Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-46n74 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-10T10:03:05.341Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Culture versus Economics: An American Dilemma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

John Gerring
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“There are billions of potential conflicts in any modern society, but only a few become significant,” E. E. Schattschneider (1960: 66) pointed out many years ago. Accordingly, the most important political struggles are not issue conflicts but issue-cleavage conflicts, “arguments about what the argument is about” (ibid.: 70–71). The definition of alternatives, from a Schattschneiderian perspective, is the primal act of politics. If the sine qua non of a political party is the selection of leaders, then the quintessential act of a political system is the selection and framing of issues, which is to say, “the domination and subordination of conflicts” (ibid.: 66).

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 129 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Alford, R. R. (1963) Party and Society. Chicago: Rand McNally.Google Scholar
Anbinder, T (1992) Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Argersinger, P. H., and Jeffries, J. W. (1986) “American electoral history: Party systems and voting behavior.” Research in Micropolitics 1.Google Scholar
Arieli, Y. (1964) Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology. Baltimore: Penguin.Google Scholar
Bailyn, B. (1967) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Barone, M. (1990) Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Bell, D., ed. (1963) The Radical Right. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Bensel, R. F.(1984) Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880–1980. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Benson, L. (1961) The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Berke, R. L. (1998) “A G.O.P. leader fights ‘litmus test’ on abortion.” New York Times, January 7, Al, All.Google Scholar
Berry, J. M. (1977) Lobbying for the People. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Budge, I., and Hofferbert, R. I. (1990) “Mandates and policy outputs: U.S. party platforms and federal expenditures.” American Political Science Review 84 (1) (March): 111–31.Google Scholar
Burner, D. (1967) The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918–1932. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Carmines, E. G., and Stimson, J. A. (1989) Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, N. H. (1976) Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Clark, T. N., and Lipset, S. M. (1991) “Are social classes dying?” International Sociology 6 (December): 397–410.Google Scholar
Colvin, D. L. (1926) Prohibition in the United States: A History of the Prohibition Party and of the Prohibition Movement. New York: George H. Doran.Google Scholar
Congressional Quarterly (1991) Presidential Elections since 1789. 5th ed. Washington: Congressional Quarterly.Google Scholar
Converse, P. E. (1964) “The nature of belief systems in mass publics,” in Apter, David (ed.) Ideology and Discontent. London: Free Press of Glencoe.Google Scholar
Craig, D. B. (1992) After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, 1920–1934. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
David, P. T., Goldman, R. M., and Bain, R. C. (1960) The Politics of National Party Conventions. Washington: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Davis, D. B., ed. (1971) The Fear of Conspiracy: Image of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Edsall, T. B., and Edsall, M. D. (1992) Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Elazar, D. J. (1972) American Federalism: A View from the States. 2d ed. New York: Crowell.Google Scholar
Ellis, R. J. (1993) American Political Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fishel, J. (1985) Presidents and Promises: From Campaign Pledge to Presidential Performance. Washington: Congressional Quarterly.Google Scholar
Formisano, R. P. (1971) The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fuchs, L. H., ed. (1968) American Ethnic Politics. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Gamm, G., and Putnam, R. (1996) “Association-building in America, 1850–1920.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, New Orleans, October 10–13.Google Scholar
Garson, R. (1974) The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, 1941–1948. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Gerring, J. (1998) Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gerring, J. (forthcoming) “Minor parties in plurality electoral systems.” Party Politics.Google Scholar
Gienapp, W. (1987) The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–56. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gienapp, W. (1994) “The myth of class in Jacksonian America.” Journal of Policy History 6(2): 232–59.Google Scholar
Gigot, P. A. (1996) “Potomac watch: Anti-immigrant reckoning comes ahead of schedule.” Wall Street Journal, November 22, A14.Google Scholar
Ginsberg, B. (1976) “Elections and public policy.” American Political Science Review 70 (March): 41–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glazer, N., and Moynihan, D. P. (1963) Beyond the Melting Pot. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Goldman, R. M. (1979) Search for Consensus: The Story of the Democratic Party. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Green, J. C., ed. (1996) Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Gusfield, J. R. (1963) Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Handlin, O. (1975 [1941]) Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation, rev. ed. New York: Atheneum.Google Scholar
