Southern Politics Revisited: On V. O. Key’s “South in the ... · the political scientist,...

Southern Politics Revisited OnV O Keyrsquos ldquoSouth in the Houserdquo

David A Bateman Cornell UniversityIra Katznelson Columbia UniversityJohn Lapinski University of Pennsylvania

V O Keyrsquos Southern Politics in State and Nation continues to be a central text in political science the singlemost important work in understanding the role of the South in American politics This article returns to replicatesand seeks to advance Keyrsquos analysis of southern politics in Congress reanalyzing and extending his account ofsouthern strategies and actions in the House of Representatives Where Keyrsquos text was characterized by an episodicattention to issue substance we focus directly on how southern representation varied across discrete issue areas Wegenerate temporally fine-grained issue-specific ideal points for members of Congress that allow us to determine howcongressional preferences changed across time generating a more refined portrait of the process by which southernDemocratic members diverged from their northern counterparts We also thicken and extend Keyrsquos account alongregional and temporal dimensions assessing how his findings change when we employ a legal-institutional def-inition of the South and include the whole period from the beginning of the New Deal to the close of the Trumanadministration The article concludes by detailing the significance of our finding to the study of American politicsparticularly American political development

V O Keyrsquos magisterial Southern Politics in State andNation a chronicle of ldquothe attempt to keep an illiberalsocial institution embedded in a putatively democrat-ic polityrdquo rightly has been considered ldquoone of thegreat achievements of our disciplinerdquo1 Some sixand a half decades after its appearance it has yet tobe equaled within political science as a rigorous andsustained intervention in public affairs Its combina-tion of provenance purposes and audiences distin-guish it from even the best books of politicalscience Moreover it can be read both as a primaryhistorical source a chronicle by a southern liberalof the political dynamics of Jim Crow just a half-decade before the unanticipated Brown v Board deci-sion and as a mixed-methods model of how toconduct meaningful research on key themes in Amer-ican political development Southern Politics must alsobe the only major political science study to have beenundertaken at the explicit encouragement of thedirector of the Bureau of the Budget and the presi-dent of the United States both of whom wrote toKey ldquoThe Presidentrdquo recalled Keyrsquos collaborator Alex-ander Heard wrote to say he ldquounderstood Key had anopportunity to serve the nation by studying the

politics of the South and that he (Truman) hopedthat he (Key) would undertake itrdquo2

It should be said at once that although its focus ison the racial dynamics of southern politics this is abook nearly exclusively about the white South Theproduct of a large research enterprise funded by a$40000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation thestudy was originated to examine the electoralprocess with a special emphasis on the poll tax bythe political scientist Roscoe Martin who directedthe University of Alabamarsquos Bureau of Public Admin-istration who recruited Key then at Johns HopkinsUnlike the other great 1940s research enterprise onrace in America Gunnar Myrdalrsquos An AmericaDilemma the vast southern landscape that came intoview in Southern Politics is marked by particular

1 John H Aldrich ldquoSouthern Parties in State and NationrdquoJournal of Politics 62 (2000) 644 643

2 Alexander Heard ldquoThe Making of Southern Politicsrdquo Per-spectives on the American South An Annual Review of Society Politicsand Culture ed Merle Black and John Shelton Reed (New YorkGordon and Breach Science Publishers 1984) 6 The presidenthad been notified by Governor Ellis Arnall of Georgia and in hisletter to Key expressed his ldquoopinion that the project is an importantone and [his] hope that you will find it possible to undertake thisassignmentrdquo Alexander P Lamis ldquoSouthern Politics at the Time ofVO Keyrdquo The Oxford Handbook of Southern Politics ed Charles SBullock III and Mark J Rozell (Oxford Oxford University Press2012) 31 Shortly after receipt of the presidentrsquos letter Key wroteto Roscoe Martin saying ldquoI suppose Irsquoll be hearing from the Popenextrdquo Heard ldquoMaking of Southern Politicsrdquo 6

Studies in American Political Development 29 (October 2015) 154ndash184 ISSN 0898-588X15doi101017S0898588X1500005X Cambridge University Press 2015

154

httpdxdoiorg101017S0898588X1500005XDownloaded from httpwwwcambridgeorgcore Cornell University Library on 02 Nov 2016 at 193513 subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use available at httpwwwcambridgeorgcoreterms

absences3 Most notable are the voices of black south-erners perhaps a reflection of the all-white researchteam W M Brewer a reviewer for the Journal ofNegro History wryly noted how ldquothe exploration resem-bles that of Myrdalrsquos An American Dilemma without ofcourse any such able colored participants as DrRalph Bunche who would have been indispensablefor reporting the realities regarding Negroesrdquo Strik-ingly too there is no mention of Myrdalrsquos work byKey though surely he knew its content thoroughlyWriting in the American Political Science ReviewArthur Holcombe observed that ldquothere is method inthis neglectrdquo4

Indeed there was Keyrsquos text was narrower thanMyrdalrsquos synoptic overview within which by contrastpolitics played a relatively modest role In centeringattention on the strategic role and patterns of actionwithin white-initiated and white-governed political in-stitutions most notably the regionrsquos anomalous elec-toral system Key wished to reveal its implications forpolicy and political representation A Texas-bornsoutherner who had been trained in politicalscience at the University of Chicago during the earlyperiod of the behavioral revolution Key sought to dis-close the systematic roots and expose the baneful con-sequences of the Southrsquos race-obsessed politicalarrangements He revealed mechanisms that gaveevery advantage to the regionrsquos semi-modern planta-tion aspects especially its black-belt counties ldquothehard core of the political Southrdquo where whites oftenwere or approached being a demographic minority5

He wanted most of all to empower what he calledldquothe unknown political Southrdquo whose range includedprogressivism and populism and a preference forurban and industrial modernization as well as ten-dencies that were not obsessed with racial hierarchy

In all Key aimed to shape a discussion that wouldempower sympathetic southern moderates muchlike himself who yearned for steady if slow reformwithout externalmdashthat is federalmdashintervention thatmight engender fierce white resistance His hopeand hedged prediction was that the growth of citiesthe relative decline of agriculture and the out-migration of blacks would prove to be ldquounderlyingtrends that probably will in due course further free[the South] from the effects of the Negro on its

politicsrdquo thus making southern politics more likethat of the rest of the nation6

Most historically minded Americanists know thecentral features of Keyrsquos analysis of what he labeledthe ldquounfathomable mazerdquo of political structures inthe Jim Crow South7 ldquoThe presence of the Negrordquohe wrote ldquohas created the conditions under whichthe political process operatesrdquo8 Southern politicsbased on a white regional consensus about racialsupremacy was organized in a plethora of factionalpatterns under the umbrella of what he designateda nonparty system Unguided by strong and competi-tive political parties the character of the segregation-ist politics chronicled by Key varied from state to statetaking one of four principal forms battles betweena hegemonic machine and its opponents battlesbetween geographic areas battles among competingcolorful and often demagogic leaders and com-pletely unstructured patterns

These patterns all operated as arrangements ofminority rule directed by leaders selected in Demo-cratic Party primaries by small to moderate-sizedoverwhelmingly or exclusively white electoratesOverall this patterning of political participation andcompetition was not equivalent to standard practicesbut was characterized by Key as ldquono party at allrdquo9 Thenonmajoritarian rules of the game were organizedabove all to underpin the regionrsquos deepest and mostintensely held racial commitments It was as aleading student of political parties has put thepoint ldquothe maintenance of an illiberal societymdashthewithholding of the rights of citizenship from a suffi-ciently large number to assure minority elections ina putatively majority systemmdashthat was the goalrdquo ofwhat Key called one-party factionalism10

Southern Politics sought to unpack the mechanismsprocesses procedures and consequences of this pe-culiar semi-organized and heterogeneous patternof politics But Key went beyond cataloguing theregionrsquos peculiar political diversity While southernpolitics and its ldquononpartyrdquo system was the great excep-tion to ordinary two-party competitive politics inAmerican life the South was an integralmdashindeed apowerfulmdashactor within national politics especiallyCongress There the white South a community ofshared fate and intention acted to guard theregionrsquos autonomous capacity to regulate its systemof racial hierarchy and humiliation That responsibil-ity demanded cohesion despite divisions of style po-litical practice and ideology ldquoThe one-party systemof the Southrdquo Key famously observed ldquois an institu-tion with an odd dual personality In state politicsthe Democratic party is no party at all but a

3 Gunnar Myrdal with the assistance of Richard Sterner andArnold Rose An American Dilemma The Negro Problem and ModernDemocracy (New York Harper amp Brothers Publishers 1944) Foran examination of Southern Politicsrsquo absences see the contributionsin Angie Maxwell and Todd G Shields Unlocking VO Key Jr South-ern Politics for the Twenty-First Century (Fayetteville University ofArkansas Press 2011)

4 Arthur N Holcombe ldquoReview of Southern Politics in State andNation by VO Key Jrrdquo American Political Science Review 44(1950)192

5 Valdimir Orlando Key Southern Politics in State and Nation(New York Knopf 1949) 666

6 Key Southern Politics 671ndash727 Key Southern Politics 6648 Key Southern Politics 6719 Key Southern Politics 392 38710 Aldrich ldquoSouthern Partiesrdquo 662

SOUTHERN POLITICS REVISITED 155


multiplicity of factions struggling for office In nation-al politics on the contrary the party is the SolidSouth it is or at least has been the instrument forthe conduct of lsquoforeign relationsrsquo of the South withthe rest of the nationrdquo Further he argued ldquothemaintenance of southern Democratic solidarity hasdepended fundamentally on a willingness to subordi-nate to the race question all great social and econom-ic issues that tend to divide people into opposingpartiesrdquo Race and only race provided ldquothe founda-tion of southern unity in national politicsrdquo11

In our reading the enduring importance of South-ern Politics lies primarily neither in its rich consider-ations of politics in the eleven states of the OldConfederacy which amount to a time-bound snap-shot based on more than five hundred interviews bythe projectrsquos staff nor in the detailed account itoffers of how voting rights had been restricted by awide array of laws and practices both constitutinghundreds of pages Analytically and substantivelythe bookrsquos comparatively concise chapters that dealwith national political representation composingfewer than 40 of the bookrsquos 675 pages are of vital im-portance These chapters constitute the textrsquos centralcontribution to understanding why the peculiar poli-tics of the South mattered not just for its residentswhite and black but for the country as a whole12

Thus it is primarily in ldquoSolidarity in the Senaterdquo andldquoThe South in the Houserdquo that Key redeems the ldquointhe nationrdquo promise of the bookrsquos subtitle Thesechapters demonstrate how the South was not merelyone region among many or simply an important com-ponent of the Democratic Party The individuality ofthe countryrsquos most distinctive section shaped the pref-erences and powers of its representatives sharply de-lineated how they would act across a range of policyarenas and constrained how congressional coalitionscould form The congressional chapters elucidate themechanisms by which southern diversity was trans-formed in Washington into the ldquoSolid Southrdquo andshow how the absence of meaningful politicalparties and party competition came to be transmutedinto a cohesive single quasi-party of regional represen-tatives who defended the Southrsquos capacity to regulatesegregation and restrict voting without federal regula-tion and control

