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Electoral Congruence and the Autonomy of American State Party Systems

Illinois Wesleyan University

This research examines whether electoral incongruence within American state party systems exists between presidential and state-level elections. Recent research by James Gimpel suggests that the states are developing autonomous party systems in which electoral cleavages in statewide races are increasingly dissimilar to those at the national level. In this research, county-level two-party voting patterns are used as measures of the geographic continuity of partisan electoral cleavages for all presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial elections over the last decade (1986-1996) from the 10 states examined most closely in Gimpel's work. However, a factor analysis of these data fail to confirm two hypotheses implied by this intrastate autonomy phenomenon. A single dominant factor appears to underlie the partisan cleavages in both the Western and Northern states. Consequently, although more variable, the partisan divisions in elections are likely to be very similar to the contours of those at the presidential level.

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