Hansen, M. (1940) The Immigrant in American History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hartz, L. (1955) The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.Google Scholar
Hays, S. P. (1967) “Political parties and the community-society continuum,” in William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham (eds.) The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hicks, J. D. (1960) Republican Ascendancy, 1921–1933. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Higham, J. (1955) Strangers in the Land. Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Hofstadter, R. (1967) The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Holt, M. F. (1978) The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Holt, M. F. (1992) Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Huber, J. D., and Inglehart, R. (1995) “Expert Interpretations of Party Space and Party Locations in 42 Societies.” Party Politics 1: 73–111.Google Scholar
Huckfeldt, R., and Kohfeld, C. W (1989) Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Jamieson, K. H. (1984) Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jensen, R. (1971) The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–1896. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, D. B., ed. (1978) National Party Platforms, 1960–1976. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Karabel, J. (1979) “The failure of American socialism reconsidered.” Socialist Register: 204–27.Google Scholar
Kelley, R. (1977) “Ideology and political culture from Jefferson to Nixon.” American Historical Review 82 (3) (June): 531–82.Google Scholar
Kelley, R. (1979) The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century. New York:Google Scholar
Kerr Knopf, K. A.(1985) Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Key, V. O. Jr. (1949) Southern Politics in State and Nation. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Kleppner, P. (1970) The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Kleppner, P. (1972) “Beyond the ‘new political history’: A review essay.” Historical Methods Newsletter 6: 17–26.Google Scholar
Kleppner, P. (1979) The Third Electoral System, 1853–1992: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Kohn, H. (1961) American Nationalism. New York: Collier Books.Google Scholar
Kraut, A. M., ed. (1983) Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Krukones, M. G. (1984) Promises and Performance: Presidential Campaigns as Policy Google Scholar
Predictors. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Kruschke, E. R. (1991) Encyclopedia of Third Parties in the United States. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.Google Scholar
Kyvig, D. E. (1979) Repealing National Prohibition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lane, Jan-E., McKay, D. H., and Newton, K., eds. (1991) Political Data Handbook. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Laslett, J. H. M., and Lipset, S. M., eds. (1974) Failure of a Dream?: Essays in the History of American Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lasswell, H. (1958 [1936]) Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: World Publishing.Google Scholar
Layman, G. C., and Carmines, E. G. (1997) “Cultural conflict in American politics: Religious traditionalism, postmaterialism, and U.S. political behavior.” Journal of Politics 59 (3) (August): 751–77.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A. (1971) “Class voting and religious voting in the European democracies: A preliminary report.” Acta Politica 6: 158–71.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A. (1977) Democracy in Plural Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A. (1979) “Religious vs. linguistic vs. class voting: The ‘crucial experiment’ of comparing Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland.” American Political Science Review 73 (2) (June): 442–58.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A. (1981) “Political parties: Ideologies and programs,” in Penniman, H. R. and Ranney, A. (eds.) Democracy at the Polls: A Comparative Study of Competitive National Elections. Washington: American Enterprise Institute.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A. (1984) Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lipset, S. M. (1977) “Why no socialism in the United States?,” in Seweryn Bialer (ed.) Sources of Contemporary Radicalism, vol. 1. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Lipset, S. M., and Raab, E. (1978) The Politics of Unreason, 2d ed. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Lipset, S. M., and Rokkan, S. (1967) “Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments: An introduction,” in Lipset, S. M. and Rokkan, S. (eds.) Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Luker, K. (1985) Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Manley, J. F. (1994) “The significance of class in American history and politics,” in Dodd, L. C. and Jillson, C. (eds.) New Perspectives on American Politics. Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press.Google Scholar
Manza, J., Hout, M., and Brooks, C. (1995) “Class voting in Western democracies.” Annual Review of Sociology (21): 137–62.Google Scholar
March, J. G., and Olsen, J. P. (1989) Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Mayer, W. G. (1996) The Divided Democrats: Ideological Unity, Party Reform, and Presidential Elections. New York: Westview Press/HarperCollins.Google Scholar
McCormick, R. L. (1986) The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Monroe, A. D. (1983) “American party platforms and public opinion.” American Journal of Political Science 27: 27–42.Google Scholar
Nagourney, A. (1996) “On volatile social and cultural issues, silence.” New York Times, October 9, Al, A18.Google Scholar
Nieuwbeerta, P. (1995) The Democratic Class Struggle in Twenty Countries, 1945–1990. Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers.Google Scholar