The diversity of southern interests Key hypothe-sized did not disappear in the legislature Ratherthe full range of interests and preferences wastamed limited and ordered by the paramount pref-erence of southernersmdashas individual members asconstituency representatives and as members of theDemocratic Partymdashto defend the contours of the sec-tionrsquos racial rules In converting multiplicity to

singularity when its representatives converged onWashington and guarded against what they perceivedas external intrusion the region became a ldquosouthernnationrdquo within congressional debates and lawmaking

Southerners gauged policies Key argued not onlyby common standards of party agendas ideology per-sonal predilections or constituency interests but firstand foremost by how they perceived implications forthe racial order which became constitutive of eachof these other factors These assessments guidedwhich issue coalitions they were prepared to enterand influenced when they united and when theydivided in the face of cross-pressures especiallythose that placed the majoritarian interests of theirparty in tension with their regional preferencesAnd these assessments had to be made on a recurringbasis charged by varying levels of anxiety If substancematters Key understood it matters not in generalbut inside historical time

This article returns to replicates and seeks toadvance Keyrsquos analysis at the institutional sitemdashCon-gressmdashwhere the regionrsquos political diversity waswrought into an anvil of sectional unity Our maingoal is to press forward with Keyrsquos findings andhunches about sectionalism in Congress by stayingclose to how he worked yet by extending the scopeof his scholarship and the techniques he employedMost simply Keymdashlike all of usmdashwas limited by theavailable technology and measures The effort in-volved in amassing roll calls and calculatingsummary quantities of legislator behavior was consid-erable and rather than a comprehensive account ofcongressional voting in the period Key made the rea-sonable choice to subset the data and reduce the taskto manageable proportions Accordingly as a firststep we thicken Keyrsquos data Heroically (before com-puters) he analyzed 598 roll calls in seven Senate ses-sions (1933 1935 1937 1939 1941 1943 and 1945)and 275 roll calls in four House sessions (1933 19371941 and 1945) We replicate his calculations for theHouse by utilizing the full set of roll calls for theperiod Key assessed reproducing the questions andmethods he deployed but with fuller information13

Keyrsquos empirical analysis as with other reexamina-tions of this period relies heavily on Rice cohesionscores and related measures of roll call voting14

11 Key Southern Politics 315ndash1612 By contrast a recent collection of essays on ldquoSouthern Pol-

itics for the Twenty-First Centuryrdquo pays scant attention to the twochapters on Congress Maxwell and Shields Unlocking V O Key Jr

13 There are a number of reasons to limit the analysis to theHouse Space limitations mean that an analysis that incorporatedboth the House and the Senate would be unlikely to go beyond abare replication of Key As discussed above our goal is not simplyto replicate Key but to anticipate what he would have done hadhe had a policy coding scheme and ideal point estimation tech-niques available The methodological motivation is that thegreater number of House members relative to the Senate allowsfor greater analytical leverage and enables us to better explore dif-ferences between southern members

14 Ira Katznelson and Quinn Mulroy ldquoWas the South PivotalSituated Partisanship and Policy Coalitions during the New Dealand Fair Dealrdquo Journal of Politics 74 (2012) 604ndash20

DAVID A BATEMAN ET AL156


While these measures do convey important informa-tion about patterns of voting they have been criti-cized as uninterpretable as measures of preferencehomogeneity which is an animating concern of South-ern Politics And while the roll calls he analyzed wereorganized primarily by degrees of regional solidarityand the stability of party coalitions Key also suggestedthat issue substancemdashincluding race but extendingwell beyondmdashstructured the behavior of representa-tives While there is an episodic attention to policysubstance in the congressional chapters of SouthernPolitics there is no systematic analysis of how southernpreferences varied across issue areas What would Keyhave argued had he been able to systematically cate-gorize roll call votes by their content as well as esti-mate membersrsquo preferences

Here we move beyond replicating Keyrsquos findings tofocus directly on southern preferences and their var-iation across policies periods and geographyDrawing on the multilevel issue categorization firstoutlined in Katznelson and Lapinski we examinethe policy areas Key identified as invoking a greateror lesser degree of southern solidarity cross-partycoalitions partisan polarization and regional isola-tion15 We report cohesion and likeness scores pro-viding an extension of Keyrsquos descriptive analysis ofsouthern voting patterns But we also generate a setof issue specific and cross-time comparable idealpoints that allow us to more directly examine the dis-tribution and variation in southern preferences

To these replications and extensions of Keyrsquosanalysis we make two additional adjustments Firstwe enlarge Keyrsquos analysis in time by carrying on tothe close of the Truman presidency and the 82ndCongress With this move we include the fulltwenty-year period of Democratic presidential rulethat but for the 80th Congress was characterized byDemocratic Party control of the legislature Acentral theme of Southern Politics was the possibilityof southern transformations and extending thetime frame allows us to better identify moments ofinflection that presaged the eventual southernrealignment

Second we broaden the geography of the Southbeyond the old Confederate states to include sixmore treating the South as a distinctive racial orderKey made his selection not on the basis of secessionbut on measures of distinctiveness in electoral be-havior during presidential elections following Recon-struction We prefer a legal and institutional standardThe seventeen states mandating racial segregation inschools before the Brown decision of 1954 match thefifteen that practiced slavery when the Civil War

began plus West Virginia and Oklahoma16 At thestart of 1967 only the same seventeen states still out-lawed interracial marriage on the eve of the Lovingv Virginia ruling that such laws are unconstitutionalIn identifying the South in terms of its shared and dis-tinctive racial features under the law we can comparethe implications of an extended South to those Keydiscovered within a more compact region This exten-sion of course introduces a bias against findings ofsouthern cohesion and collective power the largerthe region the more likely a variety of behavior Butit also facilitates learning when roll call behaviormapped onto this diversity and when it did not

With these additions and shifts we can discern ifhow and with respect to what there was more tempo-ral and substantive variation to southern congressio-nal behavior than Key discovered By using newmeasures that directly examine membersrsquo preferenc-es across time and across different issue areas weare able to reground Keyrsquos motivating interest in thesources of southern homogeneity and diversity on afoundation especially suited for that task The devel-opment and use of these measures and the systematicattention to diversity and homogeneity in preferencesacross issue areas distinguishes the contribution ofthis article from the recent literature on the Southduring this period17 We are not solely interested inassessing whether Keyrsquos findings stand under newspecifications and with additional data Rather webelieve that further comprehension of the role of

15 Ira Katznelson and John S Lapinski ldquoThe Substance ofRepresentation Studying Policy Content and Legislative Behaviorrdquoin The Macropolitics of Congress ed E Scott Adler and John S Lapin-ski (Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 2006) 96ndash126

16 While based on legal and institutional measures theseventeen-state South also has or at least had broader cultural sig-nificance in the minds of southern representatives Frank E Smiththe ldquoCongressman from Mississippirdquo wrote in 1964 that ldquorace hasthus been the major influence in Southern politics for the lasthundred years lsquoSouthernrsquo in this case means more than theformer states of the Confederacymdashit includes border states likeMaryland West Virginia Kentucky and Oklahoma and parts ofstates like Missouri and New Mexicordquo Frank E Smith CongressmanFrom Mississippi (New York Pantheon Books 1964) 111 The South-ern Governorsrsquo Conference in 2014 is composed of sixteen of theseventeen states we includemdashthe exception being Delawaremdashaswell as Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands The Brown vBoard of Education decision originated in Kansas which was one offour states that allowed but did not require racial segregation inschools The constitution of Wyoming prohibited distinction onthe basis of race in public schools although a statute had autho-rized local authorities to do so when there were more thanfifteen black students This option does not seem to have everbeen employed Arizona required segregated schools until 1951while in New Mexico and Kansas school segregation was decidedat the local level Arthur E Sutherland ldquoSegregation by Race inPublic Schools Retrospect and Prospectrdquo Law and ContemporaryProblems 20 (1955) 169ndash83 Charles T Clotfelter After ldquoBrownrdquoThe Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton NJ PrincetonUniversity Press 2004) 18

17 Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson ldquoThe Southern Imposi-tion Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Dealrdquo Studiesin American Political Development 19 (2005) 1ndash30 Devin Caugheyand Eric Schickler ldquoPublic Opinion Organized Labor and theLimits of New Deal Liberalism 1936ndash1945rdquo Studies in American Po-litical Development 25 (2011) 162ndash89 Katznelson and Mulroy ldquoWasthe South Pivotalrdquo



the South in Congress is both essential for under-standing the development of the American stateand a necessary condition for the success of the his-torical turn among congressional scholars18

To preview our findings we identify vital break-points in congressional behavior across differentpolicy domains locating the origins of the processby which southern representatives began distancingthemselves from the core of the Democratic PartyWhen examined in the aggregate the key momentcomes with the attack on Pearl Harbor When weprobe member preferences at a closer level acrossspecific issue areas we find that changing southernpreferences were not primarily occupied with theconduct of the war or Americarsquos relations abroadRather the appearance of an aggregate southernmovement away from the Democratic Party built onan earlier move toward the Right on domesticpolicy in particular on issues relating to politicaleconomy and labor markets This too has a relativelyclear point of origin first becoming evident in 1935ratcheting up in 1937 in 1942 and again after thewar This divergence occurred for both a restrictedeleven-state South as well as for the representativesof the six other southern states But it persisted andgrew more important over time for the former andnot the latter as what had been a coherent regionalgrouping became less so Moreover the regionrsquos frac-turing occurred on precisely those issues where thethreat posed by federal programs to the racial orderwere perceived as being the greatest On theseissues the potential benefits of federal interventioncame to be increasingly outweighed by the threat towhite supremacy at least for representatives of theBlack Belt and the eleven-state South While stilllargely supportive of white supremacy representativesof the broader region were also more willing tosupport the activist agenda of their nonsoutherncopartisans The consequence of southern preferencechange was that by the end of the period examinedhere southern Democrats were disproportionatelyin the median position in the House across a rangeof issue areas and likely had an effective veto on orga-nizing the countryrsquos political economy

We proceed as follows The initial section replicatesKeyrsquos principal findings extended to include morecongresses and a more expansive definition of theSouth It is the second and third sections howeverthat constitute the empirical core of this paper Thesecond section builds on Keyrsquos identification of spec-ific issue areas in which there were important region-ally based divergences from straight party voting Wehere introduce and employ a set of temporally

comparable issue-specific ideal point scores thatallow us to identify the moments and issues whensouthern preferences began to diverge from theircopartisans The third section looks more closely atthe impact of the changes in southern preferencesfrom the 73rd to 81st congresses disaggregatingthese by racial geography and assessing the likelihoodthat southerners occupied the pivotal locations acrossdifferent issue areas We conclude by discussing thesignificance of these findings for our understandingof southern politics during this period as well as thebroader importance of the South to American politi-cal development

I SOUTHERN POLITICS REVISITED

When Southern Politics first appeared some criticsworried about whether Keyrsquos roll call data wasflawed by reason of selection and method Mightthe choice of working exclusively with data generatedby behavior during the first as distinct from thesecond session of each Congress bias the resultsThere is important literature in political science thatsuggests there are potentially larger first-term effectsfor lawmaking19 We probe the question of whetherthis move was consequential for Keyrsquos work Party dis-cipline and party voting are likely it was thought to bemore robust during the periods measured by Key20

