Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
and play by the rules,” they said, were entitled to the American Dream and to their share of the American pie.82 As proxies embodying neoliberal qualities of hard work, self-reliance, and personal responsibility, “working” families now became the central focus of Democratic social policies, as opposed to poor families in a state of need. Democratic platforms embraced welfare reform, pledging “to make work and responsibility the law of the land.”83 The adoption of conservative neoliberal values, such as hard work, qualified but did not replace the Democratic focus on (national) state-provided family economic assistance. Their platforms continued to affirm the party’s commitment to “match parents’ responsibility to work with the real opportunity to do so, by making sure parents can get the health care, child care, and transportation they need.”84
Moreover, Democratic family pledges in the 1990s also began to advocate the GOP’s late twentieth-century value of parental responsibility (in addition to, but not instead of, state responsibility).85 In its preamble, the 1992 Democratic platform called for a “Revolution of 1992,” committing the party to a “new social contract … a way beyond the old approaches,” which it described as putting “government back on the side of citizens who play by the rules” and “abandoning the something-for-nothing ethic of the last decade.”86 Democratic platforms through the 1990s and 2000s repeatedly directed re-distributionist policies, such as increased minimum wage, child credit extensions, and earned income tax credits only to “parents who … take the responsibility to work full-time.”87 Like Republicans, Democrats characterized the failure of the AFDC welfare system as undermining values of “work, family, and personal responsibility,” aiming assistance now to help only “[those] people who want to help themselves and their children.”88 Democrats in the 1990s thus, more than ever, embraced culturally conservative family values such as personal responsibility and strong family life (Figure 9).
In the twenty-first century, however, Democrats eschewed these conservative traditional family values and refocused their family pledges on underlying secular-humanist values: equity, fairness, self-determination, fulfillment, and choice. Democrats once again highlighted family “economic security” at the center of their agenda, now pledging to restore values of opportunity and fair and equal access “for everyone who works hard and plays by the rules.”89 By using a language of redistributionist values far more pervasively than in other eras, Democrats now continue to highlight the valuational structure of their own Hearth family approach while avoiding an approach that is centered on more independent, traditional, market-based values. Yet, as if to counter Republicans’ “traditional family values,” Democrats express the underlying (secular) values of their Hearth approach with greater alacrity and frequency than in previous eras (see Figure 7).
Figure 9. Types of values in family paragraphs, Democratic and Republican platforms, 1968–2012.
In the twenty-first century, Republicans, in contrast, continue to use family to stress their late twentieth-century Soul approach, focusing first on the values and nonmaterial qualities of families in their pledges. In its 2012 platform, the Republican Party extolled the private valuational function of the “American family” and reaffirmed its 1980 assertion that a family’s “daily (values) lessons” such as “cooperation, patience, mutual respect, responsibility and self-reliance” are “fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic.”90 In many ways, the party, in its 2012 platform, reasserted its 1980 family approach, reasserting a free-market values initiative instead of its 1990s, Christian-dominated, traditional (religious) family values. Avowing to “Renew American Values” “to build healthy families, great schools, and neighborhoods,” the platform reemphasized family values such as autonomy and self-reliance. In so doing, the Republican Party moved back to its market-based antistatist center of gravity, less concerned with religious moralism. In 2008 and 2012, the party invoked family and described “strong family life” in terms of free enterprise, not religious, values of “responsibility” and “self-reliance.”91 Yet for Republicans, family continues to be the repository of essentially private values, a means to oppose redistribution, such that preserving family values continues to frame much of their social policy agenda.
Family in Partisan Legislative Behavior: Progressive, Postwar, and Late-Century Eras
Developments in partisan family ideologies across the twentieth century were not reflected in the parties’ national platforms alone but permeated down to the legislative behavior of members in Congress. An analysis of the kinds of family-related bills sponsored and/or cosponsored by members of Congress reveals the far-reaching impact of shifting family ideologies on individual partisans’ legislative behavior and policy framing through time.
Bill sponsorship and cosponsorship are similar in important ways to party platforms. As political scientist Christina Wolbretcht writes, both “represent positions with which an individual or party wishes to be identified, even if in neither case does the member or party necessarily follow through by devoting energy or resources to making the bill or pledge a reality.”92 Unlike platforms, however, congressional data such as bills sponsored and/or cosponsored can be traced to individual members, allowing analysis of how much the ideological positions contained in national party platforms trickle down or are mirrored by individual members and their personal ideologies.93 Moreover, as representations of ideological positions, sponsored and cosponsored bills have an advantage over other forms of legislative data such as roll call votes in that they are much more extensive. Numerous bills do not make it to the roll call stage, many are introduced but only a few are reported out to the floor by committees, and still others are killed through a variety of procedural maneuvers that may require unrecorded voice, not roll call, votes.94
For the three significant periods of family political development as identified through platform analysis in the previous section—Progressive (1899–1920), postwar (1946–1954), and late century (1989–2004)—2,004 family bills were identified and coded.95 In all three periods, legislators introduced disproportionately more economics-centered Hearth bills than Soul ones, with this disparity being most apparent in the post–World War II era.
In the postwar period, almost all family bills (96.7 percent) had an economic Hearth focus, much more than the 86.4 percent or the 60.9 percent of family bills in the Progressive and late twentieth-century periods, respectively. A large proportion of family bills following World War II were concerned with the welfare of dependents of returning and fallen veterans and proposed expanded housing, educational, social security, insurance, and pension benefits for them. Postwar legislators also used an economics-focused Hearth approach in family bills to liberalize immigration and citizenship, provide for the admission and naturalization of war brides and families of war veterans, and, when addressing the growing phenomenon of women in the workforce, provide tax and social security changes to accommodate them and their families.
In contrast to the economics-dominated postwar period, in both the Progressive and late twentieth-century periods, congressional members also sponsored sizable proportions of bills that focused on family values (the Soul approach). In the Progressive Era, members sponsored several Soul-focused family bills in the 61st, 62nd, and 63rd Congresses (1909 to 1914; 39 percent, 20 percent, and 16 percent of all bills examined, respectively). Many of these bills were directed at preserving the sanctity, values, and morality of the white family structure, for instance, by condemning and criminalizing white slave traffic and intermarriage.96 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, however, legislators began to introduce larger proportions of bills that had a Hearth focus: on average, seventeen Hearth-focused family bills were introduced for each Congress from 1899 to 1909, and this number rose to approximately thirty per Congress during the second Progressive decade, from 1910 to 1920. Members of Congress used the Hearth economic approach in veterans’ pension bills—to provide relief to their widows, children, and dependents—also invoking family economics to call for regulation of marriage/divorce,