Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
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had an unfailing sectional home—the South. More than any other legislative delegation, southern legislators most consistently—across the Progressive, post–World War II, and late twentieth-century periods—are found to have advocated conservative family positions. Southern legislators have tended to use their own southern family examples, more frequently than legislators from other regions, to illustrate their policy positions, suggesting a distinctive localism to their process of policy ideology formulation and elaboration. The turn to family in late twentieth-century party politics, the increasing adoption of the Soul family values ideal by the Republican Party (and then, to a lesser extent, by the Democratic Party), and the salience of family values as a significant national policy frame are thus directly related to southern realignment, the increasing electoral significance of the South, and the Republican Party’s pursuit of a southern strategy.
Instead of viewing the rightward “southernization” of the Republican Party and the subsequent conservative ascendance in American party politics as driven solely by race and civil rights issues24 or even battles over sex and gender,25 the book suggests that family ideals were at its core. Neoliberal views of economy and conservative views of society, historically separated by party, came to be melded into a common GOP “politics of family,” facilitating the Republican southernization trajectory and the subsequent ascendance of conservatism in party politics. Conservative ascendance in this account is thus tied to the increased prominence of southern domestic ideals within the Republican Party and subsequently in national American politics. As the Republican Party moved south, it increasingly incorporated southern family ideals to craft a Soul family values policy agenda, with Democratic legislators continuing to rely on ideals from families in the Northeast to advocate for a materialist Hearth family approach.
The account also highlights the formative role of massive family demographic change since the 1970s, its disparate occurrence and reception in the South as opposed to elsewhere, and so complicates the picture of the Republican Southern Strategy further as not merely an elite-driven phenomenon formulated by conservative political strategists and evangelical leaders. The timing of family demographic change and the coincident rightward shift toward family values within the Republican Party agenda underscore the importance of the southern cultural context in which conservative family ideals had long been prevalent but were brought to the fore by the family transformations of the late twentieth century. The book argues that family political ideals are thus rooted in distinct demographic regional realities, and overlooking these material and cultural contexts misses the lived regionalism that underlies partisan (family) appeals and political strategies.
In sum, by focusing on family, this account contributes to the literature on political parties in the following ways: (1) it highlights family as a crucial, albeit overlooked, site of party ideological divisions over state and economy; (2) it reconceives political party ideology as more than abstract principles and instead shows the lived material and cultural realities on which it is founded; and (3) it presents an alternative account of the conservative ascendance and/or southernization of the Republican Party since the 1970s, demonstrating that southern family ideals, southern reaction to family demographic transformations, and the rising electoral salience of the South with its distinctive conservative (Soul) family ideal markedly shaped this phenomenon.
The next section situates the book in APD literature, highlighting its contribution in terms of the prevailing understanding of political change in general and the significance of ideas and conceptual narratives as facilitating this change.
Family and American Political Development
Polarized Families, Polarized Parties captures change in party ideology and policy debate from Hearth to more Soul family frameworks as part of the increasing southernization of American party politics from the early to the late twentieth century. In its focus on partisan ideology and policy preferences, as assembled from in committee hearings, bill sponsorships, and co-sponsorships, the narrative highlights the formative role of ideas in shaping political change. In so doing, the book joins other recent calls for expanding American political development to incorporate more fully ideational and not just institutional change.
Ideological change has now been largely accepted as significant in mapping party transitions, in no small part due to John Gerring’s seminal work, Party Ideologies in America. Nevertheless, interpretive studies of political ideas and discursive narratives continue to play a limited role in charting or explaining political development within APD, a relatively recent subfield whose overarching methodology is characterized as “historical institutionalism.”26 Recent work in APD has challenged the original institutional bias, arguing for greater recognition of ideas and their role in shaping politics and political development.27 This has led to a reconceptualization of “ideas” themselves and how and why ideational and discursive narratives matter to a story of political change. Political scientists Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes, for example, note that discursive change often precedes formal shifts in governing authority and rightly assert, “To understand political change, we need to attend to discourse, since this is where political identifications and social cleavages are made and remade,” whereby “the very words used, the political appeals made, and the identifications evoked” become “the ground of politics, the site of change.”28 Rogers Smith in his recent book, Political Peoplehood, also demonstrates “how different narrative structures and content themes shape policy making … and how, within the constraints and using the resources their contexts provide, leaders build support by knitting their personal stories and those of their constituents together within their communal narratives of collective identity and purpose.”29
Hattam and Lowndes’s discourse-centered “cultural analysis” and Smith’s idea-centered framework of political development align closely with the model of partisan change developed in this book. Here too, (family) ideational development is used to organize and map partisan change in the twentieth century, highlighting how partisans weave together personal family stories and the ideational threads of state, economy, society, race, and gender into coherent political family ideologies that evolve and get repurposed through three periods in the twentieth century. The book then connects such historically contingent composite partisan family ideals to specific types of policy positions, identified as ascription, autonomy, welfare, and regulation, tying why and how parties have come to support certain kinds of policies to their prevailing family ideals (see Figure 2). For example, Democratic support of “ascriptive-based” policies in the Progressive Era is linked to their support of a variant of the Soul family ideology, in contrast to their support of a strong Hearth family ideal in the postwar period, which instead shaped their “welfare” policy positions at that later time. In other words, party development—coherent, discernible shifts in the parties’ policy positions—is dependent on the kind of family ideologies the parties uphold, such that changing family ideals shape shifting partisan agendas.
The importance of ideas, especially simplified narratives, within the immediate process of policy making is also highlighted in Deborah Stone’s classic work, The Policy Paradox.30 Stone stresses the use of stories (or “narratives with heroes and villains”) as a key mechanism by which political actors define policy problems, contextualize, and justify their preferred policy actions, thereby “trying to get others to see a situation as one thing rather than another” so as to facilitate reasoning by metaphor and analogy.31 The essence of policy making is thus the struggle over ideas, often presented as binaries; as Stone writes, “Ideas are a medium of exchange and a mode of influence even more powerful than money and votes and guns. Shared meanings motivate people to action and meld individual striving into collective action. Policy making, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for classification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideas that guide the way people behave.”32 Hearth and Soul family ideals, as described in this book, are just such simplified ideational means or composite political narratives through which parties struggle to define family, combining elements of state, economy, society, race, and gender into what Hattam and Lowndes call “natural affinities” that suture “disparate elements into apparently coherent political positions.”33 Whereas the two family