This concern we will see was wide of the mark Butanother the argument that the importance of south-ern behavior might have been better probedldquothrough the utilization of finer classificationrdquo webelieve to be on target and has served as one motiva-tion for the development of the three-level coding ofcongressional votes discussed below21

Key opened his treatment of the South in Congressby identifying the degree to which southerners consti-tuted a voting bloc whose cohesion was similar to thelevel achieved by nonsouthern Democratic and Re-publican members In doing so he chased aparadox Could it be the case that the disorganizedfactional politics of the region nonetheless couldproduce an organized and unified assemblage of rep-resentatives Discovering that they were in fact equiv-alently united he was empowered to turn to hiscentral substantive question If southern membersdid indeed form a comparably cohesive votinggroup what were the issues that united them Hewas particularly interested in discerning whether a

18 Ira Katznelson ldquoHistorical Approaches to the Study of Con-gress Toward a Congressional Vantage on American Political Devel-opmentrdquo in The Oxford Handbook of the American Congress ed EricSchickler and Frances E Lee (New York Oxford University Press2012) 115ndash37

19 David Mayhew Divided We Govern Party Control Lawmakingand Investigations ( New Haven CT Yale University Press 1991)Gregory J Wawro and Eric Schickler Filibuster Obstruction and Law-making in the US Senate (Princeton NJ Princeton University Press2006) 37

20 Jay Topkis ldquoReview of Southern Politics in State and Nation byVO Key Jrrdquo Yale Law Journal 59 (1950) 1203ndash6

21 Cortez A Ewing ldquoReview of Southern Politics in State andNation by VO Key Jrrdquo Journal of Politics 12 (1950) 155



Republican and southern Democratic ldquoconservativecoalitionrdquo was in fact showing signs of emergence

Key relied on a variety of measures notably Rice co-hesion scores and a variant of party unity scores AsKeith Krehbiel has shown these measures alongwith many other commonly used indices of legislativebehavior are arbitrarily sensitive to the agenda22 Thescores can change dramatically as a result of changein what is being voted on even if member preferencesare held fixed Cohesion scores for instance can below when a bloc of legislatorsrsquo preferences are verysimilar but a proposal is such that it will divide thisbloc and can be high despite considerable diversityof preferences if a proposal is sufficiently extreme23

They are simply a summary of how often a givenbloc voted together and do not anchor voting pat-terns in information about individual-level preferenc-es or the relative location of policy proposals As aresult they do not reveal the sources of cohesionwhich may include the character of the agenda ofthe moment party pressures constituency character-istics and interests and the personal predilections ofrepresentatives

For these reasons we turn to a set of preference-based measures in Section II But cohesion andother scores can nonetheless convey important infor-mation about variation and changes in patterns of leg-islative voting Systematic changes in these scoresreflect either shifts in the agenda in individual pref-erences or in other factors such as caucus organiza-tion As Key and many others have shown usedcarefully and as invitations to further probes suchscores can be very revealing of when and on whichissues such changes are occurring

Key found that during the four House sessions heexamined southern Democrats scored highest at alevel of 70 a performance that compared with a

Republican 66 and an even lower overall DemocraticParty cohesion score of 59 Our replication reportedin the top section of Table 1 shows Key to have beenuncannily accurate regarding the sessions he ana-lyzed and also puts to rest the idea that Keyrsquos datawas compromised by a first-session bias24 Cohesionmeasured across all roll calls in the four congressesassayed by Key produces results nearly identical tothose measured across only the first sessions The ad-dition of the three congresses in Keyrsquos time frame thathe did not examine likewise does not substantiallychange his reported results Cohesion measuredacross all roll calls in the four congresses assayed byKey produces results nearly identical to those mea-sured across only the first sessions By contrast thetemporal extension to the end of the Truman admin-istration reveals a clear sign of change as cohesion forthe full seventeen-state South drops from approxi-mately 65 to 57 from 68 to 62 for the Republicansand increases dramatically from 65 to 79 for nonsou-thern Democrats

Wanting to gauge regional and partisan cohesive-ness from another perspective Key calculated thepercentage of votes in which southerners achieved co-hesion scores of 70 and above The bottom section ofTable 1 reports our replication for the four sessionshe analyzed in addition we offer results for aseventeen-state South Key established that the south-ern bloc was the most persistently cohesive votingabove the high level above 70 more than 60 percentof the time By contrast Republicans did so on just54 percent of the votes in the House nonsouthernDemocrats on 48 percent and the Democratic Partyas a whole on just 44 percent A more complexpattern though comes into view when we extendthe South to seventeen states Although southernerscounted this way continued to rank first in cohesive-ness the frequency of their high cohesion votesdrops to 54 percent from 62 thus indicating intrare-gional heterogeneity that presses us to identify anddistinguish issues on which high southern cohesionwas maintained from those where it was not Againthe temporal extension to the end of the 82nd Con-gress shows the clearest indication of changingvoting patterns as the percent of roll calls with highsouthern cohesion drops from 52 for the 73ndash79thto 40 for the 80ndash82nd congresses Republicans showa similarly stark decline while again the nonsouthernDemocrats became more cohesive in their voting

The basic patterns that we find of an initially highsouthern cohesion declining over time is summarizedin Figure 1 which disaggregates cohesion scores bycongressional session for both an eleven-stateand seventeen-state South The 1932ndash52 period is

22 A cohesion score is calculated as the absolute differencebetween the number of members of a defined group who favoror oppose a given roll call divided by the number of votingmembers of this group The cohesion scores reported by Key andby us are averaged across relevant groups of roll calls Cohesionand likeness scores were pioneered by Stuart Rice and have beendeployed widely since See Stuart Rice Quantitative Methods in Poli-tics (New York Knopf 1928) For the most pertinent critiques seeKeith Krehbiel ldquoWherersquos the Partyrdquo British Journal of Political Science23 (1993) 235ndash66 and Krehbiel ldquoParty Discipline and Measures ofPartisanshiprdquo American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000) 212ndash27The concerns raised by Scott Desposato that cohesion scores arebiased for small groups should not apply here as there wasalways a sizeable contingent of southern Democrats Republicansand nonsouthern Democrats Scott Desposato ldquoCorrecting forSmall Group Inflation of Roll-Call Cohesion Scoresrdquo BritishJournal of Political Science 35 (2005) 731ndash44

23 If the cut-line for a billmdashthe halfway point between thestatus quo and the policy proposal on an array of policy preferenc-esmdashfalls right in the middle of a bloc it is likely that a low cohesionscore will result while a cut-line that appears on an extreme pointdistant from this bloc will likely result in a high cohesion score Thisis true whether the bloc has strongly similar or widely diversepreferences

24 The slight differences between our scores and Keyrsquos arelikely the result of our coding members as having voted for oragainst a measure if they were paired and different assessmentsof whether a vote was procedural



highlighted but also placed in a longer historical per-spective to underscore the degree to which thechanges in voting that emerged in the period wereof lasting significance When viewed this way a signifi-cant point of inflection leaps out Measured absolute-ly and relatively southern solidarity proved higher

during the first New Deal Congress than at any laterpoint during the Roosevelt and Truman presidencieswith the exception of the short second session of the76th Congress in November 1939 when Congressvoted on measures authorizing the president to re-strict arms sales and enforce neutrality in response

Table 1 Replication and Spatial and Temporal Extensions

REPLICATION AND EXTENSION AVERAGE COHESION SCORES (P 370)

Key Replication All Sessions 73rd to 79th 80th to 82nd(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Southern Democrats (11 states) 704 703 681 675 600Nonsouthern Democrats (37 states) 617 629 628 626 755Southern Democrats (17 states) na 677 653 648 568Nonsouthern Democrats (31 states) na 652 651 652 797Democrats 585 591 569 578 553Republicans 660 673 672 680 623Roll Calls 275 274 553 1062 474

REPLICATION AND EXTENSION PERCENT OF ROLL CALLS WITH COHESION SCORES ABOVE 70 (P 370)



Column (1) reports Keyrsquos results while column (2) reports our replication Column (3) covers the same congresses as Key (73rd 75th 77thand 79th) but includes votes across all sessions Column (4) includes all votes in the 73ndash79th period while column (5) examines all votes inthe 80ndash82nd congresses Roll calls with fewer than 10 percent of voting members in dissent are excluded as are procedural votes

Fig 1 Cohesion Scores in the House of Representatives 1921ndash1965



to the outbreak of war in Europe From the start ofthe New Deal through to 1943 and the 77th Congressthe last considered by Key southern members votedalike more often than nonsouthern Democrats andon par with the much reduced Republican faction

But a critical change set in just afterward a differ-ence Keyrsquos temporal span made it difficult toobserve Starting in the 78th Congress an increasing-ly wide gap opened up between southern Democratswho grew less cohesive and nonsouthern Democratswhose voting became more solid These striking trendswere similar both for an eleven-state and seventeen-state South and continued well into the 1960s

Key of course was interested in more than howsouthern cohesion compared to other partisan andregional groupings in the legislature Above all hewanted to identify when and the extent to whichsoutherners opposed or were opposed by other coa-litions In Table 2 we replicate Keyrsquos report on thenumber of roll calls where a majority of southernDemocrats opposed a majority of Republicans(columns 1ndash3)25 Looking only at Keyrsquos four con-gresses during the first session a large proportionof votes did pit southern Democrats against Republi-cans a finding that endures when the region is ex-panded to the full South (columns 7ndash8)

Consider once again the dramatic changes in rollcall behavior that Keyrsquos data set could not distinguishTable 2 column (11) highlights how opposition toRepublicans from Democrats in the seventeen-stateSouth was initially impressive starting at 83 percentof roll calls This level of disagreement remainedhigh through the 76th Congress With the 77th Con-gress at the start of World War II however this patternbegan to alter and the fraction of roll calls on whichsoutherners voted against Republicans became muchsmaller hitting a low of 47 percent in the 82nd Con-gress never to return to the sharply polarized situa-tion that had prevailed

Wishing to evaluate the extent of disagreementbetween the southern Democrats and RepublicansKey also calculated the percentage of votes when atleast 90 percent of southern Democrats voted togeth-er against a majority of Republicans that is votes onpolicies in which the South both was most cohesiveand most likely to have had intense preferences Wereplicate and extend his results in Table 3 With a rel-atively small N and a short time period being assessedit is not surprising that Key found a significant degreeof variation among the sessions he analyzed a rate ofabout 32 percent in the 75th and 79th and hoveringat 50 percent and just above in the 73rd and 77th(column 3 of Table 3) He also established thateven on these votes of intense disagreement with

Republicans southerners who in the 73rd alwaysvoted with their fellow Democrats started to opposenonsouthern Democratic majorities in a small butnot trivial number of roll calls in the other three con-gresses The replication in columns (6ndash7) of Table 3is based on many more votes but the pattern largelyremains as Key described it There was a decreasingproportion of votes on which a cohesive Southeither the former Confederacy or the full regionvoted in opposition to Republicans and of these agreater number were in opposition to both Republi-cans and nonsouthern Democrats (columns 7 and 9)

An alternative way to map potential coalitional dy-namics is through the use of Ricersquos likeness scores26

