ABSTRACT
The point of identifying all the groups and factions, of course, is to see how the nature of the Democratic and Republican coalitions has affected their unity and ideological cohesion. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have taken on their present-day form as the result of a complex historical evolution, in which major epochs in American political history helped shape and redefine the party coalitions, bringing them some new allies and costing them some of their previous adherents. In contrast to the clear factional structure of the Democratic Party, commentators on the American party system have usually had a good deal of difficulty defining the specific factions and subgroups within the Republican Party. As the party identification data from the early 1970s clearly show, the upheavals of the 1960s pulled many Americans away from their traditional allegiances to the Democratic Party—but did surprisingly little to aid or augment the Republicans.
