Gary C. Jacobson - The Electoral Origins of Divided Government: Competition in U.s. House Elections, 1946-1988

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The Electoral Origins of Divided Government

Transforming American Politics

Lawrence C. Dodd, Series Editor

Dramatic changes in political institutions and behavior over the past two decades have underscored the dynamic nature of American politics, confronting political scientists with a new and pressing intellectual agenda. The pioneering work of early postwar scholars, while laying a firm empirical foundation for contemporary scholarship, failed to consider how American politics might change or to recognize the forces that would make fundamental change inevitable. In reassessing the static interpretations fostered by these classic studies, political scientists are now examining the underlying dynamics that generate transformational change.

Transforming American Politics will bring together texts and monographs that address four closely related aspects of change. A first concern is documenting and explaining recent changes in American politicsin institutions, processes, behavior, and policymaking. A second is reinterpreting classic studies and theories to provide a more accurate perspective on postwar politics. The series will look at historical change to identify recurring patterns of political transformation within and across the distinctive eras of American politics. Last and perhaps most importantly, the series will present new theories and interpretations that explain the dynamic processes at work and thus clarify the direction of contemporary politics. All of the books will focus on the central theme of transformationtransformation in both the conduct of American politics and in the way we study and understand its many aspects.

Titles in This Series

The Electoral Origins of Divided Government: Competition in U.S. House Elections, 1946-1988, Gary C. Jacobson

The Parties Respond: Changes in the American Party System, edited by L. Sandy Maisel

Congress, the President, and Public Policy, Michael L. Mezey

Remaking American Politics, edited by Richard A. Harris and Sidney M. Milkis

Issues and Elections: Presidential Voting in Contemporary AmericaA Revisionist View, Euel W. Elliott

Democracies in Crisis: Public Policy Responses to the Great Depression, Kim Quaile Hill

Managing the Presidency: The Eisenhower LegacyFrom Kennedy to Reagan, Phillip G. Henderson

The Transformation of Interest Group Politics, edited by Mark P. Petracca

The Supreme Court and Partisan Realignment, John B. Gates

The Mood of the American Electorate, James A. Stimson

Congress and the Administrative State, Second Edition, Lawrence C. Dodd and Richard L. Schott

The House of Representatives: A Report from the Field, David E. Price

The Electoral Origins of Divided Government

Competition in U.S. House Elections, 19461988

Gary C. Jacobson
University of CaliforniaSan Diego

First published 1990 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2019 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1990 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jacobson, Gary C.
The electoral origins of divided government: competition in U.S.
House elections, 19461988 / Gary C. Jacobson.
p. cm. (Transforming American politics series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-0906-9 (hardcover) ISBN 0-8133-0907-7 (pbk.)
1. United States. Congress. HouseElections. 2. Elections
United States. 3. United StatesPolitics and government1945
I. Title. II. Series.
JK1965.J33 1990
324.973'092dc20 90-12411
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29166-2 (hbk)

To Winnifred Finch Brown 1883-1976

Contents

1. ii

Guide

1. TABLES
2. FIGURES

My initial purpose in writing this book was to examine and explain the evolution of competition in postwar elections to the U.S. House of Representatives. As the work progressed, what I had expected to be a subsidiary issue, the electoral origins of divided party control of the federal government, emerged as the thematic core. The 1988 elections posed the question in starkest terms: How did the Democrats maintain indeed, increasetheir solid House majority despite yet another comfortable victory for the Republican presidential candidate? More generally, Why do Americans now habitually elect Republican presidents and Democratic congresses?

Explanations for the Democrats' continued dominance of Congress fall into two basic categories: structural and political. My analysis ultimately leads me to conclude that all of the structural explanations are either wrong or inadequate and that all of the political explanations are at least partially right. Divided party control reflects, rather than thwarts, popular preferences and so is likely to continue.

The evidence I offer for these views comes from a variety of sources. Like virtually everyone who studies Congress, I made extensive use of data initially gathered and published by the people at Congressional Quarterly, Inc. (CQ). CQ's Guide to U.S. Elections was my principal source for electoral data, and the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report was the source for a great deal more, including much of my information about congressional candidates and some district-level presidential election results. I also extensively used CQ's biennial Politics in America and Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa's biennial Almanac of American Politics. It is difficult to overstate the value of these sources to students of congressional elections and politics.

I am grateful to Adam Clymer of the New York Times, who put me on the distribution list for the New York Times/ CBS News Poll. I found these polls extraordinarily useful for exploring the political roots of divided government, and they form the heart of Research. The data were originally collected by the Center for Political Studies of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, under a grant from the National Science Foundation. Of course, neither the original collectors of the data nor the consortium bear any responsibility for my analyses and interpretations.

Other data sources are cited in due course. I collected some of the original data with the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-80-77) and, later, with research funds provided by the University of California-San Diego (UCSD).

I performed all of the data analyses with Jeffrey Dubin and Douglas Rivers's Statistical Software Tools (SST), which I found ideally fast and flexible for my purposes. Only scholars who remember the days of punched cards and counter-sorters can fully appreciate the contribution that modern software and hardware make to empirical analysis. I am obliged to Douglas Rivers for making sure I always had the latest version of SST to play with.

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