Abstract

Recent American elections confirm that the two major political parties alternate with a remarkable regularity in controlling the presidency. This paper formalizes theories of partisan "equilibrium cycles " based on generational replacement and negative public response. Empirical evidence from time series analyses of historical election outcomes (1828-1996) is presented to show the existence of pseudo-periodicity. By comparing theoretical expectations with the mathematical structure of the equilibrium cycle, I conclude that negative public response, rather than generational replacement, is a more plausible explanation for partisan cycles. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 and his reelection in 1996 confirm an interesting dynamics of American politics- that the two major political parties alternate with a remarkable regularity in controlling the presidency. Since Andrew Jackson's election in 1828, the 43 presidential elections can be correctly "predicted " 32 times by a simple cyclical model starting with three Democratic wins and three Whig wins and then continuing with four Democratic wins and three Republican wins (Table 1). For the 17 elections since the New Deal, this model is wrong only in 1932, 1960, 1968, and 1972. (Table 1 about here) Historians since Schlesinger (1939, 1949) have written about partisan cycles. Among political scientists, Stokes and Iversen (1962) are the first to explore what they call the "equilibrium" tendency of the party system to restore the normal, competitive state after a transient phase of one-party dominance. Their study prompts Sellers (1965) to call the cycles of party alternation "equilibrium cycles. " Midlarsky (1984) develops a mathematical model to identify the periodicity of these cycles at 28 years, or seven elections. Intrigued by the regularity of equilibrium cycles in presidential elections, political scientists and historians have offered various theoretical perspectives. In general, these can be sorted into two categories: those emphasizing the cyclical 1 effect of generational replacement and those emphasizing eventual disaffection from the party in power. The first is conspicuously

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