From the Populist Era to the New Deal: A Study of Partisan Realignment in Washington State, 1889-1950

Abstract

Study of the popular response to the political parties and candidates of nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States history has made significant progress since the 1950s. Samuel Lubell in The Future of American Politics was certainly one of the first to show historians that much understanding about the voting behavior of past generations could be gleaned from an imaginative examination of county and precinct election data. Lee Benson, in his now classic essay on “Research Methods in American Political Historiography,” persuasively demonstrated to many that systematic analysis of quantitative data could improve the accuracy and quality of generalizations about past voting practices. Benson’s subsequent study of early nineteenth-century New York politics, The Concept ofJacksonian Democracy, which quickly became a model of excellence in research design and methods, concluded, among other things, that “socioeconomic cleavages” were less important in explaining how New Yorkers voted after about 1820 than were “ethnic and religious” factors. At least in part inspired by Benson’s findings in New York, other historians pursued the study of the relationship between voting behavior and ethnocultural and religious factors by examining, for example, political behavior in Michigan during the Jacksonian era, the Midwest and Northeast during the 1890s, and Chicago in the early twentieth century. While the emphasis upon the importance of ethnocultural and religious factors in voting has engendered some criticism and dissent, it seems fair to conclude that this approach to the study of the voting process has produced significant work that has substantially influenced interpretations of American political history.