28 The nature of American politics
development of suburbia has transformed America both visually and politi-
cally. These suburbs, spreading out many miles into the country around ur-
ban areas, represent a whole new way of life, and their impact upon politics
is as great as was that of the Roosevelt revolution. They represent a new
type of community, in which the old guidelines to political behaviour are no
longer so reliable. The population of the suburbs is ethnically diverse while
its economic composition is relatively homogeneous. Neither the old pattern
of city politics based upon ethnic differences nor the urban–rural alignment
is so relevant. As Robert C. Wood has pointed out, the suburbs fit neither into
the class patterns of the early twentieth century nor into the sectional pat-
terns of the nineteenth. Yet old political loyalties die hard, and the persist-
ence of party allegiance is one of the facts of political behaviour, even when
the original reasons for choosing one side rather than another have long
become irrelevant. Perhaps the greatest significance of the rise of suburbia
is to provide an overlap with another of our patterns of political behaviour,
individualism. Suburbanites tend to think of themselves as independents in
politics, discriminating between candidates rather than parties, paying at-
tention to different issues at the various levels of government, and making
use of all the opportunities for ticket-splitting that the American electoral
system provides.
Pluralism in American politics
The group basis of politics became the subject of intensive study only in the
twentieth century, and significantly it is two American works, The Process of
Government by Arthur F. Bentley, published in 1908, and David B. Truman’s
The Governmental Process of 1951, that most typify this approach. We shall look
closely at this view of the political system in a later chapter when discussing
interest group politics, but here we shall concentrate upon three aspects of
group politics of particular significance at the level of electoral behaviour, the
politics of class and of ethnic and religious groups.
The overlapping group nature of the American political system can be
gauged from the results of the 2004 presidential election (see Table 2.1).
Class
That class is a factor in the voting behaviour of the American electorate is
clear. The further up the income scale the more likely people are to vote
Republican. At the end of the nineteenth century the triumph of section-
alism had as its corollary a relative lack of emphasis upon class in Ameri-
can voting behaviour; but as sectionalism declined in importance, the class
alignments of American voters became more significant. The growth of an
underprivileged urban working class during the first two decades of the twen-
tieth century formed the basis of a transformation from the sectional poli-
tics of the earlier age. The economic depression of the late 1920s and the