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span style="font-size: 100%; font-family: Arial;" data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"The South\u2019s partisan shift from solidly Democratic to leaning Republican is one of the biggest transformations in American political history. This paper explores four explanations for this change: ideological self-identification and issue positions, changes in the...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... on responses to the NES question on ideological self-identification, 47 percent of southern whites identified as conservative in the 1970s, 48 percent identified as conservative in the 1980s, and 49 percent identified as conservative in the 1990s. Table 2 shows the change in partisan identification among southern whites over the past three decades, controlling for ideology. Among liberals, there is a slight decrease in Republican identification between the 1970s and 1990s. ...
Citations
... In addition to examining the ideology of the members of Congress from the South, we also look at the ideological orientations of the electorate, another area where a number of studies have examined regional differences (Cotter et al. 2006;Cotter and Stovall 1990;Knotts et al. 2005;Knuckey 2001;Schreckhise and Shields 2003;Shaffer et al. 2000). To do this, we rely on exit polls from 1984 to 2008, which asked respondents to classify themselves as liberal, moderate, or conservative, and which included sufficient respondents from each state to calculate a reliable score in each case. ...
This study examines whether the contemporary South can still be considered a meaningful political region by analyzing the political distinctiveness and political cohesion of the region. Political refers to the extent to which the states in the region are different from the rest of the country in relevant political characteristics. Political cohesion refers to the extent to which the states in the region are similar to each other in relevant political characteristics. We find that for presidential and congressional voting, the South is at least as political distinctive now as it was in the 1980s, but the cohesion of the region has declined, at least for presidential voting. The ideological distinctiveness of the South, for both political elites and the mass electorate, also has not diminished since the 1980s, but again the ideological cohesion of the states has declined. Finally, the South remains considerably more conservative that the North when it comes to public policy outcomes, although on this dimension both the distinctiveness and the cohesion of the South are lower now than in the 1980s.
... As a result of the 1991 redistricting not only were Democratic incumbents more vulnerable in 1994, but it also produced some new Republican incumbents in 1992. Additionally, while other authors suggest the 1994 election results were either the inevitable results of larger historical trends (Abramowitz and Saunders 1998;Black 1998;Black and Black 2002;Bullock 1988;Ceaser and Saldin 2005;Hood, Kidd, and Morris 1999;Knotts et al. 2005;Knuckey 2006;Lublin 2004;Norpoth 1987;Petrocik 1981) or while they focus on only one or two unique features of 1994 (Balz and Brownstein 1996), we suggest that long-term trends and more proximate factors were important in southern House elections in 1994. Our study is unique in that we offer an empirical analysis of vote choice in the 1980s. ...
This article examines the effects of party identification and ideology on white southerners’ vote choices in U.S. House races from 1980 to 1994. Using American National Election Studies data, we employ descriptive statistics and a variety of regression techniques to test these relationships. We find party identification was more important in explaining vote choice in the election of 1994 than in previous years, and a majority of white southerners first identified with Republicans in 1994. We also find ideology had an independent effect on party identification for white southerners throughout the time series. We conclude that increasingly class-based, ideologically polarized parties, opposition to President Clinton and his health care plan, the success of the Republicans in framing the election as a national ideological struggle, and race-based redistricting after 1990 created a tendency of conservative white southerners to identify with Republicans and to vote for Republican House candidates in 1994.
... Although, there is no direct way in which the ideological composition of a county can be measured that is independent of the presidential vote, the finding that the culturally conservative counties of the panhandle have become significantly less Democratic, as have the more rural counties in general, is suggestive of an ideological cleavage. At the same time, several studies have stressed the on-going ideological realignment in both the South (Abramowitz et al. 2002;Black 1987, 2002;Carmines and Stanley 1990) and the rest of the nation (Abramowitz and Saunders 1998;Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993;Rabinowitz, Gurian, and Macdonald 1984). If this interpretation of the Post-New Deal alignment is accurate, then it would suggest that not only is there a stable structure underlying the presidential vote in Florida, but that it is based around a liberal-conservative alignment. ...
Although Florida has evolved from a one-party system into an intensely competitive two-party system, many studies of the state’s partisan and electoral politics continue to stress the importance of candidate-centered voting and weak party attachments, characteristics of a dealigned party system. This paper argues that such conclusions, based primarily on studies that employ individual-level data, are misleading. The paper examines the structure of the party vote across different political offices utilizing aggregate-level election returns at the county level through principal components factor analysis. Findings indicate that the New Deal vote alignment was disrupted at the presidential level in the 1960s, and a new stable alignment emerged in 1972. Consistent with the notion of a “top-down” or “creeping” realignment, the Post-New Deal alignment penetrated elections for U.S. Senate and governor from 1986 onwards, but came to structure cabinet office elections more gradually, with a culmination of this realignment in the 1990s. Overall, the paper argues that studies relying exclusively on individual-level data to examine Florida’s partisan and electoral politics have overlooked a great deal of structure and stability underlying the vote in this politically important state.
Scholarly accounts attribute the American South's historic partisan transformation that began in the 1960s to a combination of political and economic factors, but no prior work emphasizes the connection between individuals' fundamental beliefs and partisan change. Using pooled American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1988 to 2016, we show that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism are more likely to influence southerners' party affiliation relative to non-southerners. Southerners did not connect their core values to the same extent as other citizens in the early years of our analysis-owing to the vestiges of a one-party system operating in Dixie. But over time, the relationship between core values and partisanship among southerners strengthened remarkably. Moreover, 1992-96 panel data show that egalitarianism in particular influences southern partisanship (but not vice versa). Our results reveal that core values are integral to understanding the southern Republican realignment and southerners' persistent political distinctiveness.
Objectives
This article addresses a debate among scholars of southern politics concerning the relevance of the distinction between the Deep South and Rim South states. Specifically, it examines the effect of racial resentment on white party identification in both southern subregions.
Methods
Data from the 2010 and 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) are analyzed using a multivariate logistic regression model to examine subregional differences in the effect of racial resentment on southern white party identification.
Results
Although whites in the Deep South were more likely to identify as Republicans than whites in the Rim South, the effect of racial resentment on party identification in the Deep South was not statistically different from that of whites in the Rim South.
Conclusions
While it may be premature to completely discard the notion of the “Two Souths” it may behoove scholars of southern politics to also focus on individual state‐by‐state commonalities and differences, rather than be bound exclusively to the Deep/Rim South dichotomy.
The trickle down realignment theory provides a compelling explanation for partisan change in the American South. However, few researchers have evaluated the trickle down realignment theory in the context of local office holding, and few scholars have compared the theory to alternative explanations of partisan change. This study evaluates the trickle down realignment theory's ability to explain county-level Republican office holding in North Carolina between 1992 and 2000. After controlling for economic and demographic explanations of realignment, the findings indicate that greater levels of local Republican office holding are present in counties with higher support for Republican presidential candidates in 1988. The results from this study provide strong empirical support for the trickle down realignment theory and a basis for comparative analysis for other states.
