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Why do Republicans and Democrats have the coalitions they have? I argue that ideological discussion brings issues into and out of alignment, and that the divisions we see in government are a reflection of coalitions shaped in the discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties create ideologies to rationalize their electoral coalitions? Or do ideologies shape parties, even against the re-election incentives of party leaders? In other words, how should we understand the relationship between ideology and party? These questions require a measure of ideology that is distinct from the partisan behavior of elected politicians. This paper develops such a model, coding the positions taken by intellectual thinkers around 1850. I find that ideological writers divided into two camps on slavery and on the other major issues of the day at a time when slavery cross-cut the two main camps in Congress. This division matches the one that develops in Congress a decade later, suggesting that the parties responded not just to electoral incentives, but also to this elite division. Ideology was accepted, even though it undermined longstanding attempts to hold together intersectional alliances and brought on a division that led to the Civil War. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of ideology in partisan politics cannot be explained without understanding the roots of ideology itself. I propose a path by which ideological divisions disrupted the party equilibrium of the 1950s and remade parties in ideological terms by the early 1990s. Testing this theory requires an understanding of ideology independent of partisan institutions. I apply an item response model to a sample of articles in leading ideological journals to extract a latent trait of ideology. A hierarchical model of ideal points takes advantage of the known relationship between writers for the same journal to overcome the lack of data on individual writers. The model is applied to data from 1990 and 1970. The space defined is strongly one dimensional, even in the absence of the agenda factors present in a legislature. Future work will extend the analysis back to 1870. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did the Democratic Party split over the nomination of two candidates whose policy positions were almost indistinguishable? What was Obama vs. Clinton really about? And why did the Republican Party nominate a candidate disliked by so much of the party's base? Presidential nomination politics has often revealed schisms within the party coalitions. But are these divisions personal, ideological or strategic? I use a dataset of more than 8000 presidential nomination endorsements from 1972 to 2008 to identify the network of support in the nominating party, as well as the key players in that dynamic. I then apply social networks analysis techniques, including exponential random graph models, to explain those networks. Analysis gives insight into who is important, what groups are stable, and what characteristics lead them to act together. Preliminary results suggest that major cleavages in the party usually represent stable and persistent internal divisions in the party coalitions, rather than personal divisions driven by the identities of the candidates in each race. .x000d..x000d.This paper would be appropriate for panels on internal party conflict, theories of parties, social networks methods and presidential nominations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties create ideologies to rationalize their electoral coalitions? Or do ideologies shape parties, even against the re-election incentives of party leaders? In other words, how should we understand the relationship between ideology and party? These questions require a measure of ideology that is distinct from the partisan behavior of elected politicians. This paper develops such a model, coding the positions taken by intellectual thinkers around 1850. I find that ideological writers divided into two camps on slavery and on the other major issues of the day at a time when slavery cross-cut the two main camps in Congress. This division matches the one that develops in Congress a decade later, suggesting that the parties responded not just to electoral incentives, but also to this elite division. Ideology was accepted, even though it undermined longstanding attempts to hold together intersectional alliances and brought on a division that led to the Civil War. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]