UCLA

This dissertation is about how issues get organized into partisan conflict in Congress. I argue that representatives of policy demanding minorities form coalitions with other such representatives in order to gain majority support for their demands. I then show that we can account for change in the composition of these party coalitions based on the compatibility of the preferences of each societal interest that comprise them. These compatibilities undergo change when the evolution of a new presidential cleavage transforms the partisan tendencies of important groups in the electorate (e.g., farmers, African Americans).

The dissertation has three parts. The first part elaborates the theoretical dynamic of political alignments that I summarized in the previous paragraph. The next part tests the proposition that the party coalitions in Congress serve as habitual channels of mutual accommodation in which legislators accommodate the interests of their co-partisan colleagues. The mutual accommodation premise of parties provides societal interests the incentive to align with one of the party coalitions in order to advance their legislative goals.

Which party a societal interest aligns with will naturally be informed by how compatible the group is with the set of interests that comprise each of the major party coalitions. The third part of the dissertation tests the proposition that the dominant cause of change in the alignments of all societal interests is the evolution of new presidential cleavages. New presidential cleavages move the party system to new equilibria of coalitional groupings. These new equilibria obviously involve partisan change by groups that care intensely about each new cleavage issue but also involve change for other societal interests who have their compatibilities with the coalitions transformed by the reshuffling that follows from the evolution of new presidential cleavages.

I test my hypothesis about the dynamics of political alignment by analyzing how all the major issue domains in American politics were affected by the civil rights issue evolution that began in the 1960s, and by evaluating how the organization of defense policy into partisan conflict was affected in five different episodes of partisan transition. Although most of my analysis is focused on the cases of the civil rights issue evolution and the organization of defense policy into partisan conflict, the argument I make is cast in general terms and can account for continuity and change in how all the major issue domains - and the policy demanding interest groups associated with them - are organized into American political conflict.