Divided Senate Delegation Indicator of Realignment

Extract

In a research note written in 2005 and subsequently rejected by three leading political science journals as too speculative and not adequately statistically anchored, we sought to update Brunell and Grofman's 1998 research note in the APSR on divided Senate delegation by showing that we were right in predicting that, in the Senate election years taking place immediately after our original data analyses, the number of states with divided Senate delegations would continue to decline. It did: from 19 states in 1996 to 18 in 1998, way down to 13 in 2000 and remaining at that level until the most recent election in 2006. However, at the end of our 2005 paper we also say: “Unlike Brunell and Grofman (1998), though, we are not prepared to predict further decreases in the number of divided Senate delegations.”