s on the ballot. Not only do American parties operate in a generally inhospitable cultural climate; they are faced with the problem of increasing numbers of voters attaching diminished importance to their personal party identification. One indicator of this weakened sense of partisan attachment on the part of voters is the high incidence of “ticket-splitting” — voting for candidates of different parties in the same election. In 1996, 24 percent of voters split ballots by voting for different parties’ candidates for president and the U.S. House of Representatives. As a consequence of the weakened influence of partisanship upon voters’ election day choices and the tendency of many to engage in split-ticket voting, American politics is “candidate-centered” rather than “party-centered.” This has meant that divided party control of the executive and legislative branches of government has become a commonplace feature of both the national government and the 50 states. In fact, in all but two years since 1980, the presidency and at least one chamber of Congress have been controlled by different parties, and 24 states had divided party control after the 1998 elections. THIRD PARTIES AND INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES As this table indicates, third parties and independent candidates have been a periodic feature of American politics. Often they have brought societal problems that the major parties were failing to confront to the forefront of public discourse — and onto the governmental agenda. But most third parties have tended to flourish for a single election and then die, fade, or be absorbed into one of the major parties. Since the 1850s, only one new party, the Republicans, has emerged to achieve major party status. In that instance, there was a compelling moral issue, slavery, dividing the nation that provided a basis for candidate recruitment and voter mobilization. Although the table does...