Likeness scores have similar limits to cohesionscores and should not be interpreted as measures ofpreference convergence27 Moreover because theyscore similarity only by calculating whether twoblocs voted alike on a given measure or set of mea-sures and do not integrate information about howother blocs voted the scores for specific factionaldyads should not be looked at in isolation from thescores for other pairings28 But as with cohesionscores change in the scores over time or acrossissues points to potentially important developmentseither in the location of the policies being voted onor in the preferences of the legislators

Treating Congress as a Republican nonsouthernDemocratic and southern Democratic three-actor en-vironment Figure 2 traces cross-bloc likeness scoresfor each Congress highlighting the New Deal toFair Deal period but again placing this in a longerhistorical context As with measures of intrabloc cohe-sion we see broadly common Democratic Party votingacross regions in the early part of the New Deal29 In

25 These scores are effectively equivalent to party unity scoresin that they are counts of the number of votes on which a majority ofone faction voted against a majority of another

26 These are calculated by the equation 100ndash |Yes bloc1 - Yes bloc 2|

27 Krehbiel ldquoParty Discipline and Measures of PartisanshiprdquoHerbert Weisberg ldquoAlternative Baseline Models and Their Implica-tions for Understanding Coalition Behavior in Congressrdquo Journal ofPolitics 45 (1983) 657ndash71 William Shade Stanley Hopper DavidJacobson and Stephen Moiles ldquoPartisanship in the Unites StatesSenate 1869ndash1901rdquo The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4(1973) Thomas Hammond and Jane M Fraser ldquoWhat Role CallsShould We Exclude from Conservative Coalition Calculationsrdquo Leg-islative Studies Quarterly 7 (1982) 423ndash34

28 If southern Democrats and Republicans have a likenessscore of 80 for a series of votes one might interpret that as implyinga high degree of similarity between the two blocs But if the likenessscore for southern Democrats and northern Democrats is 100 thenwhat in fact occurred was that the three blocs all voted nearlyunanimously

29 Variations of these graphs were made that also looked at thelikeness between northern and southern Republicans and south-ern Republicans and southern Democrats With some exceptionssouthern Republicans were all located in the seventeen-staterather than the eleven-state South The intraparty likeness scoreswere consistently high while the intraregional cross-party scoresclosely mapped on to that of the southern Democrats and thenorthern GOP Accordingly we limit the attention paid here tosouthern Republicans While southern Republicans of the periodmerit much more attention than the dismissiveness with which



the 74th Congress (1935) southern and nonsouthernDemocrats voted together with likeness scores as highas 89 and 92 respectively for the Confederate elevenstates and the Jim Crow seventeen (only the lattershown) Over the course of the two decades weexamine the Democratic Party exhibited more like-ness despite regional variations than any other combi-nation of members but the gap between internalsouthern and nonsouthern similarity within the Dem-ocratic Party and the degree of likeness joining south-ern Democrats to Republicans narrowed veryconsiderably

Figure 3 shows the same scores but separates outthe eleven-state South examined by Key and the sixadditional states that comprise the broader regionA few trends and moments of inflection are evidentRepresentatives in the eleven-state South had histori-cally been very similar in their voting to the Demo-cratic representatives of West Virginia KentuckyMissouri Maryland Oklahoma and Delaware Thisdeclined in the first part of the period examinedhere but then dropped considerably in 1949 froma score of 87 to 75 about where it would stay forthe next few decades Nor were the representativesof the six southern states outside the Confederacymore similar to the GOP In fact their respective like-ness scores with the GOP closely track each otheruntil the late New Deal at which point they divergeBoth the eleven-state South and the six states of the

broader region became more like the RepublicanParty in their voting in 1941 but for the eleven-stateSouth this continued to increase thereafter while itfluctuated close to its historic levels for the represen-tatives from the remaining six states

The above extensions invert Keyrsquos findings aboutrelative cohesion while allowing us to better pinpointthe likely temporal and geographic origins of theldquoconservative coalitionrdquo whose emergence was of par-ticular interest to him In so doing these findingsraise questions of considerable consequence aboutthe substantive issues and concerns that led simulta-neously to a diminishing southern cohesion and toan increasing nonsouthern Democratic Party unityas well as to an increasing similarity between south-erners and Republicans concentrated among a partic-ular segment of the region

The above replications should assuage any con-cerns about potential bias resulting from Keyrsquossubset of roll calls while the temporal and geographicextensions generate additional questions about thecontent that underpinned the formation of congres-sional coalitions during the New Deal and Fair DealTo pursue these questions however requires us tomove beyond Keyrsquos original analysis and in particularto turn to preference-based measures that allow us tobetter identify whether the changes we have seen sofar were the result of changing southern policy prefer-ences But we proceed as we imagine Key would haveby employing measures suited to the problems of de-termining those issues on which southern preferenc-es were most distinctive and of locating the momentsand issues on which the region began its historic shift

Table 2 Replication Roll Calls with Majority of Southern Democrats Opposing Majority of Republicans (p 371)

Key Replication South 11 Extension South17

Extension South 17 allsessions

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)Congress(Year)

Total Number Percent Total Number Percent Number Percent Total Number Percent

73 (1933) 56 47 839 57 47 839 46 821 129 107 82974 (1935) --- --- --- 115 73 635 82 713 184 128 69675 (1937) 77 50 649 77 53 688 53 688 142 106 74676 (1939) --- --- --- 76 58 763 60 789 199 148 74477 (1941) 67 50 746 67 49 731 45 672 117 68 58178 (1943) --- --- --- 74 45 608 39 527 126 62 49279 (1945) 75 47 627 74 50 676 44 595 165 80 48580 (1947) --- --- --- 65 35 538 33 508 126 61 48481 (1949) --- --- --- 91 45 495 42 462 202 104 51582 (1951) --- --- --- 88 47 534 44 50 146 69 473

All 275 194 705 783 502 641 488 623 1536 933 607

Keyrsquos scores use the first session of the73rd 75th 77th and 79th congresses Keyrsquos analysis for the 73ndash82nd congresses are replicated incolumns (4ndash6) Columns (7ndash8) extend the analysis to the seventeen-state South and to all sessions (9ndash10) Roll calls with fewer than 10percent of voting members in dissent are excluded as are procedural votes

they were treated by Key for space reasons we leave that analysis to afuture date



II POLICY CONTENT AND SOUTHERN PREFERENCES

One of the most notable features of the congressionalchapters of Southern Politics is the role played by policycontent Key approached the substance of roll callsbased on the structure of party and of intra- and inter-regional voting patterns in the House and SenateWorking inductively he sought to identify thesubject matter that was at stake for each type of rollcall he analyzed including those in which a majorityof southern Democrats opposed a majority of Repub-licans and those in which a southern Democratic andRepublican coalition was present He was particularlyconcerned to understand how and why particularpolicy issues induced southerners to tap into theirmost intense preference what he called the ldquosouth-ern attitude toward the Negro [that] provides thebedrock of southern sectionalismrdquo30 He also wasalert to features that cross-pressured southern repre-sentatives While acutely sensitive to emerging chal-lenges to the racial order these representatives wereDemocrats who shared with other party members akeen interest in electoral success and majority statusAdditionally their policy commitments in the mainwere close to those of fellow Democrats in keeping

with the core Democratic agenda that was broadly in-ternationalist and at home could better deal with thewidespread deprivation and poverty that gripped theSouth

Despite his interest in the content of roll calls Keydiscussed policy substance only with regard to a smallnumber of votes and his work lacked a template forthe classification of policy substance Without such acategorization variations in regional and party behav-ior by the type of policy could not be identified sys-tematically With the bookrsquos restricted time framemoreover it was not possible to determine whethervoting patterns with regard to a particular policy re-mained relatively fixed or altered over the course ofthe era

The classification scheme we employ is summa-rized in Table 431 Tier 1 designates four basicelements common to policies in all modern statesThe first category is sovereignty the cluster of policiesthat bear directly on the state as a sovereign entitythe statersquos indivisible claim to rule legitimately overparticular people and places and thus the very exis-tence boundaries and membership of the national

Table 3 Replication Roll Calls with High Southern Democratic Cohesion (190) in Opposition to Republican Majorities (p 372)

Key South 11 South 17

Total Number Percent RCs whereSDs

agreedwith NDem

majority

RCs whereSDs

disagreedwith N Dem

majority

Percent Percent ofwhich S

Dems voteagainst N

Dems


Dems voteagainst N

Dems

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

73 (1933) 56 28 500 28 0 411 19 372 074 (1935) --- --- --- --- --- 250 22 245 075 (1937) 77 25 325 20 5 218 129 155 4576 (1939) --- --- --- --- --- 302 50 366 1977 (1941) 67 35 522 32 3 299 114 231 078 (1943) --- --- --- --- --- 167 143 127 6379 (1945) 75 24 320 21 3 182 100 152 4080 (1947) --- --- --- --- --- 175 45 167 14381 (1949) --- --- --- --- --- 173 286 119 082 (1951) --- --- --- --- --- 68 100 62 0

All 275 112 407 101 11 223 90 189 24

Keyrsquos scores use the first session of the 73rd 75th 77th and 79th congresses Columns 6 and 8 shows the percent of roll calls with high south-ern cohesion in opposition to the majority of Republicans Columns 7 and 9 shows the percent of these roll calls in which southern Dem-ocrats voted against the majority of nonsouthern Democrats Roll calls with fewer than 10 percent of voting members in dissent are excludedas are procedural votes High southern Democratic cohesion is defined as roll calls on which less than 10 percent of southern Democratsdeviated from the southern majority

30 Key Southern Politics 372

31 For space reasons the scheme has been reduced to high-light those areas discussed here For the full scheme see Katznelsonand Lapinski ldquoThe Substance of Representationrdquo 112ndash13



regime The second organization and scope concernsthe substantive reach and range of activities and theinstitutional elaboration of the national governmentrsquosinstruments for governing International relations refersto the geopolitical and economic transactionsbetween the United States as a unit in the globalsystem of states and other sovereign states while do-mestic policy is the category concerned with public pol-icies shaping both the ties between government andthe economy and between government and thewelfare of its citizens

These four categories are bulky At a second tierthese are divided into three or four ldquoblueprintrdquo sub-categories Thus sovereignty in a representativedemocracy always entails decisions about liberty

membership and nation civil rights and physical boundar-ies Organization and scope in such a regime is com-posed of decisions about constitutional amendmentsgovernment organization and rules of political representa-tion International relations divide into the triad ofdefense geopolitics and international political economywhile domestic policy divides into policy judgmentsabout agriculture and food planning and resources polit-ical economy and social policy

These distinctions still are not fine grained enoughfor many analytical purposes Utilizing a detailedreview of congressional committee responsibilitiesbudget categories and the classifications of existingcoding approaches each second-tier category is sub-divided into two to thirteen tier 3 substantive

Fig 2 Likeness Scores in the House of Representatives

Fig 3 Scores in the House of Representatives Different Specifications of the South



Table 4 Policy Classification by Levels Reduced

Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3

Sovereignty Liberty ReligionPrivacyLoyalty and Expression

Membership and Nation CommemorationsNatrsquol CultureImmigrationNaturalization

Civil Rights African AmericansNative AmericansOther Minority GroupsWomenVoting Rights

Boundaries Frontier SettlementIndian RemovalCompensationState AdmissionTerritories and Colonies

