Tag Archives | Dealignment

Social Class and Party Identification During the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Presidencies

Stephen L. Morgan, Jiwon Lee

Sociological Science, August 3, 2017
DOI 10.15195/v4.a16

Through an analysis of the 1994 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article demonstrates that a substantial proportion of eligible voters within the working class turned away from solid identification with either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party during the Obama presidency. Even before the 2016 election cycle commenced, conditions were uncharacteristically propitious for a Republican candidate who could appeal to prospective voters in the working class, especially those who had not voted in recent presidential elections but could be mobilized to vote. These findings support the contested position that variation in party identification is a genuine leading indicator of electoral outcomes and perhaps also, in this case, of party realignment.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Stephen L. Morgan: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Email: stephen.morgan@jhu.edu

Jiwon Lee: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
Email: jiwonlee@jhu.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Danny Schlozman for a helpful orienting discussion of these topics as well as Andy Cherlin, Mike Hout, Jennifer Silva, and Tom Smith for comments on the penultimate draft.

  • Citation: Morgan, Stephen L., and Jiwon Lee. 2017. “Social Class and Party Identification During the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Presidencies.” Sociological Science 4: 394-423.
  • Received: June 12, 2017
  • Accepted: June 25, 2017
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v4.a16


0
SiteLock