Electoral and Ideological Change in the South:
The Case of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1952-2000
Dennis M. Simon
Department of Political Science
Southern Methodist University
dsimon@mail.smu.edu
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New
Orleans, Louisiana. 8-11 January 2004.
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Electoral and Ideological Change in the South: The Case of the U.S.
House of Representatives, 1952-2000
Introduction:
“But Not in the South”
During the 1940s and 1950s, the discipline of political science experienced what
numerous scholars called a behavioral revolution. A variety of quantitative methods
were imported from other disciplines and used to analyze survey and aggregate data on
political behavior in the United States.1 One feature of the literature produced during this
period is that the south was, more often than not, treated as an exception. The region was
so solidly and consistently Democratic that the dependent variables that were the subject
of attention in national studies – party identification, aggregate votes for federal offices,
and the partisan composition of legislatures – exhibited little variation. Thus, the
corollary or caveat “but not in the South” often tempered the conclusions drawn from
empirical analyses.
The situation has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. The south has
evolved from a bastion of the Democratic Party of the New Deal era to become the
“home base” for the Republican Party. The “community of political science” has devoted
considerable attention to the changing south. There is work that documents the shifting
partisan ties of southern voters (e.g., Nadeau and Stanley, 1993; Stanley, 1988). Other
work focuses upon the importance of the south in presidential elections and its growing
clout in the Electoral College (e.g., Black and Black, 1992). There are studies of what
some call the “southern realignment” and how the battles over the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 trigg