Though differing substantially in their approach, Eric Schickler’s Racial Realignment and Vanessa C. Tyson’s Twists of Fate share a goal of moving the literature toward a clearer understanding of how civil rights and minority interests emerge within national party coalitions and through institutional actors. In doing so, Schickler takes on dominant theories of party realignments with a far-reaching empirical investigation of the development and incorporation of civil rights interests into the Democratic coalition. Tyson more modestly focuses on contemporary multi-racial coalitions in Congress, arguing that linked fate binds minority Members of Congress (MCs) in a multiracial coalition. Each book serves different purposes, yet both share the underlying emphasis on coalitional politics and the processes of incorporation of minority interests.
Schickler takes on two major foils in his expansive study of the emergence of civil rights and African American interests as central elements of the liberal coalition within the Democratic Party and the contemporary partisan alignment. First, he argues that the realignment’s roots spanned much further back in time than stable equilibrium models suggest, dating to Franklin Roosevelt’s second term, when the liberal coalition came to be seen not only as an economically liberal coalition but also as incorporating a civil rights agenda. Second, he posits that activists and mid-level party members served as the driving force for the alignment, as new interests competed with long-standing coalition members within the national Democratic Party. Far from the top-down, elite-driven, realignment described in the current literature, Schickler argues that the decades-old emergence of new interests and coalition partners in a party system characterized by geographically separate power bases formed the foundation for the national realignment in the mid-1960s. In sum, the 1960s racial realignment of the national parties did not mark the genesis of a new era of party alignment driven by national elites, but rather was the culmination of decades of bottom-up activism, coalition building, and diverging electoral incentives.
In an argument that will likely set the bar for scholars of American political development and party alignments, Schickler’s richly detailed qualitative narrative and clever use of novel quantitative evidence results in compelling support for his thesis. For example, to date the inclusion of civil rights into conceptions of New Deal liberalism, Shickler not only relies on traditional content analysis of major media outlets and influential periodicals, but also includes a presentation of how survey instruments intended to measure ideology generally omitted civil rights items prior to FDR’s second term—a clever approach to establishing the pre-inclusion timeframes (p. 43 and Chapter 3). Aggregated public opinion polls, discharge petitions, media coverage, and content analysis of state party platforms partially round out the list of novel data applied throughout the book to demonstrate that African American and urban voters in Northern states and a push by the Congress of Industrial Organizations to include civil rights in the late 1930s and early 1940s led to the redefinition of the Democratic liberal coalition to include civil rights interests by the late 1940s. Electoral incentives and egalitarian preferences in turn directed rank and file elected officials to address civil rights in a way consistent with a liberal coalition defined by conceptions of both economic and civil rights liberalism much earlier than the 1960s.
Establishing the early foundations of the inclusion of civil rights interests into the liberal coalition provides a necessary condition for the second major argument—that realignment reflected national elites’ capitulation to longstanding efforts by mid-level partisans and activists more than a distinct and independent turn by national elites. Here, Schickler takes on both the elite driven models, but also the UCLA School approach to understanding parties as coalitions of intense policy demanders. For several decades, civil rights and growing segments of labor activists, a larger African American voting block, and the reality of geographically distinct constituency interests, compelled Northern Democrats to respond to an expansion of New Deal liberalism by supporting civil rights. Southern Democrats, seeking to undermine efforts for equality, sought to obstruct and undermine their liberal co-partisans’ efforts. Rather than a coalition of intense policy demanders cooperating for mutual benefit, or even a unified elite-driven party structure, intense intra-party conflict characterized the party system during this period.
Schickler’s argument thus counters the dominant understanding of the timeframe for the emergence of the civil rights realignment and the concept that parties are best conceived of as sets of (cooperating) intense policy demanders. It also highlights the importance of well-executed historical analysis for understanding large systemic changes that result from multiple trajectories of political context and actors. While acknowledging that mid-level party officials, intellectuals, rank-and-file members of congress, and activists (labor and civil rights) are a source of pressure from below, the argument also highlights the importance of the electoral pressure exerted by mass opinion. Both processes are likely correct, but unresolved is the issue of the influence of those non-elites on mass opinion. By signaling to voters that a party is indeed aligned on the civil rights dimension, these mid-level actors may have influenced partisan voters and the real bottom-up process started at the mid-level rather than the voter-level. Lacking the type of public opinion data necessary to determine this process, the study relies primarily on correlations between party identification and economic and civil rights policy preferences to demonstrate the early and growing inclusion of civil rights into mass conceptions of liberalism. The result is still a blurry picture of the causal path. Thus, the bottom-up characterization presented may be better described as mid-level mobilization and influence. Union leaders, civil rights leaders, and MCs outside of the very top leadership may reasonably be categorized as political elites with their own policy and organizational agendas. If this is the case, while theories positing a top-down realignment taking place in the 1960s are inadequate, abandoning the conception of elite-driven politics motivated by organizational goals (in addition to ideological or policy goals) may still be premature.
