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Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters QUOTES

Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters QUOTES

1 " Democrats comprised 37% of voting electorate in 200 compared with 46% in 1960. If the electorate of 2000 had the same balance of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents as the electorate of 1960, Gore would have won an additional 3% of the vote. "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters

2 " When people feel a sense of belonging to a given social group, they absorb the doctrinal positions that the group advocates. However party and religious identification come about, once they take root in early adulthood, they often persist. Partisan identities are enduring features of citizens' self-conceptions. They do not merely come and go with election cycles and campaign ephemera. the public's interest in party politics climbs as elections draw near, but partisan self-conception remain intact during peaks and lulls in party competition. "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters

3 " Early survey researchers noted in 1936 that 83% of Republicans believed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies were leading the country down the road to dictatorship, a view shared by only 9% Democrats. "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters

4 " Although the New York wing of the Democratic Party had made considerable inroads during 1920s, it was still the Republican Party that was home to progressives, Italians, Slavs, blacks, and many urban dwellers. By the end of the 1930s. however, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had become its dominant image in the (Northern) public's mind. "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters

5 " In 1992, 54% of the British public felt that the Labour Party was "good for one class" rather than for all classes, whereas only 14% held that view in in 1997. "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters

6 " Democratic Party not only elected virtually all public officials in the region and therefore commanded the admiration and participation of high-status people, it symbolized the abiding principle of right-thinking citizens—white supremacy. Even after Truman's integrationist policies drove Dixiecrats into revolt in 1948 Southern Democrats still saw their party in the 1950s as arguably committed to segregation by virtue of the power that the Southern delegation wielded within it. Goldwater's candidacy, the enfranchisement of black Democrats, Wallace's Independent candidacy in 1968, and the endorsement of Nixon by many Southern Democratic leaders in 1972 gradually chipped away at the middle-class respectability of the Democratic Party. When conservative Christian leaders became outspoken Republicans in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Democratic Party was routinely castigated as the party of secular humanists. The allure of respectability eventually redounded to the benefit of Republicans, as their ranks were augmented by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters

7 " Younger white Southerners are more republican not because they are more conservative but because their attachments formed during a period when Republicans were more likely to be regarded as an attractive social group "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters

8 " Southern politics since World War II has not been normal. The key political institutions of the South were swept away with the end of de jure segregation. The essential rationale for the peculiar politics of the solid South had been to disfranchise and disempower black voters, and institutions created to limit black participation did so with remarkable effectiveness. As late as March 1965, only 7% of eligible black voters in Mississippi were registered. "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters

9 " By the century's end, the balance of white Republicans and Democrats in the South mirrored the long-standing pattern in the non-South. In the past, each region perceived the parties in different terms. Southerners associated the Republican Party with the forces of Reconstruction, and non-Southerners associated it with business, farmers, and Protestantism. In the South, the Democratic Party was the party of states' rights and segregation, and in the non-South ii was the party of cities, labor and immigrants. For a variety of reasons—economic integration, migration, mass communication, the extension of federal power—the non-South's conception of the parties gradually spread southward. "

― , Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters