The Adaptation Dilemma: Race, the Republican Party, and the Roots of Democratic Backsliding

Robert Lieberman, Johns Hopkins University
Daniel Schlozman, Johns Hopkins University

Over the last half-century, party contestation in the US has been conducted more sharply along racial lines than at any time since the late nineteenth century. This evolution has had a decidedly destabilizing effect on American democracy. The Republican Party has increasingly behaved like a party representing a discrete ethnic group - white Americans - even as white voters decline as a share of the electorate. We identify an "adaptation dilemma" facing parties that represent such majority but declining groups: either adapt the party programmatically to a different electorate or attempt to mold the electorate to fit the party's existing coalition. We show historically how a combination of changing racial demographics and tightening partisan competition since the 1960s has repeatedly posed this dilemma for the Republicans and how the party has repeatedly rejected programmatic adaptation in favor of electoral restrictionism - attempts to restrict voting rights, impede voting opportunities for opponent groups, and gain partisan control of the electoral machinery. The paper presents a detailed narrative account, based on a combination of primary and secondary sources, of the series of choice points for the Republicans between seeking to expanding the parties coalition and disavowing racial restrictionism, on the one hand, and acceptance of the party's new identity in a racially divided electorate.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 145. Democratic Backsliding and Authoritarian Politics