Coalitions’ roles in civil rights and racial/ethnic minority policy influence also lie at the heart of Tyson’s Twists of Fate. Recognizing the marginalization of communities of color, whether in terms of constituencies or descriptive representatives, Tyson argues that a sense of linked fate develops among Black, Latino, and Asian MCs. This linked fate is both lateral across descriptive representatives and vertical as MCs of color share common bonds with co-racial/ethnic constituencies. The linkages result in better representation of a broad set of policy goals, usually shared with their constituents, but also influenced by commonalities with other marginalized groups. Tyson argues that in responding to this multifaceted marginalization, representatives of color formed the Congressional Tri-Caucus and pursued cooperative strategies to further civil rights and other objective minority interests. After presenting the theory, which is an important extension of the concept of the well-established mass-level manifestation of linked fate within groups, Tyson provides a broad overview of civil rights policymaking at the national level, which is followed by a quantitative analysis of roll call votes in the 108th and 109th Congresses, as well as a qualitative analysis of almost fifty interviews of members of the Congressional Tri-Caucus.
Tyson’s major contribution and unique insight stem from the analysis of interview data presented in Chapter 5. As a welcomed addition to a large literature on minority descriptive representation and recent attention to minority coalitions outside of local politics, the insights from the interview data highlight the connections between minority groups and the sense of linked fate, or a common ideological concern for equality. In their interviews, and nicely illustrated with relevant quotations by Tyson, Black and Latino(a) MCs clearly recognize a degree of linked fate among the two groups (as well as with Asian MCs). “Latinos and blacks definitely have linked fates,” responded one MC, echoing a sentiment shared by most interviewees (p. 140). Other revelations from the interviews underscored Tyson’s argument that minority MCs recognize the necessity of multiracial/ethnic coalitions for progressing civil rights agendas. But perhaps the most intriguing insight, and one demonstrating both the unique role of descriptive representation and the disjuncture between mass and national-level elite behavior, was the emergence of a theme that despite co-ethnic/racial constituents’ preferences on some issues (i.e., black mass opinion on immigration and gay marriage), MCs of color held policy positions supporting other minority groups’ preferences as they perceived any discriminatory legislation as applying to all, and were conscious of a need to act as trustees or opinion-leaders in the face of an unenthusiastic constituency.
The qualitative evidence thus provides a unique window into the motivation underlying the existing quantitative evidence suggesting a heightened level of representation and responsiveness to not only their co-racial/ethnic group’s interests, but also the interests of other marginalized groups. Gay rights and immigration provide intriguing examples of this process, as black representatives supported liberal stances based on strategic cooperation and egalitarian principles while recognizing that their constituents may not endorse such a move. Tyson adequately illuminates the role of linked-fate in explaining these phenomena and the argument adds to the foundation of an important research agenda focusing on the national-level politics of incorporation and minority coalition-building.
While the interviews provide rich detail, the roll-call analyses of civil rights and social welfare votes in the 108th and 109th Congresses aim to highlight general patterns of minority coalitional behavior. Key among the findings, and reflecting the literature on descriptive representation, is a unique level of support among MCs from Black and Latino majority districts as compared to those representing minority influence districts. This counters arguments that minority interests may be better served through influence districts than the crafting of minority-majority districts which in turn serve as vehicles for the election of minority MCs. Combined with the unique coalitional orientation of MCs of color presented in interview data, the evidence underscores the pivotal role of descriptive representation in multiracial coalition formation in Congress.
Given the work’s early emphasis on the Tri-Caucus and a claim of a scholarly contribution based in part on the inclusion of Asian interests in the analysis, the lack of data on Asian constituencies or interview data with Asian representatives is striking, however. The lack of data on Asian representatives in national legislatures is driven, of course, by a very limited set of cases (and thus the previous literature’s reliance on investigations of Black-Latino relations). However, even district Asian population measures are omitted in models examining minority influence districts, which seems to be a missed opportunity to flesh out the role of linked fate among minority descriptive representatives (pp. 119–120). What is left in the roll call analysis is really an empirical story of Black-Latino representation based on positions on civil rights and social welfare roll calls (with very little difference in the effects across these two presumably distinct dimensions of the liberal coalition), and an empirical basis for understanding coalitions among Black, Latino and Asian MCs in Congress that falls a bit short of the aspirations set out in the introduction.
In sum, both works draw scholars’ eyes to the role of coalitions as key mechanisms for minority influence. Racial Realignment reformulates the dominant narrative of how civil rights and economic liberalism came to characterize the liberal coalition and modern cleavages between the Democratic and Republican Parties, highlighting the intra-party tensions among new and existing coalition members. Twists of Fate presents a contemporary account of coalitions of marginalized members and their behavior within this new party system. As the United States continues to struggle with the dynamics of demography and policy demands, both works point to the possibility of undercurrents of tension within a seemingly stable polarized party system.
