# Realignment **Realignment** (or "critical election" theory) is the political-science framework for understanding the punctuated, era-defining shifts that separate one **party system** from the next. Associated with V.O. Key, E.E. Schattschneider, Walter Dean Burnham, and others, the theory holds that American politics moves through long periods of stable coalitions interrupted by relatively sudden, durable reorganizations of which groups vote for which party and what the central cleavage is about. A realignment typically involves a **critical election** (or sequence of elections) in which new issues cut across old loyalties, voter groups change sides en masse, and a new majority coalition is locked in for decades. Canonical examples include 1860 (slavery and the rise of the [[Republican Party]]), 1896 (the [[Fourth Party System]] and McKinley's industrial coalition), and 1932 (the New Deal coalition of the [[Fifth Party System]]). The slower **[[Southern Strategy]]** realignment — Democrats and Republicans trading their regional bases after the Civil Rights Movement — shows that realignment can also be gradual ("secular realignment") rather than a single thunderclap. The concept matters to this KB as the analytical engine behind every transition in the [[Parties Hub]]: it explains how the party of Lincoln became the party of the white South, how the party of segregation became the party of civil rights, and how the modern [[MAGA]] coalition was assembled. ## See Also - [[First Party System]] · [[Second Party System]] · [[Third Party System]] · [[Fourth Party System]] · [[Fifth Party System]] · [[Sixth Party System]] · [[Seventh Party System]] - [[Southern Strategy]] - [[Parties Hub]]