My dissertation shows how two marginal social groups - civil rights activists in the 1940s and religious conservatives in the 1980s - achieved many of their goals by becoming core players in a political party. In each case, the group faced opposition within its chosen party but allied with friendly partisans to marginalize opponents and nominate politicians committed to their priorities. Trying to influence office holders whom the groups had no hand in nominating proved ineffective: office holders would promise benefits but do nothing that displaced core supporters or median voters. Mobilizing nonpolitical groups for political purposes was the road to success. In both cases, marginal social groups rather than politicians drove the process, creating transformed parties that would stand up for rather than straddle the issues they cared about.

In this dissertation I argue that the main impulse underlying the tea party movement is a conviction that activist government helps the undeserving at the expense of the truly productive members of society. I say main impulse because racial resentment and other illiberal attitudes also contribute to tea party involvement. But illiberal motives do not play the dominant role that much existing research suggests. When tests are properly conducted, preference for limited government is the strongest and most consistent predictor of tea party support.

Further, I show that the movement catalyzed as a protest against the “bailouts” of undeserving Wall Street banks, other financial institutions, and automakers in 2008, before it acquired the famous tea party moniker from journalist Rick Santelli in February 2009. With repeated fast-paced government interventions in response to the Great Recession and with increasing publicity of the tea party brand early in the administration of President Barack Obama, the movement grew into a heterogeneous coalition, consisting of three distinct groups.

I find the largest of these subgroups has a strongly libertarian flavor and scarcely a whiff of racial animus. Social conservatives comprise another significant group, with strong preferences for limited government and moral traditionalism, and some racially conservative attitudes. Racial conservatives are a substantial subgroup too, but my analysis shows that they are no less motivated by the issue of limited government than others in the movement. These groups are different from one another but came together in the same movement largely because they shared a belief that the federal government had violated basic fairness in its response to difficult economic times.

I go on to argue that tea partiers’ preference for limited government is itself primarily driven by a “reap what you sow” conception of economic justice, rather than, as much tea party rhetoric proclaims, a desire for individual liberty. In the psychological literature on fairness, this conception is called “proportional justice”—the idea that everyone should be rewarded in strict proportion to their achievements and failings, and that government should not shield people from the consequences of their decisions. In sum, I contend the tea party impulse is at its core a demand for what its members see as basic economic fairness.

In this dissertation, I argue that features of neighborhood design that promote social interaction also promote political participation. I call this the Place and People Model of Political Participation. The dissertation’s key breakthrough is to measure the physical features of neighborhoods—whether homes have porches, streets are tree-lined, neighborhoods have natural gathering places—for a sample of respondents in a nationally representative survey. With this data, I demonstrate that the design of residential places promotes neighborly exchanges that subsequently help increase individual political participation. I show that place and people work together to influence individual engagement in multiple forms of participation, like voting, attending a march/boycott, joining a political group, and volunteering in a community project. I further demonstrate that the effects of neighborhoods and neighbors on participation hold for all people regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. All of which goes to show the critical role that place and people play in influencing individual political behavior.

The “primarying” or targeting of more moderate incumbents by outside ideological groups is commonly discussed in the press as a force for polarization that makes legislative compromise more difficult. Yet, systematic studies of the phenomenon over time are rare. This dissertation uses Federal Election Commission (FEC) and other data to measure the effects of outside ideological contributions in Congressional primaries over three decades. This analysis confirms that outside ideological groups have a discernible effect on primary outcomes and frequently target more moderate incumbents. However, periods of strong targeting do not distort the relationship between Members of Congress and the voters they represent. Rather, periods of strong targeting are followed by stronger representation as measured by the correlation between Members of Congress’s roll call ideologies and their states’ and districts’ underlying ideologies.

Democrats and Republicans in the United States have become increasingly hostile toward and distrustful of one another over the past five decades. This dissertation documents the rise of this phenomenon, which is called affective polarization, and develops and tests a novel theory to explain it.

Affective polarization has its roots the changing demographic composition of the two parties. The Democratic Party is increasingly non-white, educated, urban, non-religious, while the Republican Party remains overwhelmingly white, religious, and conservative. Previous work has tied these shifts to the increase in inter-party hostility but has been unable to show how exactly the process works.

