importance of ideas, especially simplified narratives, within the immediate process of policy making is also highlighted in Deborah Stone’s classic work, The Policy Paradox.30 Stone stresses the use of stories (or “narratives with heroes and villains”) as a key mechanism by which political actors define policy problems, contextualize, and justify their preferred policy actions, thereby “trying to get others to see a situation as one thing rather than another” so as to facilitate reasoning by metaphor and analogy.31 The essence of policy making is thus the struggle over ideas, often presented as binaries; as Stone writes, “Ideas are a medium of exchange and a mode of influence even more powerful than money and votes and guns. Shared meanings motivate people to action and meld individual striving into collective action. Policy making, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for classification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideas that guide the way people behave.”32 Hearth and Soul family ideals, as described in this book, are just such simplified ideational means or composite political narratives through which parties struggle to define family, combining elements of state, economy, society, race, and gender into what Hattam and Lowndes call “natural affinities” that suture “disparate elements into apparently coherent political positions.”33 Whereas the two family ideals are evolving, recombining various discursive elements through time, sometimes intertwining and sometimes separating, their enduring appeal is also most striking and affirms the persisting duality by which other scholars have theorized family political ideals at diverse periods in American history.34
Figure 2. Cultural change model of partisan ideational and policy development.
As noted previously, ideas in the following narrative are not self-generated by parties and political elites but are demonstrated as grounded in the material and cultural contexts of their bases and electoral groups. Family ideals, as other political ideals, deploy positive and negative cultural images associated with established identities and policies, such as “working mothers” or “deadbeat dads,” that resonate in similar ways among sets of elites and voters alike, signaling the symbiotic relationship between legislators’ party ideology and that of their constituents. Coherent partisan family ideals are thus strongly nested in and woven from families’ own demographic and “real” lives, their cultural and material contexts, changes in which both co-occur and are codependent. The book does not make deterministic or causal claims regarding the relationship between parties’ policy agendas, their family ideals, and family demographic and cultural life. The emphasis instead is on the imbricated, interwoven nature of this multifaceted relationship, suggesting that shifts in parties’ ideologies co-occur with demographic and cultural changes in the lives of their constituent families, with mass-level change acting as both constraints and opportunities for elite formulations of policy change, as seen in Figure 2.
Like overlaying circles in a spiral, there are three imbricated central layers to the cultural change model of party policy development followed in this book, as in Figure 2. The first captures the relationship between structural developments and family shifts, wherein macro-level changes, such as industrialization and mass immigration, engender changes to family life on individual and aggregate scales. Family changes are shaped by preexisting sectional contexts, both material and cultural, that impact distinctive patterns in how family practices both occur and are multiply interpreted in regionally specific ways. The second layer, the mainstay of the book, emphasizes the top-down and bottom-up formulation of sectional family political ideals by partisans in Congress. This process is shown as an interplay between evolving party dynamics such as intraparty strategies and regional coalitions, on one hand, and sectional family shifts, on the other, shaping competing ideational interpretations, articulations, and assemblies by legislators into coherent family political ideologies. Changes in party politics and in social behavior, such as transformations in family practices, emergence of new party activists such as the New Right and Left, and the opening of new issue contexts (e.g., abortion, busing, and school integration) in the late twentieth century, all contribute to the displacement of the parties’ existing family ideals and their reformulation of the discursive links between their ideals of state, society, and economy into a revised family political ideal. The third layer connects parties’ reformulated and repurposed family ideals to changes in partisan policy positions, as assembled from the parties’ altered preferences in differing historical periods for one or the other kinds of family policy: welfare, regulation, ascription, and/or autonomy.
Patricia Strach offers a complementary model of policy development, revealing how large-scale changes in American families challenge family ideals embedded in public policies, creating “policy gaps” that form, she says, “when the social practice is at odds with values or assumptions of public policy.”35 In turn, she shows how these policy gaps allowed for policy change to occur, configured around newly emergent family ideals. This book adds to that model by expanding the historical arc to include changes across three historical eras, focusing more squarely on the formation and influence of partisan family ideals on parties’ legislative agendas and empirically demonstrating the discursive links between preexisting regional family practices/norms, parties’ family ideologies, and party policy preferences.
Institutions, such as congressional parties, find mention in the book’s narrative, but institutions are more contextual and less central to this story of party policy development than the (family) ideals themselves. Ideas do not simply “cluster” with prevailing governing arrangements as some have implied they do;36 ideas also structure and guide those very arrangements. For example, not only did the precise content of the New Deal Democratic Hearth family ideal, which advocated national government responsibility for family economic welfare, arise out of context of an uneasy alliance between southern Democratic legislators and their nonsouthern counterparts (and the institutional strength of senior southern committee chairs in Congress) but also, more crucially, the substance of this ideal also served as the ideational rallying point for the organization and mobilization of Republican opposition to the New Deal political order. This ideational opposition then grew and developed into a resurgent Soul family ideal pursued by the New Right in the late twentieth century, more actively structuring Republican policy ideology and strategy in that subsequent period. Seen in this way, party competition over ideals plays a vital role in shaping the parties’ electoral and policy strategies from one period to the next. Ideational shifts, changes, and alignments are thus the very ground or site of political party development, even when those ideational changes do not immediately translate into tangible policy change.
Patterns in the very origination of ideas and their process of formulation and reformulation—which groups of legislators combine which narratives and forms of policy, highlighting what kinds of human experience and how those aggregate, if at all, into a more macro (party) agenda—are crucial to the study of political development and are an important goal of this research. Legislators offer real-life family cases in their remarks during committee hearings as illustrations of policy failures and/or success, embodiments of the kinds of family arrangements by which their ideals of society, economy, and state come together. In so doing, they draw upon positive and negative cultural imagery that is widely shared among Americans even while they reconstruct and/or reify some of that imagery. Every interaction of a member of Congress with a real family case by way of questions or comments, in which he or she raises a policy issue (coded as one event in the data set), provides a window through which to examine how legislators express their ideas and beliefs regarding family; its role in society, economy, and vis-à-vis the state; and the types of policy issues involving that family that are of interest to them, both positively and negatively. By coding these events across three historical periods covering almost sixty years’ worth of congressional hearings, for characteristics of family mentioned by members of Congress, their party, state, and region, as well as the policy issues highlighted by them, specific legislators are demonstrated to invoke historically contingent