Organization andScope

Government Organization Congressional Organization Executive Organization

ImpeachmentMisconductJudicial Organization

Political Representation Census and ApportionmentElectionsGroups and Interests

Constitutional Amendments Federalism and Terms of OfficePolitical Participation and RightsOther

InternationalRelations

Defense Air Force Org and Deployment Army Org andDeployment

Conscription and EnlistmentMilitiasNaval Org and DeploymentGeneral Military OrganizationCivil and Homeland Defense

Geopolitics Diplomacy and IntelligenceForeign AidInternational Organizations

International PoliticalEconomy

Maritime

Trade and TariffsEconomic International Orgs

Domestic Policy Agriculture and Food Agricultural TechnologyFarmers and Farming SupportFishing and Livestock

Planning and Resources CorporatismEnvironmentInfrastructure and Public Works National ResourcesSocial KnowledgePost OfficeWage and Price ControlsInterstate CompactsUrbanRegional Development

Continued



classifications intended to be mutually exclusive andcomprehensive Over time the relative importanceof policies at this level of detail varies quite a lotThe coding scheme thus provides policy classifica-tions that can be applied to and combined at differentlevels of aggregation

A finding of southern divergence on the tier 2 cate-gory of civil rights would hardly be novel Nor was it theanimating theme of Keyrsquos analysis Key was not interest-ed solely in whether southern members diverged fromtheir nonsouthern copartisans on the issue of blackrights but whether the maintenance of white suprem-acy structured membersrsquo positions on a wider rangeof issues He repeatedly raised the question ofwhether ldquothe legislative record would show that south-ern solidarity contains elements other than a dominantattitude toward the Negrordquo whether the ldquoregional com-pulsion toward solidarity spreads out from the racequestion and induces a higher degree of solidarity onother matters than would otherwise prevailrdquo32 In pur-suing this question he discovered that on specificpolicy issuesmdashespecially those relating to agriculturealiens relief and labormdashthe votes of southernmembers diverged from their nonsouthern coparti-sans And he suggested that a combination of an agrar-ian tilt combined with attitudes toward black Americansstructured this behavior

To push further we examine the tier 3 issue areasthat Key identified as having invoked different pat-terns of southern solidarity and coalition buildingKey identified at least seventy-five distinct and atypical

roll calls in the House and Senate These includedtwenty-nine votes in which the South defected fromthe Democratic Party to vote with Republicansthree votes marked by notably low southern solidarityand twenty-four with especially high cohesion andeighteen sectional votes in which the South stoodalone against nonsouthern Democrats and Repub-licans33 Reclassifying these votes according to thecoding scheme outlined above Key found thatsouthern members were most cohesive on votesabout international relations and agriculture mostexceptional on votes about civil rights and mostlikely to defect to the Republican position on votesabout labor markets and unions Pursuing this line

TABLE 4 Continued


Political Economy AppropriationsMultiple AgencyBusiness and Capital MarketsFiscal and TaxationLabor Markets and UnionsMonetaryEconomic Regulation

Social Policy EducationCivilian HealthHousingSocial InsuranceChildrenYouthCrimeDisasterMilitary Pensions Social RegulationPublic Works Transfers Poverty

32 Key Southern Politics 360 345

33 Of the votes identified by Key sixteen concerned the tier 1category of ldquosovereigntyrdquo including two votes on the tier 3 categoryldquoimmigrationrdquo ten on ldquoAfrican American civil rightsrdquo and four onldquovoting rightsrdquo Twenty-four concerned the tier 1 category of ldquointer-national relationsrdquo including one on the tier 3 category of ldquocon-scriptionrdquo one on ldquoforeign aidrdquo four on ldquointernationalorganizationsrdquo nine on ldquotraderdquo and an additional nine on ldquoprepa-ration for warrdquo a category likely to fall under ldquodefenserdquo but forwhich we were not able to find which specific roll calls to whichhe was referring Twenty-seven votes concerned the tier 1 categoryof ldquodomestic policyrdquo including two on the tier 2 categories ldquoagricul-ture and foodrdquo five on ldquoplanning and resourcesrdquo twelve on ldquopolit-ical economyrdquomdashnine of which were in the tier 3 category of ldquolabormarkets and taxationrdquo and seven were on ldquosocial policyrdquo An addi-tional six votes concerned quasi-private billsmdashsuch as the deporta-tion of Lazar Limonsky denying federal pay to specific radicals andunion leaders on public works the relief of ldquosundry aliensrdquopayment of Union Iron Works and a vote on relocating officesaway from the District of Columbia Key also identified an addition-al two votes on education which are coded under this scheme ascivil rights for African Americans as they concerned nondiscrimina-tion See Key Southern Politics 351ndash54 356ndash59 371ndash77



of inquiry we have examined whether these patternshold across the full range of votes in these issueareas34

We subset roll calls by the different tier 1 2 and 3issue areas and use these to calculate quantities suchas cohesion or likeness scores Most importantly weestimate issue-specific ideal points for each memberof the House of Representatives using the item-response model model of Clinton Jackman andRivers (CJR) allowing us to directly examine thedegree to which preference change underlay thetrends noted above35 We first estimate a single idealpoint per member across a predefined set of rollcalls such as every roll call in a given Congress or asubset of roll calls on a given issue session of Con-gress or across an interval of time such as a six-month period For each subset a unique ideal pointis estimated for every member

But we are also interested in assessing howmembersrsquo preferences changed across this periodGiven that ideal points have no natural metric weneed to adjust these in order for them to be arrayedon the same dimension and made comparableacross time To do so we rely on the technique devel-oped by Tim Groseclose Steven Levitt and DavidSnyder (GLS) to adjust interest-group scores such asthose compiled by Americans for DemocraticAction In contrast to other ideal point techniquessuch as DW-NOMINATE which constrains membersto a linear trend in their movements the GLS-technique places a constraint on the aggregatechamber and allows members to move idiosyncrati-cally over time Crucially this allows for inflectionpoints in individual membersrsquo movement36

There is no obvious correct unit of time on whichto estimate an ideal point and most scholars estimatea score for a particular Congress But there are limita-tions in doing so most obviously that it constrains allchange to that accompanying elections Moreover es-timating Congress-level scores can also reduce theavailable number of roll calls While this is notusually a problem when estimating scores across allvotes it is a problem when estimating issue-specificscores as there will often not be a sufficient numberof votes held on an issue in a given Congress to effec-tively discriminate between members This problem ismost acute for the fine-grained tier 2 and tier 3 cate-gories which are perhaps the more interesting levelsof disaggregation

We deal with both of these problemsmdashthe insuffi-ciently fine-grained time periods generated fromCongress-level scores and the occasionally insufficientnumber of roll calls in a given Congress for a givenissue areamdashin the same way by selecting units oftime that will allow us to capture a sufficientnumber of roll calls while maximizing temporal gran-ularity We proceed along a few different tracks Wegenerate aggregate ideal-point scores across all issueareasmdashequivalent in this regard to the NOMINATEseriesmdashby selecting all roll calls within a six-monthwindow We advance this window one month at atime so that the first set of scores covers monthstwo to six the second months two to seven thethird three to eight and so on for the entirety ofthe period These scores are then adjusted using theGLS technique so that they are all on the samemetric They can be thought of as a moving snapshotcentered on the date in the middle of the six-month interval37 This allows us to identify more tem-porally fine-grained changes than we would see inCongress-level or even session-level scores

For the tier 1 and tier 2 issue-specific scores inwhich the number of roll calls is a motivatingconcern we adjust the range to a twelve-month or afifty-roll-call interval in order to ensure a sufficientnumber of votes distributed across the policyspace38 For the tier 3 categories we select a series

34 Key selected a specific subset of votes based on whetherthey crossed a specified threshold Instead we use the votes he an-alyzed to identify discrete issue areas in which all of the relevantvotes are taken into account and we generate measures that arespecific to these issue areas

35 Joshua D Clinton Simon Jackman and Douglas RiversldquoThe Statistical Analysis of Legislative Behavior A Unified Ap-proachrdquo American Political Science Review 98 (2004) 355ndash70Joshua D Clinton and Simon Jackman ldquoTo Simulate or NOMI-NATErdquo Legislative Studies Quarterly 34 (2009) 593

36 Specifically they estimate the model yit frac14 at + btXi + 1itwith yit being legislator irsquos ideal point at time t Xi being a mean-preference parametermdashinitially the mean score for a memberover their entire careermdashand 1it being an error term capturing in-dividual change They generate ldquoshiftrdquo and ldquostretchrdquo parameters foreach unique sessionmdasha chamber in a given congress a legislativesession a bloc of timemdashand use this to adjust all the scores for

this session with the formula yit =yit minus at( )

btwhere yit is the ldquoadjust-

edrdquo score for member irsquo at time t and at and bt are the session spe-cific shift and stretch parameters The major limitation of theGroseclose and coauthorsrsquo technique however is that it assumesmembersrsquo movements are idiosyncratic and that the meanlong-run weighted average of congressional members remains thesame The estimates are comparable across time for each issuearea but while the rank orderings across issue areas are compara-ble their specific location or the distance between members isnot directly comparable across issue areas Tim Groseclose

Steven D Levitt and James M Snyder ldquoComparing Interest GroupScores across Time and Chambers Adjusted ADA Scores for theUS Congressrdquo American Political Science Review 93 (1999) 33ndash50See Joshua D Clinton Ira Katznelson and John LapinskildquoWhere Measures Meet History Party Polarization During theNew Deal and Fair Dealrdquo in Governing in a Polarized Age ElectionsParties and Representation in America ed Alan Gerber and EricSchickler New York NY Cambridge University Press forthcoming)John Lapinski The Substance of Representation Congress American Po-litical Development and Lawmaking (Princeton NJ Princeton Univer-sity Press 2013)

37 For a similar approach see Adam Bonica ldquoPunctuatedOrigins of Senate Polarizationrdquo Legislative Studies Quarterly39(2014) 5ndash26

38 We find that moving from 50 to 100 does not significantlychange the recovered ideal points but does decrease the temporal



of adjacent congresses based on the patterns dis-cerned at the tier 1 and tier 2 levels merge these to-gether in an aggregated roll call matrix and estimatea single score for this period39 Crucially the patternsidentified from higher-level aggregations guide ourdecisions about how to manage the trade-offbetween the need for sufficient roll calls and forscores that are rooted in discrete and relatively fine-grained periods of time For instance a single idealpoint per member is estimated in the area of labormarkets and unions from the 80th to the 82nd Con-gress as well as for the period from the 70th to the73rd Congress But as we see evidence that an impor-tant shift in member preferences at the tier 2 level ofpolitical economy occurred sometime in themid-1930s we do not estimate a score that wouldcover the entire period which would result invoting patterns from after the southern inflectionon this issue informing the ideal points for earliercongresses and vice versa40

We use these estimates to reground central themesin Keyrsquos analysis on measures that allow for a direct as-sessment of how membersrsquo preference changed overtime the importance of white supremacy in structur-ing southern preferences on civil rights and otherissues and the importance of policy-issue substancemore generally in structuring membersrsquo behaviorsWe first look at the location of party and sectionalmedians at the aggregate level using these to identifyshifts in southern preferences We move from these tothe tier 1 and tier 2 issue areas encompassing thosepolicy domains Key highlighted as areas in whichthe unique features of southern politics were mostclearly expressed

