Recent national elections have been characterized by the sharpness of their swings, producing outcomes that have not only varied sharply from election to election, but which have brought an end to--indeed, reversed--what previously had been a relatively long-standing pattern in American politics. Up until 1994, the Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives for 40 years, while up until 1992 the Republicans had controlled the White House for 28 of the previous 40 years, including 20 out of the previous 24 years. Put another way, by the early 1990s it had become something of a standard pattern over many years for the GOP to control the White House, while the Democrats controlled Congress.
Then, successively, the GOP lost the White House in 1992, and the Democrats lost both houses of Congress in 1994. Thus, during 1995-1996, the party control of the branches was reversed from what it had been for most of a generation. The natives-- that is, the voters--were restless. In 1992 they rejected George Bush, who little more than a year before had enjoyed approval ratings as high as 91 percent; in 1994, they effectively repudiated Bill Clinton, whom they had elected two years earlier. Also in 1992 they had given the largest margin to any third-party presidential candidate in 80 years.
Voter discontent evidently lay at the root of many of these sharp electoral reversals. In 1992, voters turned sharply against Bush because he seemed indifferent to or unaware of their economic frustrations (McWilliams, 1995, p. 146). In 1994, the famous "angry white males" were said to have turned against Clinton because of their social concerns, though there is evidence that it was not so much "angry" males as "ambivalent" females that caused the Democratic debacle (Reeher and Cammarano, 1996, p. 133).
The remainder of this discussion will evaluate voter discontent in its relationship to the political system: how the structure ...