Political historians have tended to argue that the North and South went to war because their political system broke down. War, they argue, was not inevitable, nor was it a result of necessarily divergent economic or social paths. The war came from a critical political breakdown in the midst of the sectional crisis. The complex connections and loyalties among national parties, state parties, and individual voters, they argue, explain the breakdown.

Michael Holt, Daniel Crofts, and William Shade have compiled the most detailed studies of party formation in the antebellum period for Pennsylvania and Virginia. Their studies suggest several important patterns. First, ethnicity and religious affiliation were important determinants for party identification in this period in both places. Second, party leadership in both places shifted in the 1850s, becoming less differentiated by socioeconomic factors. Third, strong economic growth and prosperity in the 1850s challenged the patterns of party loyalty and allowed party institutions to weaken. Fourth, local issues, such as taxes, schools, and courts were crucial in creating party alignments and in many cases overshadowed the importance of national issues. Finally, all three studies point to the neighborhood or local network as the most important variable in determining how individuals voted and aligned themselves with political parties in both sections. (See, for example, Crofts, Old Southampton; Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s; and Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion)

Slavery's effect on voting and political behavior remains surprisingly unclear. At the local level men divided into parties for reasons so subtle that we can hardly reconstruct them. The most recent and complete study of voting patterns in Virginia, by Daniel Crofts, reveals that residence, slaveholding, and religion--in that order--explained how men voted. The confluence of "family, neighborhood, partisanship, slaveholding, agricultural production, and religious affiliation" depended on local geography, its cultural and social settlement patterns and the natural features around them. This portrayal corresponds with those of other parts of the United States, including Harry Watson's pioneering study of Cumberland County, North Carolina, and a remarkably detailed study of Washington County, Oregon, by Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats. (See Crofts, Old Southampton; Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict; Bourke and DeBats, Washington County)

The most recent community-level study challenges the centrality of politics in American life on the eve of the Civil War. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin examined local political activity and institutions in eight nineteenth-century American communities and found a shockingly low level of participation and political activism in these places. Politics occupied a tenuous "space" within the lives of ordinary Americans, the authors suggested; instead, it competed for the attention of Americans who viewed parties as rude, base, self-aggrandizing institutions, far from the virtuous and altruistic presence in their lives of religion, civic duty, republicanism, and liberalism. White men in the nineteenth-century United States have a reputation among historians as enthusiastic partisans, voting in greater numbers and with greater zeal and commitment than ever in American history, but Altschuler and Blumin depicted a disaffected electorate, more interested in free booze than freedom, only vaguely aware of the candidates' positions, and largely disdainful of the parties' constant bickering. (Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic) At the local level, it is clear that communities presented a complex social geography of politics and of the social network in which politics took place.