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Immigration Clashes, Party Polarization, and Republican Radicalization: Tracking Shifts in State and National Party Platforms since 1980

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2023

Kirsten Walters Open the ORCID record for Kirsten Walters [Opens in a new window]  and
Theda Skocpol Open the ORCID record for Theda Skocpol [Opens in a new window]
Kirsten Walters*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Theda Skocpol
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
*
Corresponding author: Kirsten Walters; Email: kwalters@g.harvard.edu
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Abstract

Studies of U.S. politics increasingly aim to make sense of two key trends: party polarization and Republican Party radicalization. Surprisingly, however, party divergences on immigration have been largely overlooked. Drawing on state and national political party platforms since 1980, we document the rise of attention to immigration, the polarization of substantive party positions, and the sharp GOP turn toward restrictive measures. After pinpointing the timing and relative trajectories of national and state-level agenda shifts, we explore potential drivers and establish two sets of flashpoint events worth further study: highly visible and mostly deadlocked congressional battles over immigration grand bargains, and bottom-up reverberations from the widespread 2006 immigrant rights protests and post-2008 Tea Party organizing. We find that grassroots Tea Party efforts were intervening accelerators rather than original causes of the Republican embrace of tough immigration restrictions. The article concludes by stressing the chronological layering of successive party polarizations—from 1960s divergences around civil rights, through clashes about abortion and LGBTQ rights from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and followed by immigration polarization in the 2000s. This process of layering polarizations on top of one another may have supercharged recent GOP turns toward ethnonationalism and tolerance for threats of violence.

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Research Article
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Studies in American Political Development , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , April 2024 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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2 Analysts often speak of “cultural” versus “economic” issues, but we prefer to speak about “social-regulatory” issues, because policies about civil rights, family structures and reproductive rights, and immigration also have profound economic dimensions—above all because they help determine who can be full participants in the labor market and in the ownership and management of economic as well as civic organizations.

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19 The only state without any platform availability is Maryland. Additional states without Republican platform availability are Delaware, Florida, and Tennessee. Additional states without Democratic platform availability are Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, and Pennsylvania.

20 In alternative specifications, we include only paired platforms to control for variations across space and time apart from party stances as such, following the lead of Feinstein and Schickler, “Platforms and Partners.” Our results are not sensitive to the choice of including only paired platforms or all platforms, so specifications in the main text report findings from all paired and unpaired platforms using the logic that it is better to code as many platforms as possible. Appendix B shows findings including only paired platforms.

21 Between 1980 and 2000, we do have some long-term coverage, including from the border states of California and Texas.

22 We calculate this percentage by summing the number of words in platform sections relating to immigration and then dividing it by the number of words from all platforms—including those that do not mention immigration—from a given year and party. To identify references to immigration, we first manually read each platform and then checked this manual method by searching each platform for the following common immigration-related terms: “immigration,” “immigrant,” “alien,” “refugee,” and “border.”

23 For example, we would not include references to national security as references to immigration, unless such references make explicit mention of immigrants or immigration. This distinction is especially important in the years immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when many state and national platforms devoted increased attention to national security, but these references were often distinct from mentions of immigration.

24 An alternative way to measure attention, as usefully highlighted by an anonymous reviewer, is as the percentage of platforms that reference immigration in each year. This measure, plotted in Appendix C, addresses the potential concern that trends in attention are driven by a small number of platforms devoting substantial space to immigration. Both our percentage-of-words-based measure and this alternative measure display similar trends in the timing of increased attention to immigration.

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39 Randal C. Archibold, “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration,” New York Times, April 23, 2010, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html.

40 A. Elena Lacayo, “One Year Later: A Look at SB 1070 and Copycat Legislation,” National Council of La Raza, April 18, 2011, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.unidosus.org/publications/666-one-year-later-a-look-at-sb-1070-and-copycat-legislation/.

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49 See, for example, Kirin Kalia, “Immigration Ultimately Not an Issue in the 2008 Election,” Migration Policy Institute, December 4, 2008, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/immigration-ultimately-not-issue-2008-election.

50 Skocpol, Theda, Tervo, Caroline, and Walters, Kirsten, “Citizen Organizing and Partisan Polarization from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance,” in Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization?, ed. Roberts, Kenneth M., Lieberman, Robert C., and Mettler, Suzanne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 369–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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53 Marcelo Ballvé, “Tea Party Dabbles in Immigration Politics,” Facing South, February 5, 2010, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.facingsouth.org/2010/02/tea-party-dabbles-in-immigration-politics.html; Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.

54 Skocpol, Tervo, and Walters, “Citizen Organizing and Partisan Polarization.”

55 An exception is a uniquely nuanced study by Gervais and Morris that classified GOP House members into subsets, including some who had no visible Tea Party ties and others who were either actively supported by national Tea Party organizations and/or took active, public steps to court the movement. Analyzing congressional votes from 2011 through 2014, these authors find that even though both Tea Party and non-Tea Party aligned Republicans tended to be equally fiscally conservative, GOP “legislators who make an effort to attach themselves to the Tea Party movement have significantly more conservative roll call voting records than fellow Republicans who are not attached to the Tea Party.” See Gervais, Bryan T. and Morris, Irwin L., Reactionary Republicanism: How the Tea Party in the House Paved the Way for Trump’s Victory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

56 Gervais and Morris, Reactionary Republicanism, 107.

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59 “Immigration,” Gallup.

60 Feinstein and Schickler, “Platforms and Partners.”

61 Gamm et al., “The Culture War and Partisan Polarization.”

62 Christopher Hare and Keith T. Poole, “The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics,” Polity 46, no. 3 (2014): 411–29.

63 Parker and Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In; Hajnal, Zoltan and Abrajano, Marisa, “Trump’s All Too Familiar Strategy and Its Future in the GOP,” The Forum 14, no. 3 (2016): 295–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sebastian Parker, Christopher, “Status Threat: Moving the Right Further to the Right?,” Daedalus 150, no. 2 (2021): 56–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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