Fourth Party System
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 Presidential voting patterns from 1896 through 1928. Darker shades indicate a higher proportion of elections won by the Democratic Party (blue) or the Republican Party (red); the map summarizes state results rather than individual vote totals. |
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The Fourth Party System is a term used in political science and United States history for the configuration of political parties and voting behavior that developed in the mid-1890s and lasted until the Great Depression. Its conventional boundaries are the election of 1896 and the election of 1932, although scholars treat both dates as approximate. The period is also called the System of 1896.
The Republican Party was the era's strongest national party. Republican presidential candidates won seven of the nine elections from 1896 through 1928, and Republicans usually controlled the Senate. Their coalition was strongest in the Northeast, much of the Midwest and, after 1896, parts of the West. The Democratic Party retained the Solid South and competed in western and urban constituencies; it also controlled the House from 1911 to 1919 and both chambers during most of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. Wilson won the presidency in 1912 after a Republican split and was narrowly reelected in 1916. Republican predominance therefore did not amount to uninterrupted control of the federal government.
The period encompassed the Progressive Era, the emergence of the United States as an overseas power, World War I, and the political culture of the 1920s. Its central issues included corporate regulation, tariffs, monetary and banking policy, labor conflict, political reform, immigration, racial hierarchy, women's suffrage, prohibition and the expanding administrative capacity of government. The electorate also changed profoundly: most Black southerners were excluded from voting, women gained a constitutional protection against sex-based disfranchisement in 1920, and migration altered the politics of northern cities.
The system unraveled after the Wall Street crash of 1929, as mass unemployment and the inadequacy of existing relief arrangements weakened Republican loyalties. Democratic gains in 1930 and Franklin D. Roosevelt's victory in 1932 began the formation of the New Deal coalition. Some realignments associated with that coalition—most notably the large-scale movement of Black voters in northern cities toward the Democrats—became decisive only after 1932, especially in the 1934 and 1936 elections.