Fifth Party System
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c. 1932–late 1960s or 1970s
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 Presidential voting patterns from 1932 through 1976. Darker shades indicate a higher proportion of elections won by the Democratic Party (blue) or the Republican Party (red). The map summarizes state results and does not establish universally accepted dates for the party system. |
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The Fifth Party System, also called the New Deal Party System, is a periodization of United States party politics that began with the electoral realignment associated with the Great Depression, the 1932 election of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the consolidation of the New Deal coalition in 1936. The system displaced the Republican ascendancy associated with the Fourth Party System and made the Democratic Party the leading national party for much of the mid-twentieth century. It did not produce uninterrupted Democratic control: Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952 and 1956, Republicans controlled Congress in 1947–1949 and 1953–1955, and a bipartisan conservative coalition often limited liberal legislation after 1938.
The Democratic coalition brought together groups whose interests and ideologies did not always coincide: white southerners, northern urban political organizations, many Catholics and Jews, industrial workers and labor unions, portions of the farm vote, liberal intellectuals, and, increasingly during the 1930s, Black voters outside the disfranchising South. Republicans retained substantial support among businesspeople, many professionals and middle-class Protestants, and voters in smaller towns, suburbs, and parts of the Midwest and Northeast. Both parties contained liberal, moderate, and conservative factions. The resulting politics cannot accurately be described as a sudden exchange of party ideologies; rather, the parties' positions, constituencies, and regional bases changed unevenly over several decades.
The central disputes of the system concerned the federal government's responsibility for economic security, regulation, labor relations and social welfare; the place of race and civil rights in national politics; and the conduct of World War II and the Cold War. Institutions created or enlarged during the period—including Social Security, federal labor law, agricultural supports, housing and veterans' programs, and later Medicare and Medicaid—continued to structure political conflict after the coalition that created them weakened.
There is no scholarly consensus on the system's ending. Suggested turning points include the elections of 1964–1968, the 1972 election and party reforms, the 1980 election, and the Republican congressional breakthrough of 1994. The civil-rights realignment, decline of urban machines and organized labor, growth of suburbs and the Sun Belt, expansion of candidate-centered campaigning, and rising conflict over culture and national identity occurred at different rates. Consequently, some historians use the broader concept of a New Deal order lasting into the 1970s or 1980s, while some political scientists identify a successor Sixth Party System beginning in the late 1960s.