Regional Realignments? Sub-nationalTrends in Partisan Identification in the Northeast.

Many political scientists have been searching for a national realignment among the American electorate in recent political history. Individuals who examine political behavior and party systems with strict periodization requirements in mind expected a ?critical realignment? to occur during the 1960s. After examining past historical instances at the national level, it would seem as though a realignment did not occur as expected. A durable partisan change in the national electorate resulting in a new majority political party assuming power, and the implementation of sweeping public policy changes (as occurred during the Civil War in the 1860s and the New Deal realignment during the 1930s) remains elusive. The value of examining whether a realignment has occurred only at the national level is questionable, however, since a single focus on national electoral and partisan patterns likely obscures changes occurring at sub-national levels. This paper investigates the possibility of regional realignment by examining the change in partisan identification among whites residing in one discrete region of the United States: the Northeast. Multivariate logit analyses are employed in order to uncover the generational, social group, and attitudinal factors contributing to change in the partisan identification of whites in the Northeast using National Election Studies survey data, 1972-2000. The findings support the notion that whites in the Northeast are more Democratic than Republican in terms of their partisan identification over time. However, the underlying contributing factors, and the magnitude and direction of partisan change vary according to the classification of the partisan identification dependent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]