Partisan Change and Dealignment in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States

Abstract

concepts of and are well established in modern literature dealing with electoral change. Particularly in the United States, V. O. Key's 1955 article on The Theory of Critical Elections established an understanding of American political alignments as relatively stable entities which nevertheless underwent periodic but relatively rare sea changes.' Since that time, there have been many refinements in our understanding of the processes of political change, but the concept of realignment has remained central to much of our thinking about the evolution of party systems. More recently, patterns of change have been documented in a number of western nations which are commonly classified as dealignment. Dealignment describes a process of weakening or erosion of an existing party alignment without necessarily implying its replacement by a new and stable set of partisan loyalties. There is often a presumption that dealignment is a preliminary stage of the larger scale process of realignment, but there is not necessarily any reason why this need be so. While it may be true that a weakening and decline of an old party system is perhaps a precondition for realignment, the opposite does not necessarily follow-that dealignment must bring about realignment. Although there have been dealigning trends in a number of countries in recent years, in no single instance of these has there yet been general agreement that a true realignment has occurred. Indeed, it is possible to see dealignment itself as a protracted or perhaps semipermanent condition of a party system and to anticipate some of the electoral phenomena which follow from such a condition, such as greater volatility and greater impact of short-term forces.