Partisan Realignment in the American States

• In Event: Parties and Polarization across the United States

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable transformation of the American party system. The cleavages are as well-documented as they are stark; rural versus urban, high school versus college-educated, religious versus secular, and conservative versus progressive. In this paper, we develop a new measure of partisan sorting at the state level, show how state-level partisan sorting changes over time, and investigate how partisan sorting, independent of state partisanship, affects state elections a policy outcomes. We find that partisan sorting makes it more difficult for state governments to respond to public inputs and improve state outcomes.

Authors

• Robert Kirby Goidel, Texas A&M

• Spencer Goidel, Auburn University

• Brian Smentkowski, University of Idaho