The worst thing that happens after most US elections is that people begin to debate whether or not the election in question is/was a “realignment” election.

So when I saw that Stan Collender had a post titled Beware of Those Who Call This Election a Realigment” I was excited. But instead of his argument being the correct one that this is a bogus concept, he’s saying “It may well be a realignment, but anyone who uses that word tonight, tomorrow, or in the next few months to characterize the 2010 election will either be guessing or spinning.”

What you really need to do with realignment-mongering pundits is suggest they read David Mayhew’s Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre in which he persuasively argues that there’s no meaningful “realignment” phenomenon. There’s a good short summary here if you’re interested. To give my own summary, Mayhew’s point is that there’s no dichotomy between two “kinds” of elections. There’s just a lot of elections. Some are more important than others, especially in retrospect. Sometimes a party wins a bunch of elections in a row. Sometimes a voting bloc switches partisan loyalties on an enduring basis. But there’s no “pattern” in which these things all go together. Stuff just happens. Partisan majorities are usually fleeting.

People gaze at the stars and see constellations, but that just goes to show that human intelligence plus random occurrences equals pattern-detection not that there’s some deep underlying structure to the heavens that’s painting pretty pictures for us.

Via John Sides, Ernesto Dal Bó, Pedro Dal Bó, and Jason Snyder on “Political Dynasties” (PDF):

Political dynasties have long been present in democracies, raising concerns that this inequality in the distribution of political power may reflect imperfections in democratic representation. However, the persistence of political elites may simply reflect differences in ability or political vocation across families and not their entrenchment in power. We show that dynastic prevalence in the Congress of the United States is high compared to other occupations and that political dynasties do not merely reflect permanent differences in family characteristics. On the contrary, using two instrumental variable techniques we find that political power is self-perpetuating: legislators who hold power for longer become more likely to have relatives entering Congress in the future. Thus, in politics, power begets power.

I think we should probably understand political dynasties in democracies as part of the larger story of the importance of elite signaling in democratic politics. Most people have stronger views about individual figures than they do about “the issues.” So the question becomes how do you extend the brand? Most voters are most effectively reached via partisan branding—something like 80 percent of people are robotic party-line voters—but “swing voters” by definition don’t work this way. Family relationships then become an effective means of extending a positive brand that’s doesn’t involve parties.

Andrew Gelman has a post up about an exchange we had over the weekend. Here’s a historical image of the two-party share of the House vote:

My view is that the right way to understand this is that historically Democrats averaged about 55 percent of the vote because of the weirdness around the one party politics of the Jim Crow South. Then from 1994 on you have a 50/50 average and you should understand the 2008 Democratic landslide as an unsustainable outlier. Gelman points out that this is pretty speculative on my part and that as of January 2009 it was at least possible to argue that the 2008 result was a return to historical norms. Obviously I can’t prove I’ll be right about the future, but I’d like to go on record with my prediction—I think over the next decade or two the parties will be about equal on average. With the current distribution of voters and districts, a 50:50 split of the national vote leads to a GOP majority, so I expect we’ll see small Republican majorities as the most common outcome.

You rarely get a single anecdote that tells you so much about how the American polity operates:

Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues on the Senate floor as a conquering general returning from war. Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), in charge of the Senate Democrats’ campaign effort, gave her a hug and a kiss and said, “Now we just have to raise money.” Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: “Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other.”

Lincoln received bipartisan hugs, kisses, handshakes and even a fist bump. Sen. Claire McCaskill applauded and let out a “woo-hoo.”

The ideal of governing in a manner that’s equidistant from rival interest groups (which even as “clarified” is clearly what Schumer is saying) is basically worthy. But in the American context, there’s a dangerous lack of balance. Schumer, who’s become something of a national leader among Senate Democrats, celebrates this ideal, but there’s not a single member of the Republican Party—much less a leader—who’d say anything remotely similar. Schumer is basically describing polyarchy or interest-group pluralism. But the imbalance between Schumer and his rivals on the other side of the aisle reflects what Charles Lindblom ended up criticizing as the “privileged position of business in polyarchy.”

Andrew Gelman elaborates on the conditions that make U.S. presidential elections pretty predictable, but that don’t let us say the same thing about other kinds of elections:

(a) A long history: we can predict this year’s election, to some extent, from last year’s. The U.S. isn’t a country like Guatemala where they’ve only been having competitive elections for a few years.

(b) Clear separation between the parties. Talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum aside, the Democrats and Republicans are, according to Huber and Stanig, further apart on economic issues than are left and right groupings in just about every other industrialized country.

(c) Only two major candidates. Anderson in 1980, Perot in 1992 and 1996: they cane close but they didn’t quite make it a real three-candidate race. It basically worked to focus on the Democrat and the Republican.

(d) Equal resources. Not quite: Nixon reputedly massively outspent McGovern in 1992, Bush had the edge over Gore in 2000, and Obama had a few hundred million to spare in 2008. Still, compared to referenda and elections for congress and governor, presidential races are on a pretty level playing field.

(e) A clear schedule: Voters have many months to sort out the information and make up their minds.