Figure 4 traces the location of the median northernRepublican southern Republican (almost exclusivelyfrom the six states of the broader region) northernDemocrat and southern Democrat Each marker islocated at the center of a six-month window and soincorporates information from the immediatefuture and past By limiting the temporal window tosix months in which Congress was in session we canbetter identify break points in time The temporal in-flections we saw in the cohesion and likeness scoresare clearly evident in the party medians as wellWhile some of shifts in the location of the partymedians reflect changes in the composition of Con-gress following elections others do not41 The 77th

granularity All ideal point techniques suffer from the possibilitythat the roll calls will not sufficiently discriminate betweenmembers and increasing the number of roll calls is no panaceaagainst this See Howard Rosenthal and Erik Voeten ldquoAnalyzingRoll Calls with Perfect Spatial Voting France 1946ndash1958rdquo AmericanJournal of Political Science 48 (2004) 620ndash32 We find that for tier 1issue areas there are sufficient roll calls for either a six- or a twelve-month window For some tier 2 issue areas there are sufficient rollcalls for a twelve-month window but that for all but a few tier 3 issueareas we need to arbitrarily set a number of roll calls (rather than atemporal interval) to subset While this increases the ability to dis-criminate between members the problem is that it requiresmerging across many different congressesmdashseveral years in whichthe politics around an issue might change but only a single scorewill be generated To compensate for this we rely on the inflectionpoints identified with cohesion likeness and the tier 1 and tier 2ideal scores to temporally bound the selection For instance aswe discuss below we subset the tier 2 ldquocivil rightsrdquo roll calls bymerging several congresses but only those after the inflectionthat seems to have occurred in the 78th Congress Note also thatthe scores are calculated for months in which Congress is insession and so do not constitute an exact calendar year Where aspecific event or set of debates might be responsible for suddenchanges in legislative behavior this can be confirmed by locatingthe median at the final date rather than at the center Mergingacross several years is certainly not a perfect solution but it is a wide-spread practice in estimating across time DW-NOMINATE esti-mates scores based on a memberrsquos entire tenure as do thestate-level scores estimated by Boris Shor Christopher Berry andNolan McCarty ldquoA Bridge to Somewhere Mapping State and Con-gressional Ideology on a Cross-Institutional Common Spacerdquo Legis-lative Studies Quarterly 35 (2010) 417ndash48

39 In this sense they are equivalent to Common Space scoresKeith Poole ldquoRecovering a Basic Space From a Set of Issue ScalesrdquoAmerican Journal of Political Science 45 (1998) 954ndash93

40 In estimating issue-specific ideal points we are seeminglygoing against the finding of Poole and Rosenthal that most of con-gressional voting can be reduced to a two-dimensional space KeithPoole and Howard Rosenthal Congress A Political Economic History ofRoll Call Voting (New York Oxford University Press 1997) We donot see it this way The two-dimensional model established byPoole and Rosenthal was chosen based on its parsimony in explain-ing voting across the entirety of American history In most congress-es they find some gain to estimating additional dimensions but

that they are not worth including relative to the task of explainingvoting in the aggregate Scholars interested in using preference-based measures to understand how specific issues change overtimemdashacknowledging that these preferences will not be unrelatedto the party cleavage that provides most of the structure to thefirst DW-NOMINATEmdashare left with few options in DW-NOMI-NATE Where these issues generate different ordering of preferenc-es but do not constitute a sizeable portion of the agenda they willsimply appear in the two-dimensional model as an increased rate oferror We propose issue-specific scores not as an intervention in thedebate as to the number of dimensions but because they allow forcloser inspection of how given preferences on a given issue changeover time We are also persuaded by the reasons as to why scholarsmight want to subset roll calls as we have done here offered byKeith Poole One is to ldquouncover the microstructure of the spatialmaprdquo to find those issues that in the short-term might result in dis-tinct shifts in the aggregate location of members Another is ldquotouncover what is going on when structural change is occurringrdquoKeith Poole Spatial Maps of Parliamentary Voting (Cambridge Cam-bridge University Press 2005) 185 Southern preferences didclearly shift in an important way during this period which is alsothe period in which the second dimension becomes clearly relevantin voting patterns suggesting the possibility of a structural changefor southern representatives if not for the legislature as a wholeMoreover as we will see when we examine distinct issue areas theaggregate shift in the southern position was a reflection of the spe-cific shifts that they took on distinct issue areas and the aggregatespatial map was produced by how these distinctive patterns of shiftsand stability occurred at different times Understanding the micro-foundations of the spatial maps that place the southerners to theright of the nonsouthern Democrats requires closer attention tohow preferences potentially varied by issue

41 The decline in the northern Democratic median reflectsthe electoral loss of approximately 30 percent of their seats in No-vember 1942 as well as the loss of approximately 40 percent of their



Congress sat from January 1941 to December 1942and during this period the southern Democratswent from the left side of the Democratic distribu-tionmdashhaving in fact moved further away from thecenter than at any time since the New Deal beganmdashto the right side Closer inspection shows that theirabrupt switch occurred in the months followingDecember 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor Inthe dying months of the 77th Congress howeverthey once again switched locations as debate overan antindashpoll tax measure temporarily united north-ern Democrats and Republicans

Key noted throughout Southern Politics that theBlack Belt was the bedrock of southern cohesionand the data allow us to directly compare the prefer-ences of Democrats from the Black Belt congressionaldistricts to those from constituencies with very fewAfrican Americans Figure 5 traces the medians ofthree different blocs of southern Democratic repre-sentatives those from congressional districts whereAfrican Americans constituted over 35 percent ofthe population those where they were a smallerusually much smaller proportion and those fromthe six states of the broader region In the early

Fig 4 Location of Party and Regional Median Members 1932ndash1952

Fig 5 Location of Median Members Across Southern Sub-Regions



New Deal and indeed for nearly the entirety of theperiod from 1877 to the New Deal (not shown) themedian representatives of the different regional spec-ifications of the South were remarkably similar Butthe representatives of the six states of the full Southbegan to diverge from their regional copartisans asthe 1940s progressed No such divergence occurredamong the eleven-state representatives What hadbeen a coherent regional unit was to a certainextent fracturing

Preference-based measures such as ideal pointsalso allow us to better assess whether the trends of adeclining southern Democratic and increasing north-ern Democratic cohesion were the result of an in-creased heterogeneity of preferences or whetherthe policies that were being voted on were simplymore likely to divide southern representatives Oneway to assess this is to look at the standard deviationof southern Democratsrsquo ideal points the greater thedispersion of southern preferences the higher thestandard deviation Figure 6 traces the standard devi-ation for the Black Belt the nonndashBlack Belt in theConfederacy and the six states of the full regionThe standard deviations of the Democrats in theNorth and the full South are shown in thebackground

Comparing Figure 1 and Figure 6 the limits of co-hesion scores in measuring preference homogeneityare apparent By the ideal-point measures the north-ern Democrats became more heterogeneous in theirpreferences despite their increasing cohesion and

with the exception of the period immediately sur-rounding Word War II southern Democrats remainedconsistently more homogenous in their preferencesthan their northern copartisans And insofar as theregionrsquos congressional representation was becomingmore heterogeneous by the end of the Truman ad-ministration this was largely a function of increasingdispersion among Democrats from the six states andtheir increasing separation from the regionrsquos con-gressional delegation42

The cohesion score trends outlined above were lessthe result of changes to the dispersion of southernpreferences than to the location of southerners relativeto the broader chamber As they moved away fromtheir traditional position as the left wing of the Dem-ocratic Party southern representatives were increas-ingly located near the median of the House If weexpect that roll calls are disproportionately intendedto appeal to the median voter then a grouprsquos beinglocated near the median will decrease their cohesionscore as each vote will be more likely to dividethem43 The regionrsquos representatives might havebeen less cohesive in the sense that they voted togeth-er less frequently than before but this was a functionof their being pivotal on a greater range of votes

The questions that remain then are on what issueswere they diverging from the Democratic Party whendid these shifts occur and to what extent and on what

Fig 6 Diversity in Democratic Preferences Standard Deviations Across Regions

seats in November 1946 But these losses persisted through the 81stand 82nd Congresses suggesting a transformation in the northernfaction of the party during this period

42 For a similar finding of low southern preference heteroge-neity see Devin Caughey ldquoCongress Public Opinion and Repre-sentation in the One-Party South 1930sndash1960srdquo (PhD dissUniversity of California Berkeley 2012) 49

43 As an empirical matter the roll calls for the period didindeed cluster at the center of the chamber 74 percent of rollcalls saw cut-lines within the two standard deviations surroundingthe chamber mean



issues did this result in the ldquosouthern nationrdquo becom-ing pivotal for the enactment of national policy Theremainder of this article disaggregates these measuresby policy and period situating the observed variationand break points in the context of the politics of thetime

Aggregate scores mask considerable heterogeneityacross issues Figure 7 traces the party and sectionalmedians across the tier 1 issue areas of sovereignty orga-nization and scope domestic policy and international rela-tions The scores are calculated for a twelve-monthwindow and advance one month at a time Strikingdifferences appear even at the coding classificationrsquosbulkier first tier of analysis in both the extent andtiming of southern preference change Southernmembers did not simply become more conservativeacross the board

For one we might have expected the coincidenceof the attack on Pearl Harbor and the southern Dem-ocratic shift rightward to be the result of their sup-porting Republican measures in organizing theprosecution of the war In fact the divergence ofthe southern representatives from the Democratic co-alition on international relations while presagedperhaps in the late war period becomes a cleartrend only in the postndashWorld War II years Thetrend occurred in domestic policy where the

outbreak of war was accompanied by clear rightwardshift Roll calls on public works on wage and pricecontrols on agriculture on labor and on social secur-ity saw greater similarity between Republicans andsouthern Democrats than between Democrats44

What is not shown and which is beyond the scopeof this paper is that by the 1960s the southern Dem-ocratic median on international relations was well tothe right of the Republican median Moreover thisrightward movement occurred firstmdashand ultimately

Fig 7a Location of Party and Regional Median Members Tier 1 Issue Areas

44 In the days immediately preceding the attack the Southand the GOP had supported the Carl Vinsonrsquos (D-GA) Anti-StrikeBill which would limit strikes in defense industries limit the estab-lishment of new closed-shop defense factories and require industryto take an oath of all persons that they were not Communists orBund members and to discharge those who were Southern oppo-sition to labor unions which was an important component of theirrightward movement preceded the attacks in December In themonths following Pearl Harbor southern Democrats allied with Re-publicans on amending the Employment Stabilization Act (2191942) on the Agricultural Appropriations Bill (691942) onthe sale of grain and wheat (6261942 and 7151942) and onthe Emergency Price Control Act (9231942) The next yearsouthern Democrats and Republicans voted together on a versionof the Hobbs Act targeting labor unions (491943) on a bill reg-ulating wartime use of production plants (641943) on the Com-modity Credit Corporation (11231943) and on a host of otherissues falling in the category of domestic politics



would be more dramaticmdashfor the eleven-state Southalthough by the 1960s the Democratic representa-tives of the six non-Confederate states would be tothe right of the Republicans as well (not shown)

