“E pur si muove!”: Russell Dalton and political realignment

Abstract

The 1960 publication of 'The American Voter', which revealed that voters have stable affective ties to political parties, transformed political alignment into one of the central objects of contemporary political analysis. It was in Lipset and Rokkan (1967), however, that the social bases of such links were investigated and found to be formed by means of the concept of 'cleavages'. Stability, then, comes from the links that party systems maintain with social structures in such a way that different models of society produce different types of party system. Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) well-known diagnosis was that in the context of advanced democracies there exists a tendency to 'freeze' party systems in place so that a stable alignment between voters and parties can flourish under their umbrella. Since the late 1970s, however, researchers began to explore the idea that ties between voters and parties were not as robust as the Michigan studies would have it. Likewise, party systems turned out to less 'frozen' than cleavage theory had predicted. The empirical parameters for this assessment were decline in voter turnout, party identification rates and activism, as well as increased electoral volatility in various democracies worldwide. This phenomenon was given the name 'party dealignment'.