ABSTRACT
Bill Clinton's election as president in 1992 hardly signified a re-creation of the Democratic presidential majority that dominated American politics between 1932 and 1968. Beginning in the late 1950s and increasingly in the 1960s, scholars began to develop an interpretation of the American party system that placed both the stability of the New Deal system and the early stages of its decline in the more general theoretical context of what came to be known as realignment. Critical realignment theory provided a powerful account of how to read American electoral history at a time when symptoms of impending dramatic political change were becoming apparent. The Democrats certainly began losing presidential elections, producing a pattern of consistently low percentages of the popular vote as stable as the classic pattern that scholars had considered typical of a mature party system. The chapter also provides an outline of this book.
