The Roots of Polarization: From the Racial Realignment to the Culture Wars

A deeply researched account of how battles over civil rights in the 1960s shaped todays partisan culture wars.

In the late twentieth century, gay rights, immigration, gun control, and abortion debates all burst onto the political scene, scrambling the parties and polarizing the electorate. Neil A. OBrian traces the origins of todays political divide on these issues to the 1960s when Democrats and Republicans split over civil rights. It was this partisan polarization over race, he argues, that subsequently shaped partisan fault lines on other culture war issues that persist to this day.

Using public opinion data dating to the 1930s, OBrian shows that attitudes about civil rights were already linked with a range of other culture war beliefs decades before the parties split on these issuesand much earlier than previous scholarship realized. Challenging a common understanding of partisan polarization as an elite-led phenomenon, The Roots of Polarization argues politicians and interest groups, jockeying for power in the changing party system, seized on these preexisting connections in the mass public to build the parties contemporary coalitions.