Changing Party Coalitions: the Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment

Where did the Red states and Blue states come from? Jerry F. Hough, professor on the US Presidency at Duke University, looks at the American experience and examines the fundamental change in party alignment that took place in the second half of the 20th century. For fifty years, Hough has studied how states, markets, and democracies develop and how effective and stable ones can be created and maintained. The American experience is not incorporated in the theories of comparative...
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Where did the Red states and Blue states come from? Jerry F. Hough, professor on the US Presidency at Duke University, looks at the American experience and examines the fundamental change in party alignment that took place in the second half of the 20th century. For fifty years, Hough has studied how states, markets, and democracies develop and how effective and stable ones can be created and maintained. The American experience is not incorporated in the theories of comparative politics and of nation-building, he explains, because it has been too encased in mythology. Now that the North South conflict is essentially over and the antagonistic European-Americans have all become whites, it is time to break the taboos that were created to have these consequences. The 1950s through the 1970s were a period of great political turmoil in the United States. The media directed its attention at the dramatic events of the black revolution, the anti- Vietnam demonstrations, and the women s liberation movement, but some of the most fundamental changes were less visible. The relations between North and South were highly confrontational, but the period actually led to the end of the historic North South conflict that had defined the America political system since the Revolution. This required a radical change in party alignment. The two parties have been groping ever since to find a satisfactory new set of coalitions, but they have thus far failed. The red state blue state alignment produces narrow and polarized electoral results in a society that is not polarized. What is going on? Only relatively recently have scholars looked carefully at the crucial role of European- American ethnicity in US policy toward Europe. For Hough, it became clear that the conflicts between Britain and Germany affected the two largest ethnic groups in America the British- Americans and the German-Americans as deeply as policy toward Cuba affects Cuban- Americans in recent decades. Then he came to understand that the consistent pro-detente position of the Republican Party, the party of the Northern British-American and German-American Protestants, came from its need to hold its coalition together. This all raised important questions in earlier stages of American history, where such coalitions originated. Jerry F. Hough is a specialist on comparative government first of all, from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s, on the Soviet Union. At the University of Illinois, he taught in freshman courses that centered on the US in comparative perspective. At the University of Toronto, all his courses dealt with the Soviet-American-Canadian comparison. At Duke University in the 1970s he taught courses on American political participation, as well as the Soviet Union. Hough was a scholar at the Brookings Institution from .. to Projects in the Soviet Union with the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation Hough was an active participant in the American debates on Soviet-American relations from the 1960s through the 1990s. Since the late 1990s Hough has been employing his skills as a Sovietologist in the American context. The change in the focus of his research and teaching did not, however, change the basic questions that Hough has been working on since the mid-1950s: the relationship of long term economic development on political institutions. In these pages he proposes challenging new theories about the formation of electoral alliances in the 20th and 21st centuries."