ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that if groups of voters are defined primarily by their psychological outlooks and values, the coalitions of voters and interests comprising each party have been quite stable for that century and a half —a long time, indeed, in the world history of democratic politics. Andrew Jackson in 1828 won the White House by building a coalition of highly disparate forces. The Jacksonians were enamored of a traditional economic order, based on subsistence farming by independent yeomen but also including plantation slavery. Historians have only begun the painstaking process of identifying the causal forces that determined party affiliation before the Civil War. The drive for civil rights for blacks—that is, full equality under the law regardless of the traditionalism of the rural South — reflected the commitment to a totally modern society. Youth demanded freedom from the tight psychological self-control demanded by the modern value system.
