The Making of Partisan Majorities: Parties, Anchoring Groups, and Electoral Change

This dissertation asks about the causes and consequences of alliance between political parties and large, socially important movements, which I term anchoring groups, in the United States. I develop a framework to explain why and with what effect movements ally with parties rather than forming third parties or becoming pressure groups, and then apply it to two primary cases and eighteen shadow cases, from Free Soil to gay rights, across American history.;Movements approaching the party system face a trilemma rooted in the distinctive American political system, but playing out in different ways through evolving alignments. Party-group alliance requires a group with a commitment to mainstream electoral politics, as well as a receptive political party. Parties accept alliance if, with movement support, they can maintain ongoing electoral majorities. Otherwise, partisan elites will attempt to freeze out their movement allies. Movements with broad agendas and no receptive parties will form third parties. Those with narrow agendas and support in both existing parties will become pressure groups.;Twice in twentieth-century US politics, long-running partnerships between parties and anchoring groups have reshaped the party system. In the 1930s, the CIO made common cause with the New Deal on behalf of labor and social legislation. In the late 1970s, conservative evangelicals responded to threats and dislocations in the wake of the '60s, most notably attempts to revoke tax exemptions from segregated religious schools, to form a partnership with the Republican party. Both unionists and religious conservatives moved from the fringes of party politics into the political mainstream, offering access to votes, money, and networks in exchange for substantial -- and often veto-wielding -- influence inside majority parties.;In a process that often stretches for decades, party and movement adapt in a process of reciprocal change, as parties assimilate core group priorities and movements lose their early zeal, radicalism, and naivete, instead accepting the strategies and compromises of ordinary politics. In this light, American politics, with neither a labor party nor a formally confessional party, appears less distinctive. Rather, anchoring groups have served as looser if equally important mechanisms linking political parties with group-based mobilization.