Noll, M. A., ed. (1990) Religion and American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Odegard, P. H. (1928) Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Oldfield, D. M. (1996) The Right and the Righteous: The Christian Right Confronts the Republican Party. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Parenti, M. (1967) “Ethnic politics and the persistence of ethnic identification.” American Political Science Review 61 (September): 717–26.Google Scholar
Patterson, J. T. (1967) Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Pomper, G. (1967) “‘If elected, I promise’: American party platforms.” Midwest Journal of Political Science 11 (3) (August): 318–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pomper, G. (1980) Elections in America: Control and Influence in Democratic Politics. 2d ed. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Rae, N. C. (1989) The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans from 1952 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rae, N. C. (1992) “Class and culture: American political cleavages in the twentieth century.” Western Political Quarterly (September): 629–50.Google Scholar
Rae, N. C. (1994) Southern Democrats. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reichley, A. J. (1985) Religion in American Public Life. Washington: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Reid, R. F. (ed). (1988) Three Centuries of American Rhetorical Discourse: An Anthology and a Review. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.Google Scholar
Rieder, J. (1985) Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rogin, M. P. (1987) Ronald Reagan: The Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rokkan, S. (1970) Citizens, Elections, Parties: Approaches to the Comparative Study of the Processes of Development. New York: David McKay.Google Scholar
Romanofsky, P. (1978) Social Service Organizations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Rothman, D. (1974) “The structure of state politics,” in Bonadio, Felice A. (ed.) Political Parties in American History, vol. 3. New York: 815–39.Google Scholar
Rumbarger, J. J. (1989) Profits, Power, and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing of America, 1800–1930. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Sarasohn, D. (1989) The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Schantz, H. L. (1996) “Sectionalism in Presidential elections,” in Schantz, Harvey L. (ed.) American Presidential Elections: Process, Policy, and Political Change. Albany: State University of New York Press: 93–133.Google Scholar
Schattschneider, E. E. (1960) The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Schlesinger, A. M. Jr. (1994) The Disuniting of America. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Schmidt, A.J. (1980) Fraternal Organizations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Sellers, Charles (1991) The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shafer, B. E. (1983) Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics. New York: Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Shafer, B. E. ed. (1992) Is America Different? Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shafer, B. E., and Claggett, W. J. M. (1995) The Two Majorities: The Issue Context of Modern American Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Silbey, J. H. (1985) The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Silverberg, H. (1997) “State building, health policy, and the persistence of the American abortion debate.” Journal of Policy History 9 (3): 311–88.Google Scholar
Sinclair, A. (1962) Prohibition: The Era of Excess. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Skocpol, T. (1997) “The Tocqueville problem: Civic engagement in American democracy.” Social Science History 21 (4) (Winter): 455–79.Google Scholar
Smith, A. E. (1929) Campaign Addresses of Governor Alfred E. Smith. New York: AMS Press.Google Scholar
Sowell, T. (1981) Ethnic America: A History. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Sorauf, F. (1964) Political Parties in the American System. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Steinmo, S., Thelen, K., and Longstreth, F., eds. (1992) Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sternsher, B. (1975) Consensus, Conflict, and American Historians. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Swierenga, R. P. (1990) “Ethnoreligious political behavior in the mid-nineteenth century,” in Noll, M. A. (ed.) Religion and American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press: 146–71.Google Scholar
Teske, N. (1997) Political Activists in America: The Identity Construction Model of Political Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thernstrom, S. (1973) The Other Bostonians. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Turner, F. J. (1932) Sections in American History. New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Tyrrell, I. R. (1979) Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Valelly, R. M. (1989) Radicalism in the States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wald, K. D. (1992) Religion and Politics in the United States. 2d ed. Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press.Google Scholar
Weakliem, D. L., and Heath, A. F (forthcoming) “The secret life of class voting: Britain, France, and the United States since the 1930s.” Google Scholar
Weed, C. P. (1994) The Nemesis of Reform: The Republican Party during the New Deal. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, N. (1983) Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, J. Q. (1962) The Amateur Democrat. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, J. Q. (1995 [1973]) Political Organizations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wolfinger, R. E. (1965) “The development and persistence of ethnic voting.” American Political Science Review 59 (December): 896–908.Google Scholar