This is worth keeping in mind when you hear the intuitively wrong-sounding empirical results on the lack of campaign effects. What the political science is telling you isn’t that presidential election campaigns couldn’t make a difference to election outcomes, it’s telling you that they don’t seem to make a difference in practice. But if one candidate just refused to fundraise, or did fundraise but did something wildly eccentric with the money, then for all we know that might make a big difference. You could imagine a candidate deliberately trying to tank the race, or just acting plain-out weird. What if John McCain delivered lengthy speeches denouncing his own policy agenda? But in practice we always see two well-funded, well-known candidates run pretty conventional campaigns and within that context the ups-and-downs of the campaign trail don’t seem to make a difference.

Andrew Gelman delves into a question I’ve been wondering about—does the political science literature about (the absence of discernable) campaign effects on election outcomes apply in more complicated races with multiple options? He says not really:

To put it another way, when the race is between candidate A and candidate B, you might as well vote for the candidate you prefer, no matter who happens to be in the lead—and the evidence is that people do just that. I’ve not seen evidence of any bandwagon effects in races between two candidates of opposing parties. But when the race is between A, B, and C, then, yes, your vote choice can definitely be affected by the possibility that C really has a chance of winning.

To put it yet another way: Elections are inherently more unstable when more than two candidates are involved.

That seems right on a theoretical level. If you look at something like the latest poll out of Canada you can see that a bunch of people who are telling pollsters they’ll vote Green or NDP are facing a tactical issue about whether it makes sense to cast a tactical vote for the Liberals. At the same time, there’s good reason to think that many Liberal voters would be turned off by explicit Liberal-NDP collaboration. So on its face, research about campaign effects in US presidential elections shouldn’t tell us much about this situation. But for a political scientist’s post on a political science topic, Gelman’s was uncharacteristically lacking in specific references to research on the subject—I wonder what’s out there, but couldn’t quite come up with the right combination of search terms to find anything relevant.

By Ryan Powers

Both the Hill and Roll Call have accounts today of an apparently testy exchange between Obama and Sen. Corker at a lunchtime, closed-door meeting yesterday:

“I said, ‘I got to tell you something, there’s a degree of audacity in you being here today,’” Corker said, recalling his exchange with the president. “If you look at your three major initiatives they were almost all done on party-line votes,” Corker told Obama. “I feel we’re all props here today.

“Just last week you engineered a very partisan vote,” Corker added. “I would just like for you to explain to me, when you get up in the morning, and when you come over to lunch like this, how you reconcile that duplicity.”

Obama, of course, has worked very hard the last two years to reach out to Republicans. And Corker, if we take him as his word, would really like to cooperate (he sort of tried it seems on financial reform). But Obama’s failure to secure bipartisanship is hardly duplicitous. The fact of the matter is Obama and Corker are dealing with structural forces that are much larger than themselves. Alan Abramowitz documents this in a paper that he recently presented here at William and Mary, arguing that the partisan divide in Washington is simply a reflection of the partisan divide in the voting public — and not just the political elite:

The gradual disappearance of conservative Democrats and moderate-to-liberal Republicans has had a clear impact on the electoral coalitions of Democratic and Republican Senate candidates. … [O]ver the past four decades on the [American National Election Study] 7- point liberal-conservative scale…the gap between the average location of Democratic and Republican voters has more than doubled, from .8 units to 1.7 units. In 1972, conservative identifiers made up 30 percent of Democratic Senate voters and 43 percent of Republican Senate voters. In 2008, conservative identifiers made up 19 percent of Democratic Senate voters and 72 percent of Republican Senate voters.

Abramowitz concludes, “Rather than indicating that there is a ‘disconnect’ between politicians and voters, polarization in Congress actually indicates that Democratic and Republican members are accurately reflecting the views of the voters who elected them.” He also suggests that the effect of this is more obvious in the Senate than in the House due to reliance on unanimous consent and the filibuster.

It seems that the sooner Obama et al recognize this political reality and learn to work with in it, the better. Recent weeks suggest, however, that the President is getting there.

Steve Teles writes in with a sharp take on the Liberal/Conservative coalition in the U.K.:

I think there’s another way to think about the coalition, which is not to think of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats as internally coherent parties. Rather, it’s better to think of both of them as internally heterogeneous. The Conservatives have a more liberal wing, which Cameron and his clique are part of. The LibDems have a more socially democratic (and public-service-delivery) wing, and a more liberal (in the European sense) wing, which Clegg, Laws, and Cable are part of. The coalition makes a certain amount of strategic sense if you think of both governing cadres as wanting to have power, but also to govern from their part of their own party coalition. Cameron gets to use the coalition as an excuse not to do the things that his more conservative party members want, and Clegg gets a similar excuse with his more social democratic members. So while the coalition doesn’t make as much sense from the point of view of the median of each party, it does make sense given that the leadership of each party is closer to the ideological center than their party median.

Certainly I think the general view in the late-1990s was that Tony Blair in many ways regretted the fact that he won such a big majority in 1997—what he really wanted was to be “forced” into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats precisely because, per what Teles writes, that would have strengthened his hand vis-à-vis the Labour left.

Apparently the Tory-LibDem coalition violates a lot of our theoretic understanding of the coalition-formation process. I see two factors in play here. One is that our understanding of this subject comes from countries that habitually feature coalition governments, of which the UK is not one. The other is that the ideological identification of the Liberal Democrats is contested and a bit problematic. They appear to most outside observers to be a center-left party that’s in many ways to the left of Labour, but their traditional location is as a centrist party to the right of Labour and many Labour supporters also see it that way.