Secular Realignment

The concept of realignment has been very prominent in the study of American electoral politics over the past fifty years. There are multiple definitions of realignment, exhibiting a good deal of variation. However, most agree that realignment involves fundamental and large-scale changes in the party system, usually including changes to both the primary line (or lines) of cleavage and to party coalitions.

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By far the most important figure in thinking about realignment is V. O. Key Jr., and it would not be inappropriate to claim that the near obsession with the idea of realignment within the subfield of American electoral politics over the past half-century can be traced to Key's writings on the subject. Indeed, scholarly interest in the concept of realignment has spread far beyond the American context to the study of systems other than the United States. In his writings, Key offered two very different types of realignment. The first type, outlined in his seminal 1955 article, is critical realignment. Critical realignment is large-scale change that happens abruptly in one or two election cycles. The results produced by this massive change then persist for a number of years in a state of relative stability. In Key's words, critical realignments produce change that is “sharp and durable.”

Key's idea of critical realignment has shaped the study of American politics like few other ideas. Indeed, as Everett Carll Ladd and Charles Hadley state, “It truly is a case of Key sneezing and political science catching a cold.” However, Key significantly modified his thinking on the concept of realignment shortly after his original piece. In 1959, he offered another type of realignment, one that was much different than its critical cousin. This other type, of course, is secular realignment.

Like critical realignment, secular realignment results in change in the party system. But how change comes about is very different. Two elements are central to understanding the concept of secular realignment—time and group partisanship. At its most basic level, secular realignment is the gradual shifting in the patterns of partisan support by certain groups of voters over the course of a number of election cycles. It is useful to quote Key at length:

For many years, scholars focused heavily on critical realignment, while secular realignment was largely ignored. Indeed, many works that are now regarded as classics in the study of American politics—Burnham (1970), Campbell et al. (1960), Schattschneider (1960), and Sundquist (1983), to name but a few—elevated the idea of critical realignment to default status as the way to understand and explain political change in the American context. But, before long, critics were punching holes in the explanation of change offered by critical realignment, and exposing numerous weakness in the theory overall—Carmines and Stimson (1989), Fiorina (1981), Ladd (1991), and Ladd with Hadley (1975). Indeed, David Mayhew's trenchant critique (2002) calls into question the very utility of the critical realignment concept.

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