The difference in the Southrsquos rightward movementacross issue areas helps explain the pattern observedin the aggregate figures in which the South seemedto move left in 1941 before turning sharply to theright in 1942 In the two years preceding 1941 thebulk of votes had been on the tier 1 category of do-mestic policy (45) and especially on the tier 2 cat-egory of political economy (13) In the yearsurrounding 1941 the plurality of votes were on thetier 1 category of international relations (36) andespecially on the tier 2 category of defense as thenation began providing for the possibility of warSoutherners strongly supported the administrationWhat appears to be a move to the left in fact reflectsa sharp change in the agenda one that altered thepattern of conflict45 This finding clearly underscoresthe need for more disaggregated measures

Relative to the domestic policy and international re-lations measures the ideal points estimated on thesovereignty subset of votes exhibit a jumpy qualityearly on before settling into a stable pattern duringand after World War II This also is in part a reflectionof the content of the agenda as sovereignty votes inthe initial period of the New Deal largely reflectedthe imperial and expansionist legacy of the precedingdecades while civil rights and civil liberties constitut-ed the bulk of the sovereignty agenda thereafterThirty-four percent of the votes in the sovereignty cat-egory between 1932 and 1942 concerned the

Fig 7b Location of Party and Regional Median Members Tier 1 Issue Areas (continued)

45 All ideal-point measures share the problem that changes inthese can be a product of changes in the agenda or in preferencesand that there is no perfect means of isolating which is responsiblefor shifts in the estimated scores This problem however is

potentially greater when scores are estimated over short timewindows With longer time horizons short-term variation in theagenda is likely to be averaged out although the problem thenbecomes one of interpreting the meaning of the recovered dimen-sion as the mix and content of issues changes over time The cost oflonger time horizons however is that they can result in misleadingassessments of political conflict at particular moments and obscurepotentially important differences in preferences across issue areasThere is no perfect balance between fine-grained measures moresensitive to subtle changes in the mix of votes and stable measuresthat potentially obscure the microstructure of the spatial mapPoole Spatial Maps 185 Researchers should instead be attentiveto the particular dangers of each and exercise the appropriatecaution in their interpretations



governing of the Philippines Puerto Rico the Hawai-ian Isles or American Indian communities between1942 and 1952 only 14 percent were concerned withthese topics while votes concerning civil rights hadgone from 9 percent to 32 percent and civil libertiesfrom 11 percent to 48 percent46

But what is most important to note is the dramatictransformation on this issue largely a function of theincreased prominence on the agenda of civil rightsfor African Americans and civil liberties for variouscategories of Americans during the war Civil rightsfirst appears as an issue voted on during thisperiod in the 75th Congress after having beenlargely kept off the House agenda since the 67thCongress when through December and January of1921ndash22 the House debated and voted on an anti-lynching bill When antilynching legislation wasnext considered by the 75th Congress a sectionalrift already somewhat apparent in 1921ndash22 hadopened up47 The South was prepared to stand alonewhen federal action to secure black rights was con-cerned and as we shall see increasingly stood withthe Republican Party when civil liberties were at stake

What we have observed at the tier 1 categories aredifferent patterns by which the South diverged fromthe Democratic Party They broke sharply with theirhistoric role as the left wing of the coalition with theoutbreak of war a trend first evident in domesticpolicy Only later did they begin to engage in cross-

party voting on the issue of international relationsAnd while the full region as well as the more con-fined subset analyzed by Key diverged on domesticpolicy during wartime only this more condensedregionmdashwhere the vast majority of southern blacksalso livedmdashcontinued on this trajectory for the nextseveral decades

The tier 2 categories allow us to more closelyexplore which issues in particular were accompaniedby early andor more complete southern divergenceFigure 8 unpacks the Tier 1 categories internationalrelations and domestic policy tracing the party andsectional medians for the tier 2 issue areas ofdefense geopolitics agriculture planning and re-sources political economy and social policy Ondefense votes of which there were relatively fewbefore hostilities began in 1939 there does notseem to be any evidence of a conservative coalitionforming On geopolitics votes a category that in-cludes foreign aid the eleven-state South begandiverging from the Democratic mainstream in1943ndash44 and continued on this trajectory over thenext few decades On this issuemdashwhich includedvotes on the provision of relief to war-devastated coun-tries and the prohibition of funds to countries domi-nated by the Soviet Unionmdasheleven-state southernersbegan voting more clearly with the Republicansand were largely unaccompanied by the Democraticrepresentatives of the broader region

As with defense there was no conservative coalitionon agricultural policy and the median preferences ofthe different factions of the Democratic Party were allrelatively similar In fact on this issue the northernDemocrats tended to be closer to the Republicansthan their southern copartisans and the end of theperiod saw a distribution of party and sectionalmedians not unlike that which had opened theperiod The distinctive agrarian bent of southern rep-resentatives noted by Key worked against an alliancewith the Republicans But in the tier 2 domesticpolicy categories of planning and resources politicaleconomy and social policy there was a clear breaktoward the right before and in the early years of thewar one that occurred to varying degrees and longev-ity both in the eleven states of the Confederacy andacross the full region The northern and southernDemocrats had switched places on politicaleconomy by mid-1935 occurring just as the Senatefought over whether to take up the antilynching legis-lation introduced by Democratic senators EdwardCostigan (D-CO) and Robert Wagner (D-NY) Theywould split further in the 75th Congress of 1937ndash38and after northern Democratic losses in the electionsof 193848 On some issues these divergences in the

46 It is important to note that this might call into questionwhether sovereignty constitutes a coherent issue category orwhether the change in the agenda leads to different dimensionsbeing compared If so then the ideal points will not be directlycomparable We are less concerned with this possibility for a fewreasons For one while it is certainly possible that by aggregatingthe votes into the tier 1 category of sovereignty we are effectivelycomparing two noncomparable dimensions rather than identifyingchanges in membersrsquo preferences this measure allows us to clearlyidentify when this occurred and by extension on which votes andpolicies Our confidence in the scores as being truly comparablemeasures of preferences might be reduced but the gain will be amuch more pinpointed identification of when this dimensionaldivergence began to occur Second both before and after 1942mdashand before and after the New and Fair Dealsmdashmember preferenceson the different categories aggregated under sovereignty policyshow a consistent relationship The change that we see is theresult primarily of northern Democrats and to a lesser extent Re-publicans The positions of southern Democratsmdashboth substantive-ly and in terms of their estimated positionsmdashremain consistentacross this period This suggests that nonsouthern preferencechange rather than changed dimensionalitymdashon the set of votes ag-gregated under sovereignty policymdashis responsible for the changethat becomes evident around 1942

47 The likeness scores for liberty votes were initially quite highacross the three different factions at 69 73 and 72 for southernDemocratsnorthern Democrats southern DemocratsGOP andnorthern DemocratsGOP respectively for the pre-1942 periodAfter 1942 intra-Democratic similarity declined to 69 while thesouthern Democrat and Republican similarity score increased to90 The likeness score between the northern and seventeen-stateDemocratic Party on civil rights votes was 34 compared with 86on other votes the score for northern Democrats and the Republi-can Party was 61 as compared to 47 on nonndashcivil rights votes

48 This is supported by the qualitative and historical literatureas well which identifies 1937ndash38 as the period in which a conserva-tive coalition came into being with southern Democrats being themost important faction of Democrats to oppose the administration



Democratic coalition were nearly as much a result ofthe northern Democrats moving to the left but forthe most part the southern movement was more dra-matic and began earlier than that of the nonsouthernDemocrats49

Fig 8a Location of Party and Regional Median Members Selected Tier 2 Issue Areas

James T Patterson Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal TheGrowth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress 1933ndash1939 (Lexing-ton University of Kentucky Press 1967) Susan Dunn RooseveltrsquosPurge How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party (CambridgeMA Belknap Press 2010)

49 The dates at which points these shifts occurred are ap-proximate as the fifty-roll-call interval can cover successive

congresses For instance the northern Democratic and eleven-state South medians on planning and resources cross duringan interval centered on July 18 1939 but included roll callsfrom June 20 1936 through June 25 1942 The average spanof time included varies across issue area from 16 congressesin the issue area of political economy to four congresses in agri-culture with an overall average of two congresses This limits ourability to pinpoint the timing of change although this limitationis true also for measures such as DW-NOMINATE which estimatescores across a memberrsquos entire career which are generated foran individual Congress and which are constrained to move ina straight line between congresses The advantage of more tem-porally fine-grained measures is that they have clear boundswhich allows for the content of the agenda to be inspected and



Examining preferences at the tier 3 level is moredifficult than for the aggregated tiers as the relativesparseness of the roll call record requires a starkertrade-off with temporal specificity in order to have suf-ficient votes to discriminate between members Welook more closely at tier 3 preferences in SectionIII aggregating across congresses based on the tem-poral inflections identified here But we can get asense of the specific policy debates and legislative

coalitions associated with these changes by examiningissue-specific likeness scores for the three mainblocs50

Figure 9 traces a set of six-vote moving average like-ness scores from the 73rd to the 82nd Congress with

Fig 8b Location of Party and Regional Median Members Selected Tier 2 Issue Areas (continued)

compared And an advantage of GLS is that it maintains the rankordering of members for each interval

50 On their own likeness scores cannot tell us whether south-ern preferences were changing although we have evidence that thiswas occurring for tier 1 and tier 2 issue areas But they do allow us toidentify the specific votes and policy measures on which a conserva-tive coalition began to appear and thus provide a guide for identi-fying and more closely exploring the substantive policies anddistinctive set of regional concerns underlying this coalition



a dotted vertical line marking the attack on PearlHarbor Six tier 3 issue areas have been selected inwhich the voting showed a clear divergence of theSouth from the Democratic mainstream51 Thepolicy areas associated with the tier 1 category of sov-ereignty showed the clearest sign of southern diver-gence from the Democratic Party and the earliestsplits in the party occurred in the tier 3 categoriesof African American civil rightsmdashincluding votingrights (not shown)mdashimmigration and liberty52 Keyhad identified southern uneasiness about immigra-tion as a possible source of defection from the Dem-ocratic Party and our data bear out this hunch

Here a conservative coalition had formed in theearly New Deal years

By 1938 such a coalition was evident on libertyissues as well Citing Nazi summer camps and Com-munist organizing in New York City and the recentpainting of Plymouth Rock red Martin Dies andother southern Democrats successfully urged theHouse to establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities on May 26 1938 Over the nextseveral years southerners and Republicans wouldunite on a series of votes buttressing the committee53

In the area of national resources which included pol-icies such as enabling and regulating the requisition

Fig 9 Party and Regional Likeness Scores Selected Tier 3 Issue Areas

51 We inspected the likeness scores for all tier 3 issue areasand selected these as showing the greatest divergence from apattern of greater intrapartisan likeness than cross-partisan like-ness These we suggest are the most likely candidates for beingissues on which a conservative coalition began to emerge

52 The similarity between Republicans and southernDemocrats on immigration predates the New Deal and from the67th to the 72nd Congress the GOPsouthern Democratic likenessscore was 62 against 72 for the northern Democrats and GOP and55 for the two wings of the Democratic Party From the 73rd Con-gress on the respective similarity scores would be 82 60 and 52

