Cycle No. 03 · Narrative
Huntington — creedal passion
~60–70 year cycle of American political moralism: surges of 'creedal passion' - when the gap between American ideals and American institutions becomes intolerable - followed by long cynical intervals
Does it hold up?
Not testable on the record that exists — and that is the finding, not a dodge.
The paired record (US House Polarization (DW-NOMINATE)) runs 144 years: 2.4 of the 3.0 full periods this site requires before it will run a test on a 60-year claim. Roughly 36 more years of that measurement would reach the floor.
This is not a verdict about this theory in particular: 0 of the 9 paired constructions on this site clear that floor. Long-cycle claims are hard to test because the records are short, not because the theorists are careless.
- Period
- 60 years
- Reference peak
- 1968
- Paired data
- DW-NOMINATE polarization
Peak calibration
Midpoint of Huntington's 'S&S Years, 1960–1975' (American Politics, Ch. 7), the period he identified as the fourth American creedal-passion era. Huntington didn't designate a single peak year; 1968 is the interval midpoint.
Confidence classification: Narrative — an interpretive reading of history — no statistical fitting behind the period. Every cycle on this site is a pure sinusoid built from the theory's stated period and one documented reference peak — a deliberately naïve construction, so that disagreement between theories rather than parameter fitting is what you see. See about for why nearly every cycle peaks near the present.
Where this curve plots its extrema
Computed from period 60 and reference peak 1968, across the site's default window (1600–2050). These are positions of this construction, not dates claimed by the theorist.
- Peaks
- 1608 · 1668 · 1728 · 1788 · 1848 · 1908 · 1968 · 2028
- Troughs
- 1638 · 1698 · 1758 · 1818 · 1878 · 1938 · 1998
Paired data series
US House Polarization (DW-NOMINATE)
party-mean distance (d1)Distance between Democratic and Republican House means on the first DW-NOMINATE dimension; 46th–118th Congress (1879–2023)
Why this pairingHuntington's construct is recurring surges of creedal moralism - not interparty roll-call distance. This project pairs it with DW-NOMINATE polarization as an imperfect proxy chosen by us, not a measure Huntington proposed; it is the cleanest century-scale roll-call series available.
- Source
- Voteview / Lewis, Poole, Rosenthal, Boche, Rudkin, Sonnet (2026)
- License
- freely available; project code MIT-licensed; no explicit data license
Spectral verdict
Insufficient data — no test possible · 2.4 of 3.0 required periods
The US House Polarization (DW-NOMINATE) record spans 144 years — 2.4 of the 3.0 full periods this site requires before testing a 60-year claim. No test was run and no p-value exists: the honest verdict is that the record is too short to test the claim at all.
INSUFFICIENT_DATA is an eligibility outcome under the site's pre-registered 3.0-period rule - the test is declined, not failed - and is not evidence for or against the theory.
Pre-registered harmonic-regression test at the exact stated period against an AR(1) red-noise null (99,999 bootstrap draws), gated on the record covering at least 3.0 full periods. Read the protocol under spectral testing on the methods page, or fetch the machine-readable verdicts.json.
Reuse this
Kooi, D. (2026). Sinusoidal History: Huntington — creedal passion. https://sinusoidalhistory.com/cycles/huntington · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21998618. Paired data series: US House Polarization (DW-NOMINATE) (Voteview / Lewis, Poole, Rosenthal, Boche, Rudkin, Sonnet (2026)), freely available; project code MIT-licensed; no explicit data license.
Our code and the original chart files are MIT-licensed as our own work. The plotted data stay under their upstream terms, listed above: CC BY series carry their attribution requirement with them, and a series with no explicit license is shown here without any grant we can pass on. Reuse our figures and code with attribution; honour the data terms for the plotted series.
Open this cycle in the interactive chart to calibrate its peak and period against the data, or compare it with the other nine on one axis.