March 13, 2008 -- Democrats, take heart. The latest Republican ascendancy, which began when the party took over the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994, may be coming to an end -- according to new research in the field of political science.
If history is any judge, party power in American politics seems to switch back and forth at consistent, predictable intervals.
A team of three researchers looked at every election since 1854 and tallied the percentage of seats in the House and Senate won by each party.
To find patterns in this data, Samuel Merrill III, a mathematician at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., borrowed a tool from astronomers: spectral analysis, a statistical method usually used to find repeating cycles in sunspots.
The tool uncovered a rhythm hidden within the Congressional election data, published in the February issue of the American Political Science Review. Every 12 to 15 years, party dominance seemed to swing from the Democrats the Republicans (or vice versa).
To explain this wobble in voter allegiance, Bernard Grofman, a professor of political science at University of California in Irvine, searched for spring-like forces that might cause such a steady oscillation.
Previous research has shown that voters like familiar faces; incumbent candidates typically pull constituents toward their party of choice. But voters also drift away over time, put off by the failed policies of those in power, wanting change.
Politicians, for their part, are caught between wanting to please the average voter, which pulls them closer to the political center, and staying true to the ideological doctrines of their party, which push them away from the center and their constituents.
The team built a mathematical model based on these push-pull forces.
"Like any model, ours is a simplification of the real world," said author Tom Brunell, who worked on the model at the University of Texas at Dallas. "It ignores the effects of the economy on politics, for one thing. But nonetheless, our cycling curve does a pretty good job at matching the data."
The only major discrepancy is Watergate, a big hiccup that swung five seats in Senate and 49 seats in the House to the Democrats in the middle of a Republican period.
The study brings new perspective to an old debate.
In the 1950s, political scientist V.O. Key suggested that every 30 to 40 years, a critical presidential election forces our government to reset itself; his version of a liberal/conservative cycle relied on periodic key issues like Lincoln's anti-slavery stance in 1860, McKinley's progressive business coalitions in 1896, and Roosevelt's sweeping social reforms in 1932.
But Key's "realignment theory" ran into problems when no one could find any such pivotal elections in the 60s, 70s or 80s.
David Mayhew, who teaches politics at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., thinks the methodology of this new research provides a fresh and better way to find such patterns.
"Realignment theory," he said, "looked too much at the presidents; the strength of this study is that it focuses on Congress."
In fact, when the authors of the new paper applied their spectral analysis to presidential races, they found a much weaker party pattern.
It may be a matter of too little data: only 38 presidential races since 1854. Or it may be, as Mayhew believes, that the high-profile nature of the office brings into play too many factors that have nothing to do with party affiliation -- such as personal charisma.
So while fans of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can expect a forecast of extended Democratic power in Congress, they'll have to wait until November to see if they can claim the White House, too.
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