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TIME History politics What Makes a Democrat a Democrat and a Republican a Republican? Its More Complicated Than You Think It remains the case that a large majority of the public has liberal views on some issues and conservative views on others

History News Network

This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.

Political scientists will often say that peoples political party affiliations are major causes of their voting behavior and of their opinions on various policy issues. Yet this line often neglects evidence that, to understand political party affiliations, one needs to focus on voters opinions on various policy issues.

Fifty years ago, Democrat Lyndon Johnson battled Republican Barry Goldwater for the presidency. At that time, no Republican presidential candidate had carried the Deep South since Reconstruction. Nonetheless, Goldwater carried the line of states from Louisiana to South Carolina (as well as his home state of Arizona) but no other states. The reason for his victory in these southern states had to do with Goldwaters opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which Johnson, in contrast, had championed. In the election, many southern whites voted on the basis of this issue, at the expense of their traditional party.

Further, as the pace of social change accelerated in the early 1960s, the Supreme Court issued a line of controversial decisions on school prayer, birth control, and abortion. These previously sleepy issues took on greater public prominence. As the political parties adopted their contrasting positions in the 1970s, key voting groups began shifting. White churchgoers (including many southerners and Catholics who had previously been solid supporters of Democrats) increasingly voted Republican, while the growing group of non-religious whites leaned more towards Democrats.

More recently, the Reagan years saw the opening of a new gender gap in party voting, driven not by abortion (an issue on which men and women have never, it turns out, differed much on average), but by the gender gap in support for government safety-net programs. In addition, more recently, Republicans have become increasingly associated with anti-immigrant views (a major milestone occurring in 1994, when Republican Governor Pete Wilson supported Californias Proposition 187), and, as a result, Latinos have become increasingly solid Democratic supporters.

To make sense of contemporary politics, its more crucial than ever to understand what drives the publics contrasting views on a wide range of hot-button issues taxes, healthcare, affirmative action, immigration, school prayer, same-sex marriage, abortion, marijuana legalization, and others. One needs to be able to see how these issues relate to the demographic splits that increasingly guide political analysis.

In The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind (Princeton, 2014), we offer a fresh perspective on these topics. We combine the data-driven analyses typical of political professionals with growing psychological insights into human motives.

We sift through large surveys for connections between peoples lives and their politics, focusing attention on the biggest links. A key point is that different kinds of issues involve different major demographic predictors.

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What Makes a Democrat a Democrat and a Republican a Republican? Its More Complicated Than You Think