This dissertation attempts to fill this gap in understanding with the argument that elite communication is the essential intermediate step in the transformation of demographic social sorting and into affective polarization. Specifically, political elites’ appeals make group identities salient considerations, activating stereotypes about who belongs in each party. Political actors make these appeals in speeches, campaign ads, and news reports because they more are effective tools for mobilizing and persuading voters than appeals based on policy or ideology. And as core social identities such as race, class, religiosity, urbanicity, and age increasingly align with partisanship, the incentive to political actors to play to them become stronger.

In making these appeals to Americans’ social identities, partisans’ understanding of what a typical Democrat and typical Republican look like solidifies, making it easier to demonize members of the opposite party. These increased stereotypes lead to affective polarization among the American public. In other words, social identity alignment does not engender affective polarization in and of itself; the later results only as political communication activates aspects of individuals’ personas in the service of political goals. Increased inter-party hostility is an unfortunate by-product of this mobilizing rhetoric.

To test this theory, I examine the way that political elites have communicated shifts in the party composition since the 1970s. I use a multi-pronged methodological approach, combining longitudinal survey data, text analysis, and survey experiments to test each link in my chain of argument: 1) that the parties have grown increasingly distinct over time, 2) that political elites communicate these changes in their rhetoric, and 3) that exposure to appeals to group identity can increase affective polarization.

Overall, the results of this research are mixed. I find robust evidence that affective polarization has occurred among broad swaths of the American electorate, and confirm the findings of Mason (2018) that social group sorting has occurred during that same time period. Further, I demonstrate that the language that party elites used to describe their priorities and goals tracks these changing party coalitions, with appeals to group identities increasing most sharply within the Democratic Party. However my research on the effects of exposure to group appeals produced mixed results, supporting expectations in some experimental tests and disappointing them in others. My overall conclusion from this research is that the theoretical premise of this dissertation, which posits a central role for elite communication in causing affective polarization, remains promising but will require more refined tests to confirm or refute.

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.

This dissertation examines the acquisition of partisan attitudes among Asian American immigrants in the United States. It is an empirical inquiry into the processes in which Asian American immigrants learn about American politics, adjust their attitudes, prioritize their issue concerns, and develop political conceptions of the Democratic and Republican Party. This dissertation engages theories of social and cognitive psychology by examining individual-level partisan opinion formation as mediated by political conceptualization, partisan schemas, policy preference, and psychological attachment to the parties. Evidence is drawn from a series of original in-depth interviews, surveys, and survey experiments conducted as part of the dissertation, as well as from large, publicly available national surveys.

The development of partisanship among Asian Americans is a multi-stage process. It begins with pre-migration predispositions which lay the foundation for post-migration learning. But while Asian American immigrants arrive in the United States with distinct political leanings, they tend to have weak understandings of how they relate to American political parties, candidates, ideologies, and standard political debates. Hence, they tend to be uncertain, ambivalent and inconsistent in their partisanship. As Asian Americans spend more time in the U.S., they develop increasingly sophisticated conceptions of American politics. Their growing understanding comprehends more than just the parties and the candidates; it also includes their notion of themselves as Asian Americans and how this group fits into the political system and American ethno-racial categories. At its highest level of development, their conceptualization merges personal and political identities into a profound guide to action in politics. Taken together, coherent cumulative experiences and gradual exposure to American politics lead to stronger and more sophisticated political conceptualization and greater consistency in partisan preference. In most cases this process nudges Asian Americans to identify with the Democratic Party. In certain cases, however, different life experiences, such as experience running a personal business, result in different partisan trajectories.

Economic inequality has increased substantially in the U.S. over the past four decades. Some students of voting behavior have linked this to an increase in class voting and polarization in the U.S. At the same time several comparative scholars have argued for a general lack of class voting in the West since the end of World War II. I combine the use of individual level survey measures from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, along with county level measures from the American Community Survey to test for class voting effects in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I find that county level measures of inequality are strongly associated with support for Obama in the 2012 election, but that class voting is not the primary driver of this relationship. Instead I find that individuals living in high inequality environments in 2012 supported Obama at higher rates regardless of family income, and that differences in racial resentment account for a substantial portion of this effect. Finally, I find evidence that the vote of working class urban whites responds to increased inequality to a greater degree than their non-urban, and middle/upper class counterparts. This last finding mimics previous findings in the comparative literature that class voting tendencies typically manifest in countries with high levels of population density.