideologically polarized party elites. The alternative we have offered is an account of "conflict extension," in which the mass re­sponse to recent elite-level developments should be lim­ited to party identifiers, particularly strong partisans, who are aware of party polarization on each separate is­sue agenda. In the aggregate, this limited mass response should produce conflict extension, with the parties in the electorate growing more polarized on social welfare, ra­cial, and cultural issues, but with attitudes toward all three agendas remaining distinct. The aggregate- and in­dividual-level evidence we presented supports our view. Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom that mass partisan change is driven by a single issue dimension and characterized by conflict displacement. An important question is if the conflict displacement perspective once accurately described the partisan change process, why does it no longer seem to do so? Our account of contem­porary electoral developments points toward an answer: the extent to which mass partisan change is characterized by conflict extension as opposed to conflict displacement depends heavily on the structure of ideological conflict between party elites. If party elites polarize along one ma­jor issue dimension and take centrist or heterogeneous positions on other dimensions, then the parties in the electorate will not receive cues that their own views on different agendas should be consistent. In such circum­stances, we would not expect mass ideology to be polar­ized on multiple agendas nor would we expect attitudes on multiple issue dimensions to converge toward a single liberal-conservative dimension, even among the most aware strong partisans. However, if Democratic and Re­publican elites take positions on multiple issue dimen­sions that are consistently liberal and consistently conser­vative, respectively, then politically-aware party identifiers will receive cues that their views on different issue agendas should go together and they should move toward polar­ized stands on each of those dimensions.

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GEOFFREY С. LAYMAN AND THOMAS M. CARSEY

Part of the reason that the conflict displacement the­sis has prevailed may be the common view in the realign­ment literature that party leaders have incentives to keep the focus of political conflict on one particular issue di­mension (Schattschneider 1960; Sundquist 1983). Dur­ing a period of stable alignment, majority party elites want to focus partisan debate on the issues that created the alignment that made them the majority (Riker 1982). Some work suggests that minority party elites have in­centives to introduce cross-cutting issue dimensions in an effort to disrupt the alignment (Riker 1982; Carmines and Stimson 1989), but minority party leaders also ac­crue benefits from the existing alignment—they hold po­litical office and they hold the balance of power within their own party—and they may not wish to upset it by taking the focus off the dominant issues (Carmines 1991). In fact, Sundquist (1983) contends that the initial reaction of both parties' leaders to a new issue agenda is to straddle and suppress it. Of course, during a period of party realignment, such efforts fail and new issues are in­troduced onto the agenda. But, realignments also involve some replacement in the leadership of both parties (Sundquist 1983), and the elites who were brought to power by the new issue dimension may wish to focus po­litical conflict only on it and avoid continued party po­larization on the old dimension. If party elites do wish to limit partisan conflict to one issue dimension at a time, and if they are successful in that goal, then periods of change in the partisan issue agenda should be associated with conflict displacement.

Of course, party leaders never have been able to exert enough control over the agenda of political conflict to limit it to a single issue dimension indefinitely (Riker 1982), but they may have been much better able to con­trol the agenda in the past than they are now. Before the Democratic party's reforms in the late 1960s and early 1970s created a participatory nominating process at the national level, party leaders exercised considerable influ­ence over candidate nominations and the drafting of party platforms, and thus over the parties' issue agendas. With a nominating process now dominated by primaries and caucuses, however, party leaders have much less con­trol over the agenda. Groups of political activists, each championing different issue agendas, have greater access to party politics and can exert substantial pressure on party candidates, office-holders, and platforms to take extreme stands on these multiple agendas in order to piece together a winning electoral coalition.²⁰ When

²⁰Much of the evidence for growing party elite polarization on multiple policy agendas comes from Congress, where changes in the nomination process have not been as dramatic as at the presi­dential level. Thus, there are certainly other factors contributing to these elite-level developments. The movement of southern whites

party elites are unable to limit partisan conflict to a single, dominant issue dimension and are pressured to take consistently liberal or conservative positions on nu­merous issue agendas, this signals to party identifiers that they should do so as well. Thus, conflict extension, rather than conflict displacement, should occur.

The conflict extension perspective on partisan change may be more compatible with contemporary theories of electoral politics and candidate strategy than either the ideological realignment or conflict displacement view­points. Spatial theories that rest on assumptions about the desire and ability of parties to shift the relative salience of different issue dimensions (cf. Riker 1990; Shafer and Claggett 1995; Carsey 2000) are precluded under ideo­logical realignment's notion that mass issue preferences are unidimensional. But, they are perfectly consistent with our view that although the mass parties have grown more polarized on multiple issue agendas, mass ideology has remained multidimensional. Meanwhile, our evidence that attentive partisans bring their own issue positions to­ward the consistently liberal or consistently conservative stands of Democratic and Republican elites, something not predicted by conflict displacement accounts, suggests that parties may find some success using persuasion as a strategic tool. This is consistent with theories arguing that it is necessary or at least often beneficial to parties to take nonmedian positions on issues (cf. Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989; Gerber and Jackson 1993; Carsey 2000). Lastly, the importance that awareness of elite-level parti­san politics holds in the conflict extension account com­ports with theories of the importance of information in electoral politics (cf. Alvarez 1997), thus pointing more generally to the importance of awareness in linking mass-and elite-level politics.