Party Realignment and the Transformation of the Political Agenda: The House of Representatives, 1925—1938

Abstract

According to Walter Dean Burnham, party realignments “result in significant transformation in the general shape of policy.” Through the analysis of House roll-call data, the New Deal realignment is examined to determine whether, in fact, a significant transformation took place and, if so, what its characteristics were. It was hypothesized that if a new political agenda emerged at that time, at least some of the stable policy dimensions which Aage Clausen finds as characterizing the modern Congress should have developed during the New Deal period. In terms of content and level of partisan voting evoked, the government management and the agricultural policy dimensions do take their modern form during the New Deal. A social welfare dimension developed but had not, by the late 1930s, taken its modern shape. It is argued that a major transformation of policy did take place and that, in the process, the ideological distance between the parties increased. This realignment, however, did not immediately change regional voting patterns within each party.