Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso

Figure 2. Cultural change model of partisan ideational and policy development.

      As noted previously, ideas in the following narrative are not self-generated by parties and political elites but are demonstrated as grounded in the material and cultural contexts of their bases and electoral groups. Family ideals, as other political ideals, deploy positive and negative cultural images associated with established identities and policies, such as “working mothers” or “deadbeat dads,” that resonate in similar ways among sets of elites and voters alike, signaling the symbiotic relationship between legislators’ party ideology and that of their constituents. Coherent partisan family ideals are thus strongly nested in and woven from families’ own demographic and “real” lives, their cultural and material contexts, changes in which both co-occur and are codependent. The book does not make deterministic or causal claims regarding the relationship between parties’ policy agendas, their family ideals, and family demographic and cultural life. The emphasis instead is on the imbricated, interwoven nature of this multifaceted relationship, suggesting that shifts in parties’ ideologies co-occur with demographic and cultural changes in the lives of their constituent families, with mass-level change acting as both constraints and opportunities for elite formulations of policy change, as seen in Figure 2.

      Like overlaying circles in a spiral, there are three imbricated central layers to the cultural change model of party policy development followed in this book, as in Figure 2. The first captures the relationship between structural developments and family shifts, wherein macro-level changes, such as industrialization and mass immigration, engender changes to family life on individual and aggregate scales. Family changes are shaped by preexisting sectional contexts, both material and cultural, that impact distinctive patterns in how family practices both occur and are multiply interpreted in regionally specific ways. The second layer, the mainstay of the book, emphasizes the top-down and bottom-up formulation of sectional family political ideals by partisans in Congress. This process is shown as an interplay between evolving party dynamics such as intraparty strategies and regional coalitions, on one hand, and sectional family shifts, on the other, shaping competing ideational interpretations, articulations, and assemblies by legislators into coherent family political ideologies. Changes in party politics and in social behavior, such as transformations in family practices, emergence of new party activists such as the New Right and Left, and the opening of new issue contexts (e.g., abortion, busing, and school integration) in the late twentieth century, all contribute to the displacement of the parties’ existing family ideals and their reformulation of the discursive links between their ideals of state, society, and economy into a revised family political ideal. The third layer connects parties’ reformulated and repurposed family ideals to changes in partisan policy positions, as assembled from the parties’ altered preferences in differing historical periods for one or the other kinds of family policy: welfare, regulation, ascription, and/or autonomy.

      Patricia Strach offers a complementary model of policy development, revealing how large-scale changes in American families challenge family ideals embedded in public policies, creating “policy gaps” that form, she says, “when the social practice is at odds with values or assumptions of public policy.”³⁵ In turn, she shows how these policy gaps allowed for policy change to occur, configured around newly emergent family ideals. This book adds to that model by expanding the historical arc to include changes across three historical eras, focusing more squarely on the formation and influence of partisan family ideals on parties’ legislative agendas and empirically demonstrating the discursive links between preexisting regional family practices/norms, parties’ family ideologies, and party policy preferences.

      Institutions, such as congressional parties, find mention in the book’s narrative, but institutions are more contextual and less central to this story of party policy development than the (family) ideals themselves. Ideas do not simply “cluster” with prevailing governing arrangements as some have implied they do;³⁶ ideas also structure and guide those very arrangements. For example, not only did the precise content of the New Deal Democratic Hearth family ideal, which advocated national government responsibility for family economic welfare, arise out of context of an uneasy alliance between southern Democratic legislators and their nonsouthern counterparts (and the institutional strength of senior southern committee chairs in Congress) but also, more crucially, the substance of this ideal also served as the ideational rallying point for the organization and mobilization of Republican opposition to the New Deal political order. This ideational opposition then grew and developed into a resurgent Soul family ideal pursued by the New Right in the late twentieth century, more actively structuring Republican policy ideology and strategy in that subsequent period. Seen in this way, party competition over ideals plays a vital role in shaping the parties’ electoral and policy strategies from one period to the next. Ideational shifts, changes, and alignments are thus the very ground or site of political party development, even when those ideational changes do not immediately translate into tangible policy change.

      Patterns in the very origination of ideas and their process of formulation and reformulation—which groups of legislators combine which narratives and forms of policy, highlighting what kinds of human experience and how those aggregate, if at all, into a more macro (party) agenda—are crucial to the study of political development and are an important goal of this research. Legislators offer real-life family cases in their remarks during committee hearings as illustrations of policy failures and/or success, embodiments of the kinds of family arrangements by which their ideals of society, economy, and state come together. In so doing, they draw upon positive and negative cultural imagery that is widely shared among Americans even while they reconstruct and/or reify some of that imagery. Every interaction of a member of Congress with a real family case by way of questions or comments, in which he or she raises a policy issue (coded as one event in the data set), provides a window through which to examine how legislators express their ideas and beliefs regarding family; its role in society, economy, and vis-à-vis the state; and the types of policy issues involving that family that are of interest to them, both positively and negatively. By coding these events across three historical periods covering almost sixty years’ worth of congressional hearings, for characteristics of family mentioned by members of Congress, their party, state, and region, as well as the policy issues highlighted by them, specific legislators are demonstrated to invoke historically contingent and evolving patterns of family political ideals, also suggesting ideational aggregate patterns of legislators’ family ideals across party and region.³⁷ Thus, empirical examinations of ideas, while first and foremost reliant on qualitative methods such as discourse and content analysis, can also deploy quantitative approaches, as also developed (in an alternative methodology) in Gerring’s book on Party Ideology. Moreover, the revealed aggregate patterns in partisan and sectional family ideals over time enable one to see, in a tangible way, the process of formation and elaboration of policy ideas and to also discern how macro (and institutional) forces, such as political parties and demographic change, can and do enable the groupings of ideas into coherent policy ideologies.

      At a macro level, in each of the three eras examined, Hearth and Soul family ideals emerge as two grand narratives that have durable political appeal and recurrent salience. At this scale, both operate much like ideational “orders” or “regimes,” similar, for instance, to James Morone’s depiction of “social gospel” and “neopuritan” approaches that have continually shaped responses to moral panics across American political history.³⁸ At a mesa policy level, however, these family ideologies engender variations in how they link ideas of race, gender, economy, and state into composite policy positions in different periods of time, manifesting in alterations in which policies most support that ideology, when, and how. In the Progressive Era, for example, Soul family values ideology largely supported ascriptive policies, whereas in other