“ E pur si muove ! ” : Russell Dalton and political realignment

The 1960 publication of ‘The American Voter’, which revealed that voters have stable affective ties to political parties, transformed political alignment into one of the central objects of contemporary political analysis. It was in Lipset and Rokkan (1967), however, that the social bases of such links were investigated and found to be formed by means of the concept of ‘cleavages’. Stability, then, comes from the links that party systems maintain with social structures in such a way that different models of society produce different types of party system. Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) well-known diagnosis was that in the context of advanced democracies there exists a tendency to ‘freeze’ party systems in place so that a stable alignment between voters and parties can flourish under their umbrella. Since the late 1970s, however, researchers began to explore the idea that ties between voters and parties were not as robust as the Michigan studies would have it. Likewise, party systems turned out to less ‘frozen’ than cleavage theory had predicted. The empirical parameters for this assessment were decline in voter turnout, party identification rates and activism, as well as increased electoral volatility in various democracies worldwide. This phenomenon was given the name ‘party dealignment’.

(DALTON, Russell J.. Political realignment: economics, culture, and electoral change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) The 1960 publication of 'The American Voter', which revealed that voters have stable affective ties to political parties, transformed political alignment into one of the central objects of contemporary political analysis. It was in Lipset and Rokkan (1967), however, that the social bases of such links were investigated and found to be formed by means of the concept of 'cleavages'.
Stability, then, comes from the links that party systems maintain with social structures in such a way that different models of society produce different types of party system. Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) well-known diagnosis was that in the context of advanced democracies there exists a tendency to 'freeze' party systems in place so that a stable alignment between voters and parties can flourish under their umbrella.
Since the late 1970s, however, researchers began to explore the idea that ties between voters and parties were not as robust as the Michigan studies would have it. Likewise, party systems turned out to less 'frozen' than cleavage theory had predicted. The empirical parameters for this assessment were decline in voter turnout, party identification rates and activism, as well as increased electoral volatility in various democracies worldwide. This phenomenon was given the name 'party dealignment'. One of the first works to point out such changes in the relationship between voters and parties was 'Electoral change in advanced industrial democracies', published in 1984, among which of the editors was Russell Dalton (DALTON et al., 1984) 1 . Subsequently, the theme of dealignment came to occupy a prominent place in Dalton's voluminous work, which, in general terms, stayed in line with the analytical (and normative) parameters of the debate on changing values initially developed by Ronald Inglehart (1977). The argument is that party dealignment is linked to the modernization process experienced by countries in the advanced stage of capitalism and is particularly linked to increased education levels and the concomitant development of the media. From this perspective, citizens are increasingly cognitively 'well-equipped' to establish their own preferences and have the means to achieve them, for which reason that they are less dependent on political parties (DALTON, 2013;DALTON, McALLISTER and WATTENBERG, 2003).
As a consequence, we see an expanded universe of independent voters who are well informed, interested in politics and committed to democracy. The aforementioned inflection, it must be emphasized, does not mean a repudiation of his previous 'framework'. For Dalton (2018), the same forces that caused dealignment are those that shape realignment. They are 'socio-economic modernization and the reaction to it' 2 . What has changed, according to Dalton It begins with the conceptualization of the multidimensional cleavage structure mentioned above. For Dalton (2018), the issues that make up the economic divide persist as a lever of public opinion, but by way of 'novelty' he adds the cultural divide to the central axis of the process.
The economic cleavage is defined with reference to such themes as tax policy and social services. With reference to this cleavage, Dalton (2018)  has also led many parties to change their political positions, so that in most multiparty systems, parties now compete in a two-dimensional space.
Another aspect analyzed in the book is the representation gap. This concept is important to demonstrate that, even with the growth of a multiparty system, party offers are unable to cope with the countless demands of voters. Dalton (2018) describes the degree to which parties agree with their supporters, in collective and individual terms (political congruence). To this end, he focuses on researching whether voters as an aggregate collective (macro level) seek parties that do a good job of representing their positions well or whether they are satisfied with parties that partially reflect their views. The analysis considers the opinions of the average voter and compares them with party positions. In this instance the parties come out well. When this congruence relationship is analyzed at the individual level it turns out to be less effective.
The final part of the book is dedicated to North America and seeks to demonstrate that the two-dimensional division of the political universe also applies to a two-party system context. For Dalton (2018), the cultural dimension emerged earlier in the United States than elsewhere due to mobilization of social groups against the Vietnam War. Dalton (2018)  This gives rise to a somewhat positive interpretation of the relationship between electoral change and democracy. After all, realignment in the way described in the book indicates that parties seek to be more congruent with public opinion, more responsive to their voters and to incorporate the various demands of society into their platforms and actions when in government.
Such optimism on the part Dalton (2018), however, leaves space for a series of dilemmas between responsiveness, representativeness and democracy. The most emblematic example seems to be the recent phenomenon of populism. Populists say they directly represent the will of the people; they want to carry out this will without intermediaries. Its risks to democracy are too well known to discuss here, but the phenomenon serves to exemplify some of the potentially perverse effects of realignment.
This specific criticism notwithstanding, 'Political Realignment' is a fundamental work for anyone wishing to understand the dilemmas faced by democracies in an increasingly complex and pluralized world. Despite the author's focus on advanced democracies, the various issues addressed in the book offer an important framework for analyzing the extent to which this new twodimensional configuration of the political world is also present in young democracies, such as that of Brazil, and, what's more, the extent to which phenomena such as the election of a far-right politician to the position of the country's top job can or cannot be seen as part of this process.