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Tides and Patterns in American Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Louis H. Bean
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Extract

As an aid in interpreting the outcome of the 1942 congressional election and subsequent general elections, this paper presents two basic studies that have been found very helpful in connection with the 1940 election. One of these deals with the changes in political sentiment for the country as a whole, as shown by the long-time record of relative strength of the Democratic party in the two-party vote in congressional and presidential elections. From this long-time record it is possible to derive the characteristics of our political tides and an interpretation of the most recent changes as background for forthcoming elections. For example, the Democratic party attained its greatest strength on record in 1936, but in 1938 the tide turned against it, largely because of the 1937–38 business recession. Recovery by 1940 checked the decline.

The second study (in two sections) deals with the basic similarities between the pattern of political behavior for a given series of elections for the country as a whole and the political behavior of most of the states. From the “normal” relationships that can be developed between the national and state experience, it is possible to determine the influence of certain major issues, such as the isolationist and third-term issues in 1940. In that election, the Eastern and Far Western states voted more Democratic and the Midwestern and Great Plains states voted less Democratic than usual. These discrepancies are immediately traceable more to isolationist and anti-third-term sentiment than to any of the other issues.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , August 1942 , pp. 637 - 655
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1942

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References

1 Presented originally at the 1940 meeting of the American Political Science Association. Some of the material is drawn from the author's Ballot Behavior; A Study of Presidential Elections (Washington, D. C., 1940).

2 For a fuller statement of the relation of business to political tides, see Ballot Behavior, Chap. 10.

3 This specific factor and its power to distort the political patterns in different states, enhancing the Democratic percentages in some of the Northern states and reducing them in the Southern, is dealt with in Ballot Behavior, Chap. 9.

4 See ibid., p. 71.

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