The Political Impact of the Depression in Comparative Perspective
Via Henry Farrell, a provocative argument from Larry Bartels that the FDR realignment was basically just a coincidence:
The 1936 election has become the most celebrated textbook case of ideological realignment of the American electorate. However, a careful look at state-by-state voting patterns suggests that this resounding ratification of Roosevelt’s policies was strongly concentrated in the states that happened to enjoy robust income growth in the months leading up to the vote. (As usual, voters seem to have been quite myopic—huge variations in income growth in 1934 and 1935 had no discernible effect on 1936 voting patterns.) Indeed, the apparent impact of short-term economic conditions was so powerful that, if the recession of 1938 had occurred in 1936, Roosevelt would probably have been a one-term president.
Considering America’s Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to “throwing the bums out” than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply—and simple-mindedly—rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.
I would consider this one more reason to agree with David Mayhew that “realignment” is not a real phenomenon in Americna politics — the observed patterns are just the human capacity for pattern-recognition looking at a mess of miscellaneous events.
28 Responses to “The Political Impact of the Depression in Comparative Perspective”
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October 7th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Well, you’ve convinced me! Where do I go to register as a Republican?
October 7th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
There was, in fact, a realignment of political power, whether or not voters possessed anywhere from 0% to 100% of an intention to have such a thing happen.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a political scientist, but every time the FDR-connected “realignment” has been discussed, I thought they meant the empirical shift in power, not some idiotic notion of what was in the voters’ heads. There’s an easier way to get that information — you ask voters in surveys & interviews and in ethnographic research.
And certainly a big part of the actual power realignment was a sort of coincidence: it wasn’t exactly a ‘variable’ that Roosevelt happened to belong to the party which dominated the segregated South, but the fact that he could win the North along with the single-party South made it happen.
One thing Bartels might have wanted to mention as an explanatory variable: all kinds of governments from different ideological background abandoned many of the policies which (at least at the time was massively assumed to have) led to the Depression and adopted economic intervention on a massive scale.
And, of course, 1/3 of our nation, the South, did not simply ‘recover’ to any prior status — it was fundamentally altered and developed out of a completely backwards primary product exporting region to an actual part of a modern, developing nation.
And that may not have happened were it not for the influence of the nearly permanently entrenched Southern Democrats who happened to belong to the ruling party and could not realistically be challenged by any other party.
Finally, I don’t give a flying f*** which researchers think it’s just fine that we might be able to be governed well regardless of how informed or ignorant voters are — my preference for an informed electorate is a principled one, not an excuse to look back and say, well, I guess things turned out okay anyway.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved
Yes, but the British New Deal came in 1945 when the war hero Churchill was rejected in a landslide Labour victory. Voters considered the 1930s and the Tories when making that decision.
Labour brought in a National Health Service and nationalized major industries (with disastrous long term results for international competitiveness, it must be added).
October 7th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I would say the same thing happened with Reagan. He just happened to be the president when the stagflation and other woes from the 1970’s ended, his appeal and the Republican Party’s dominance owed more to that coincidence than to any sudden embrace of the conservative movement, much to the hard right’s annoyance ever since.
The same thing will probably happen to the next president. If he’s able to be there when things get better, we might see a realignment otherwise he will very likely lose in 2012 and the “realignment” will have to wait.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
This makes sense to me. There are other factors that are probably more impactive that might explain a realignment. For example, in the late 70s a lot of people moved out the cities and into the suburbs and adopted a faux individualism that Republicans have been feeding red meat to ever since. I suspect that had more to do with the Reagan realignment than any effects from his goofy economic policies did. An electorate that undergoes sweeping demographic changes is likely to realign one way or another. Its simply easier to sustain an orthodoxy if you get your messaging straight at the beginning.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
The stunning rise of the Nazis had deeper psychological and spiritual roots than the “realignment” taking place in the rest of the industrialized world. The Nazis offered the Volk nothing less than a new, breathtakingly dark religion.
October 7th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
But did such a thing happen with Clinton? One of the strongest and longest periods of economic prosperity — but Gore couldn’t win after him, and the Dems never did take back Congress until 6 years after Clinton left.
As for FDR, what I think El Cid is saying is this: is it possible that FDR’s _policies_ helped some areas of the country in 1936, and those areas voted for FDR. Perhaps it wasn’t that their income went up, but rather that they saw good policies, or what they thought were good (and causative) policies, and _that’s_ why they voted for FDR?
October 7th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote a fascinating history of this time — the three volume “Age of Roosevelt”. Volume 2 — The Coming of the New Deal — has a chapter VII that covers the reaction of the Right — and why the voters found its arguments hypocritical and unconvincing.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
What about “realignment” in the sense that the Democrats won 5 out of the next 7 elections, and maintained control of Congress for the next few decades?
October 7th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
We’ll just have to hope that the coming recession ends before the ‘10 midterms.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Noah: Yeah, they seem to be discussing “realignment” as discussing the policy intentions of the voters, rather than the empirical result of who governs, and for whom, and by doing what.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
One of the strongest and longest periods of economic prosperity — but Gore couldn’t win after him, and the Dems never did take back Congress until 6 years after Clinton left.
Those Republicans came in as a result of continued economic discontent in ‘94, and after that, Democrats and Republicans could both see what they wanted to see as the cause of the subsequent boom; to the Republicans, it happened because of Gingrich and in spite of Clinton. It wasn’t really pinned on either party, which was part of the reason 2000 could be such a fifty-fifty election.
Then, of course, 2002 and 2004 were much more about the psychological shock of 9/11 than about economics. After 2002, the Republicans utterly owned anything that happened economically.
October 8th, 2008 at 1:03 am
I’ve been skeptical of the standard notion of the New Deal coalition. After all, it really only produced only one very popular president–FDR. Truman and Kennedy didn’t ride some predominant majority to victory, while Stevenson was defeated handily, and Johnson won without much of the South (a fundamental piece of the coalition). Perhaps it should be called “one very popular president”. In Congress there were Democratic majorities, but you could say that about most of American history.
But this quote almost makes me a true believer again! Realignment theory does not make strong assumptions about the kinds of reasons why there are realignments. All it means is that a party establishes a majority of identifiers over the course of a generation or so. This identification may happen for any number of reasons–ethnic identity, economic interests, cultural values, or even path dependency (what party did my ancestors join when they got off the boat?). But the underlying theoretical claim is that Party ID is very influential in voting, and has a certain basic structure to it that lasts for several elections. So it really seems irrelevant that parties of many different types did well in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The Nazi party is really the worst example–they were indeed a “party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased [and] dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter”, but they were a dictatorship during that time! What in the world is the point here?
There is a structural difference in Party ID numbers between the 1932-1968 period and the 1968-2008 period. This difference was caused by the realtively slow (over a period of more than on election) migration of large voting blocs from one party to the other. That’s really all that realignment theory is saying, in a nutshell.
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