The family is an integral part of politics, be it the defining unit for social welfare provision or the primary socializing agent of children. It should come as no surprise, then, that the family also shapes party competition in the United States; parties routinely treat families as the canvas onto which they project their political values and policy goals. And yet, family is nowhere to be found in the scholarly literature on the development of the American party system. Gwendoline M. Alphonso rectifies this problem in Polarized Families, Polarized Parties by offering a historical account of the emergence of the family as a key component of party competition in the United States, thus “necessitating a fresh look at the conceptual understanding of party ideology and providing an alternative explanation for the late twentieth-century conservative ascendance” (p. 4).
At the heart of Alphonso’s argument are the “Hearth” and “Soul” frameworks that define parties’ approaches to family. The Hearth framework is liberal and emphasizes the “economics essential to family well-being,” while the Soul framework is conservative and emphasizes the “values essential to family well-being” (p. 9). It is through these two frameworks that family becomes the discursive mechanism that binds together elite and mass polarization: Hearth and Soul “frame how legislators imagine and conceive of family and generate parties’ policy agendas . . . serving as opportunities and constraints on successive political actors looking to formulate new approaches to changing realities” (p. 18).
Alphonso traces the rise of these frameworks in the United States from 1900 to 2012 using data on party platforms, congressional bill sponsorship and cosponsorship, and congressional committee hearings. These data lend themselves to both statistical analyses—for instance, showing how often the family is mentioned by parties or legislators—and more careful qualitative treatment—such as illustrating how the two frameworks graft onto the nature of the times. Alphonso supplements and illustrates these data with anecdotes from convention speeches, press conferences, speeches from the floor of Congress, and presidential debates, as well as statistical analyses of U.S. Census data and a myriad of surveys, all of which enriches the account she tells. All told, the data collection and analysis are quite extensive and impressive and should serve as a model for anyone writing about American political development.
From these data, Alphonso identifies three key periods of development. In the Progressive era, the family begins to make its way onto regional agendas through issues such as women’s suffrage and racial intermarriage. Discussions during this time are primarily ascriptive in that they focus on the biological underpinnings of family-related issues. The post–World War II era saw some movement of the family to the national agenda as debates over the family came to shape the origins of the current social welfare regime in the United States. Still, family was not wholly polarizing at this time as there was substantial regional overlap between parties on the Hearth and Soul frameworks. It is only in the contemporary period (i.e., late 1970s onward) that families become a central feature of party politics, exemplified by Bill Clinton’s “Families First” campaign or George W. Bush’s appeal to conservative family values. Alphonso shows how the rhetoric of family ties together economic and social values and thus revises our understanding of what was previously seen as competing dimensions of political ideology.
Alphonso makes several important theoretical and empirical contributions in this book. First, she identifies the family as a third component of (spatial) models of party competition. But rather than offering family as just another dimension in addition to the economic and the social, Alphonso argues that family has become the lingua franca that allows parties and politicians to justify, and the public to make sense of, the conjoining of (sometimes opposing) economic and social values. Second, she highlights a formative but previously unidentified component of American political history. A focus on family helps us understand family demographic transformations, the politics of race and gender, and economic policy winners and losers. This contribution lays the groundwork for future scholarship to further explore the material and policy consequences of family rhetoric. Third, this history offers lessons for our current politics. Appeals to family values or the middle class infuse policy debates and campaign rhetoric at every turn. From health care to gay marriage to immigration, the family frame is now widely applied and has the potential to shape political outcomes. Alphonso thus offers a framework through which we can make sense of current events.
Still, the author sometimes has trouble seeing the forest through the trees. The analysis of the Progressive era, for instance, focuses exclusively on how the Hearth and Soul frameworks shape the parties’ position on gender relations, family structure, and the role of government vis-à-vis the family, but overlooks the fact that family comprises a minuscule portion (< 5%) of the parties’ platforms during this period. This left me wondering what the family came to replace once it eventually held a more prominent position on the parties’ platforms. The question for this era is less about what parties are saying about families and more about why parties are not saying much about families in the first place. If families define party competition today, why did they not define party competition during the Progressive era? Alphonso is silent on these questions.
The book also sometimes omits important parts of the relevant literatures. For instance, Gary Miller and Norman Schofield’s important work on partisan alignment (“Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States,” American Political Science Review, 97[2], 2003) highlights the pivotal role of activists in shifting the ideological positioning of parties (see also Geoffrey C. Layman et al., “Activists and Conflict Extension in American Party Politics,” American Political Science Review, 104[2], 2010), but activists are only cursorily acknowledged in Alphonso’s telling.
A similar problem is seen with respect to political polarization, where Alphonso eschews rather than embraces roll-call votes as a marker of this phenomenon. But, surely, if family matters to polarization, as Alphonso convinces me it does, then her analysis of party platforms, congressional hearings, and bill sponsorship should have parallels in roll-call votes. In other words, if the rhetoric of family is at all consequential to policy (and not simply an electoral strategy), then we should see it affecting the legislative decisions of politicians (Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting, 1997).
The audiences for this book are political scientists, historians, and sociologists studying American political development, political parties, partisan polarization, or political sociology. But even for scholars outside of these areas or those who may shy away from historical accounts, I would recommend portions of Polarized Families, Polarized Parties that speak to the politics of today. Chapter 1 lays out the Hearth and Soul frameworks, while Chapter 5 documents the deployment of these frameworks in contemporary politics. Arguably, the primary contributions of the book are found in these chapters, and so I recommend them to any scholar of American politics.
