The Electorate's Partisan Evaluations: Evidence of a Continuing Democratic Edge

Abstract

Scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to studying changes in how the public evaluates the Democratic and Republican parties. However, there have been few attempts to examine the underlying components of the changes in these overall evaluations of the parties in detail. By recoding the Center for Political Studies' open-ended likes/dislikes questions for parties, this paper maps change in the underlying partisan evaluations of the electorate since 1952. The results suggest that the Democrats have remained the favored party, despite some gains by the GOP in recent years. Of the eight issues studied, the Republicans have made significant inroads only on the economic front. The findings also highlight the obstacles that face the Republican's effort to gain majority status, suggesting why it has remained the minority party for over 50 years, and why it is likely to remain in that position in the near future. With the defeat of Michael Dukakis in 1988, the Democrats have lost five of the last six presidential elections, winning ten or fewer states in four of those contests. The Democrats have also lost a sizable share of self-identified partisans in recent years. In 1980, for instance, the Democrats held a twenty percentage point lead over the Republicans. By 1988, that lead had shrunk to about six percentage points. In addition, there are indications of a pro-Republican tide among the youth of the nation, suggesting that further gains by the GOP may be on the horizon. Work by Cavanagh and Sundquist (1985), Norpoth (1987), Norpoth and Kagay (1989), Petrocik (1987), Shanks and Miller (1989), and Wattenberg (1987 and 1990) all lend support to the claim that the fortunes of the Democratic party have been waning. JOHN G. GEER teaches at Arizona State University. The author thanks Thad Brown, Pat Crittenden, Kim Kahn, Pat Kenney, Bob Luskin, Warren Miller, Jim Stimson, and Tom Rochon for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1988 WPSA meetings in San Francisco. Data used in this paper were made available by the ICPSR. The author bears sole responsibility for the analyses and interpretations presented here. Public Opinion Quarterly 55:218-231 C) 1991 by the Amencan Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press / 0033-362X/91/0055-02/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.103 on Mon, 25 Apr 2016 06:42:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Electorate's Partisan Evaluations 219 While the GOP has made gains in the 1980s, this trend need not continue. The fortunes of the parties have had peaks and valleys over the last 50 years. In 1964, for instance, the GOP appeared to be retreating on nearly all fronts. Yet by 1968, the GOP had won the White House and had also made sizable inroads into the Democrat's edge in self-identified partisans. Such shifts suggest that we should be cautious when interpreting the recent changes in the public's attitudes toward the parties. Caution may be particularly appropriate in this case, given that the Democrats retain a plurality of self-identified partisans, control both houses of Congress, and hold a majority of governorships and legislatures in the fifty states. To detect the depth of the GOP's gains and thereby develop a better sense of the relative standing of the two parties, I examine changes in the public's evaluations of Democratic and Republican parties since 1952. This examination does not include the public's assessment of presidential contenders. By setting aside attitudes toward the two nominees, one avoids contaminating the estimates of partisan support in the electorate. It is possible, for instance, that the gains by the GOP in recent years are tied, in part, to Reagan's personal popularity rather than any enduring change in how the public evaluates the two parties. Thus, by limiting attention to just the public's evaluation of the parties, one can better estimate the underlying support for the parties in the