not only the dismantling of existing Democratic programs but also the creation of new programs, to enhance and support traditional families in perpetuating traditional social-moral values.
Regardless of substantive differences in partisan family values, the difference over the relative role and extent of values (as major or minor) in defining the parties’ late twentieth-century approach to families is evident from the extent to which both addressed values in their family pledges. Starting in 1976, Republicans far outpaced Democrats in their references to values in their platforms (Figure 7). Democratic platforms embraced values less and with greater inconsistency in their family pledges. Although Democrats invoked values more in family planks in 1972, under the influence of the New Left during the McGovern election, this did not result in a durable shift toward a Democratic (secular) valuational family approach. Instead, Democratic family pledges in the 1980s were much less preoccupied with values than their Republican counterparts. Values then began to feature more prominently in Democratic family pledges in the 1990s, falling in 2004, only to rebound during the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
In terms of substantive differences, each party turned to family to highlight its own social vision. Republican family pledges sought to restore a conservative social order, consistently invoking neoliberal-traditional values of strong family life, faith/traditional moral values, family self-determination, and self-reliance (Figure 8). On the other hand, the Democratic Party in its family pledges engendered a more progressive social order by repeatedly making reference to secular-humanist values of diversity, equal protection, fairness, the pursuit of personal fulfillment, and individual self-determination.81
Figure 7. Sum of values invoked in family paragraphs, Democratic and Republican platforms, 1968–2012. Data compiled by author.
Figure 8. Values in Democratic and Republican family paragraphs, 1968–2012.
There were commonalties too, evidencing greater cross-party appeal of certain (Republican) values. First, the value of hard work was highlighted initially only in Republican planks on welfare reform but has since been embraced by the Democratic Party. Starting in 1992, Democratic platforms also began to tie eligibility for numerous social programs to work. Families “who work hard and play by the rules,” they said, were entitled to the American Dream and to their share of the American pie.82 As proxies embodying neoliberal qualities of hard work, self-reliance, and personal responsibility, “working” families now became the central focus of Democratic social policies, as opposed to poor families in a state of need. Democratic platforms embraced welfare reform, pledging “to make work and responsibility the law of the land.”83 The adoption of conservative neoliberal values, such as hard work, qualified but did not replace the Democratic focus on (national) state-provided family economic assistance. Their platforms continued to affirm the party’s commitment to “match parents’ responsibility to work with the real opportunity to do so, by making sure parents can get the health care, child care, and transportation they need.”84
Moreover, Democratic family pledges in the 1990s also began to advocate the GOP’s late twentieth-century value of parental responsibility (in addition to, but not instead of, state responsibility).85 In its preamble, the 1992 Democratic platform called for a “Revolution of 1992,” committing the party to a “new social contract … a way beyond the old approaches,” which it described as putting “government back on the side of citizens who play by the rules” and “abandoning the something-for-nothing ethic of the last decade.”86 Democratic platforms through the 1990s and 2000s repeatedly directed re-distributionist policies, such as increased minimum wage, child credit extensions, and earned income tax credits only to “parents who … take the responsibility to work full-time.”87 Like Republicans, Democrats characterized the failure of the AFDC welfare system as undermining values of “work, family, and personal responsibility,” aiming assistance now to help only “[those] people who want to help themselves and their children.”88 Democrats in the 1990s thus, more than ever, embraced culturally conservative family values such as personal responsibility and strong family life (Figure 9).
In the twenty-first century, however, Democrats eschewed these conservative traditional family values and refocused their family pledges on underlying secular-humanist values: equity, fairness, self-determination, fulfillment, and choice. Democrats once again highlighted family “economic security” at the center of their agenda, now pledging to restore values of opportunity and fair and equal access “for everyone who works hard and plays by the rules.”89 By using a language of redistributionist values far more pervasively than in other eras, Democrats now continue to highlight the valuational structure of their own Hearth family approach while avoiding an approach that is centered on more independent, traditional, market-based values. Yet, as if to counter Republicans’ “traditional family values,” Democrats express the underlying (secular) values of their Hearth approach with greater alacrity and frequency than in previous eras (see Figure 7).
Figure 9. Types of values in family paragraphs, Democratic and Republican platforms, 1968–2012.
In the twenty-first century, Republicans, in contrast, continue to use family to stress their late twentieth-century Soul approach, focusing first on the values and nonmaterial qualities of families in their pledges. In its 2012 platform, the Republican Party extolled the private valuational function of the “American family” and reaffirmed its 1980 assertion that a family’s “daily (values) lessons” such as “cooperation, patience, mutual respect, responsibility and self-reliance” are “fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic.”90 In many ways, the party, in its 2012 platform, reasserted its 1980 family approach, reasserting a free-market values initiative instead of its 1990s, Christian-dominated, traditional (religious) family values. Avowing to “Renew American Values” “to build healthy families, great schools, and neighborhoods,” the platform reemphasized family values such as autonomy and self-reliance. In so doing, the Republican Party moved back to its market-based antistatist center of gravity, less concerned with religious moralism. In 2008 and 2012, the party invoked family and described “strong family life” in terms of free enterprise, not religious, values of “responsibility” and “self-reliance.”91 Yet for Republicans, family continues to be the repository of essentially private values, a means to oppose redistribution, such that preserving family values continues to frame much of their social policy agenda.
Family in Partisan Legislative Behavior: Progressive, Postwar, and Late-Century Eras
Developments in partisan family ideologies across the twentieth century were not reflected in the parties’ national platforms alone but permeated down to the legislative behavior of members in Congress. An analysis of the kinds of family-related bills sponsored and/or cosponsored by members of Congress reveals the far-reaching impact of shifting family ideologies on individual partisans’ legislative behavior and policy framing through time.
Bill sponsorship and cosponsorship are similar in important ways to party platforms. As political scientist Christina Wolbretcht writes, both “represent positions with which an individual or party wishes to be identified, even if in neither case does the member or party necessarily follow through by devoting energy or resources to making the bill or pledge a reality.”92 Unlike platforms,