53 Maury Maverick Democrat from Texas and staunch NewDealer opposed the creation of the committee arguing that itwould ldquobe the greatest fishing expedition that Congress ever under-took in the history of the United Statesrdquo and would inflame preju-dice and enable ldquothe Republicans on the committee [to] investigateMr Roosevelt and the Democrats [to] investigate Mr Landon MrBrowder Mr Thomasmdasheverybody who ran against Rooseveltrdquo Mav-erick Congressional Record May 26 1938 7576 The painting ofPlymouth Rock red (or pink depending on the source) occurredon May Day 1938 The Communist Party denied involvementldquoPlymouth Rock Gets Red Paint Coveringrdquo Lewiston Daily SunMay 9 1938 12



of property for prosecution of the war and later thereconversion of federal programs and property topeacetime the impact of the war is immediately ap-parent Wage and price controls appeared on the con-gressional agenda in June 1941 and then again moreprominently in 1945ndash46 and were likewise an issueon which a conservative voting coalition was often ap-parent although less so than the other issues exam-ined here Southern Democrats and Republicansjoined on economic regulation votes during the waron issues such as affirming the intent of Congressthat regulation of the insurance industry should stayunder state control

But it is on the issue of labor markets and unionsthat the South first and most dramatically divergedon domestic nonsovereignty policy From the waveof ldquosit-downrdquo strikes in 1936ndash37 the South hadbegun voting more and more with Republicans onlabor issues Throughout the 1940s as Key anticipat-ed the likeness of southern Democrats and Republi-cans became dramatically and consistently higherthan any other pairing Southerners and Republicanssought to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act(whose passage had come only after more than ayear of bitter fights in and outside of Congress) inves-tigate the National Labor Relations Board andcompel arbitration by the Conciliation and MediationBoards of labor disputes during the war54

The analysis of roll calls if anything understatesthe importance of southern opposition to New Deallabor legislation Southern influence upstream inthe legislative process was used not only to blockfurther liberal policies but to advance conservativeones on labor policy as well as on wage and price con-trols farm policy and taxation measures55 It was a co-alition of Republicans and southern Democrats onthe House Rules Committee that refused to report

the Fair Labor Standards bill until a discharge peti-tion had secured the needed 218 signatures Andonly four days later on December 17 1937 74percent of southern Democrats and 93 percent of Re-publicans voted against three-quarters of nonsou-thern Democrats to return the bill to the LaborCommittee Southern diversity was also revealed onthis issue at least at this juncture Senator HugoBlack of Alabama was the sponsor of the bill in theSenate and had initially proposed that businessesaccept a thirty-hour workweek And after the billrsquosseeming demise in December momentum wasrenewed with the primary election victories of ListerHill and Claude Pepper in Alabama and Floridaover two anti-New Deal opponents with an opinionpoll suggesting that a plurality of white southernerssupported the bill After a meeting in the WhiteHouse the Southeastern (later Southern with the ad-mission of Arkansas Oklahoma and Texas) Gover-nors Conference announced their support for thebill56 But for the most part southern representativesprotested the bill as undermining southern industrybecause it required wages that could not be reason-ably afforded by businesses in the region57

This southern conservatism on issues related tolabor standards and organizingmdashand it was especiallyon issues relating to unions that the conservative coa-lition in voting appearedmdashradiated out to otherissues that at first glance did not have an obvious con-nection For instance while Nazism had been centralto Diesrsquos defense of the House Committee onUn-American Activities he moved quickly to directthe committeersquos attentions to the involvement ofCommunists in government agencies such as theFederal Theater Project and in the growing labormovement Both contemporaneous and recent histo-ries have shown that the conservative coalition sup-porting the Dies Committeemdashboth in congressionalvoting and in committee activitiesmdashwas organizedaround a concern with organized labor and the Con-gress of Industrial Organizations in particular58

54 Forty-five percent of southern Democrats (52 of eleven-state representatives) voted with 89 percent of Republicans andagainst 15 percent of nonsouthern Democrats in favor of investigat-ing the ldquosit-downrdquo strikes While 97 percent of northern Democratssupported the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 only 59 percent ofsouthern Democrats and 43 percent of eleven-state representativesdid so against 48 percent of Republicans who opposed it when itpassed the House Southern support had increased and Republi-can support declined when it came to the conference report

55 The conservative coalition did more than simply vote withRepublicans on the floor For instance Schickler and Pearson findthat the Rules Committee during much of the period examinedhere provided support for several conservative coalitions thatwere opposed by the Democratic Party leadership In addition toholding back liberal legislationmdashwhich might have resulted ineven more southern opposition in roll call votingmdashthe Rules Com-mittee frequently advanced conservative legislation either that hadnot been reported by the responsible committee or that was at-tached to ldquomust-passrdquo legislation Many of these in turn did notcome up for a roll call or saw conservative priorities advanced onlegislation supported by most liberals on account of it being ldquomust-passrdquo Eric Schickler and Kathryn Pearson ldquoAgenda Control Major-ity Party Power and the House Committee on Rules 1937ndash1952rdquoLegislative Studies Quarterly 34 (2009) 455ndash91

56 George Brown Tindall The Emergence of the New South1913ndash1945 (Baton Rouge Louisiana State University Press1967) 602 Howard D Samuel ldquoTroubled Passage The LaborMovement and the Fair Labor Standards Actrdquo Monthly LaborReview 123 (2000) 32ndash37 36

57 While a majority of southern representatives accepted theconference committee report (60 versus 96 of nonsouthernDemocrats and 52 of Republicans) they had secured a consider-able loosening of the standards and coverage of the bill On passageof the Fair Labor Standards Act see Jonathan Grossman ldquoFairLabor Standard Acts of 1938 Maximum Struggle for a MinimumWagerdquo Monthly Labor Review 101 (1978) 22ndash30 22 The publicopinion poll reported in Grossman was published in theNew York Times on February 16 1938 According to Grossmanabout 90 percent of the jobs lost in the first year of the FLSArsquos op-eration were in southern industries such as bagging pecan shellingand tobacco stemming Grossman ldquoFair Labor Standards Actrdquo 28

58 Katznelson Fear Itself 330 August Raymond Ogden TheDies Committee A Study of the Special House Committee for the



Similarly a conservative coalition first appearedaround the issue of national resources on a bill pro-hibiting strikes lockouts or work stoppages in facto-ries or mines used or operated by the United Statesfor the prosecution of the war This bill was opposedby nonsouthern Democrats and vetoed by the presi-dent but the veto was overturned by southern Demo-cratic and Republican votes59

The split in the Democratic Party opened up overspecific policy proposals reinforced by successivecongressional elections But the temporal orderingof these divisions was not an accident of the agendaThe differences between the partyrsquos regional wingsemerged as national policy began to enter intopolicy domains formerly the prerogative of thestates Perhaps more important the differencesemerged as the positions taken by the swelling contin-gent of liberal northern Democrats and the militantlabor organizations from which they increasinglydrew support made it clear to the southern politicalelite that they could no longer rely on their coparti-sans to support them in their paramount policyconcern

After the elections of 1932 Senator Carter Glassworried that ldquothe victory Tuesday was almost too over-whelming to be saferdquo and a few years later noted thatthe ldquoblue eagle [of the National Recovery Administra-tion] was fast becoming a bird of preyrdquo a ldquoblackbuzzardrdquo60 The formation of the Southern TenantsFarmers Union in response to the Agricultural Adjust-ment Act the CIOrsquos decision to send organizers tobuild unions in southern factories and the successesof the ldquosit-downrdquo strikes in the North for union mem-bership drives greatly heightened the anxieties of thesouthern political leadership while the reactionagainst labor unions in national (and especially south-ern) public opinion encouraged them to break withan otherwise popular administration61 The CIOmoreover was treading on ground that the AFL hadlong abandoned supporting biracial unions and ex-plicit organizing appeals to black workers The firstconstitutional convention of the CIO in 1938 unani-mously endorsed a resolution from a white unionistfrom Birmingham to work for the abolition of thepoll tax needed to gain the ldquoaid and active support

of the Negro peoplerdquo and ldquothe only guarantee ofthe continued existence and progress of the CIO inthe Southrdquo62 It was on those issues most implicatedin the threat posed by union organizing and federallabor reformmdashwhite supremacy and the regionrsquoslow-wage economymdashthat southern representativesbegan to break with their copartisans63

Even a first cut through this descriptive data dem-onstrates how the substance of policy maps ontothe types of coalitions that formed and identifiesturning points when coalitional patterns alteredwith regard to distinctive policies The analysis alsoinvites us to examine in closer detail which policyareas were most implicated in the maintenance ofwhite supremacy and the consequences of theseissue-specific shifts in southern representativesrsquo pref-erences on lawmaking and the creation of thepostwar policy regime

III THE PIVOTAL SOUTH

A comparison of the 73rd and the 81st congresses ef-fectively bookmarking the New and Fair Deal periodallows us to look more closely at some of the trendsnoted above The first question one central to Keyrsquosproject is the degree to which southern anxietyover the preservation of its racial hierarchy structuredattitudes on other issues as well Key of course identi-fied the Black Beltmdashthose counties where AfricanAmericans constituted more than 35 percent of thepopulationmdashas the bedrock of southern politicsWhile Key argued that many of the differencesbetween the Black Belt and nonndashBlack Belt were sub-merged in Congress it is not unreasonable to expectthat ideal points across different issues might none-theless vary across this divide

We examine the effect of three different regionalgroupings on member preferences the six states ofthe broader South the thirty-odd representatives ofthe Black Belt and the seventy or so representativesfrom the nonndashBlack Belt eleven-state South64 Welimit the analysis to Democrats and report the condi-tional marginal effect on a memberrsquos ideal point of

Investigation of Un-American Activities 1938ndash1943 (Washington DCCatholic University of America Press 1945) Nancy Lynn LopezldquoAllowing Fears to Overwhelm Us A Re-Examination of theHouse Special Committee on Un-American Activitiesrdquo (PhDdiss Rice University 2002)

59 Roosevelt vetoed the restriction on strikes at war factoriesalthough this was quickly overridden with 90 percent of southernDemocrats and 78 percent of Republicans voting against 65percent of nonsouthern Democrats

60 Harvard Sitkoff A New Deal For Blacks The Emergence of CivilRights as a National Issue vol 1 of The Depression Decade (New YorkOxford University Press 1978) 103ndash4

61 Caughey and Schickler ldquoPublic Opinion OrganizedLaborrdquo

62 Philip S Foner Organized Labor amp the Black Worker 1619ndash1973 (New York International Publishers 1974) 228

63 Michael Honey ldquoIndustrial Unionism and Racial Justice inMemphisrdquo in Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South edRobert Zieger (Knoxville University of Tennessee Press 1991)138 Sitkoff A New Deal for Blacks 105 Robert Rodgers KorstadCivil Rights Unionism Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracyin the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill University of NorthCarolina Press 2003)

64 These numbers changed relatively little over time Therewere thirty-two representatives from the Black Belt in the 73rd Con-gress and thirty-four in the 81st forty-five Democratic representa-tives from the six non-Confederate states (none of which met thethreshold of more than 35 black) in the 73rd and thirty-sevenby the 81st and seventy-three and seventy Democratic representa-tives of the eleven-state South outside the Black Belt in the 73rdand 81st Congresses respectively



being from one region rather than another65 This isthe effect relative to the ideal point of nonsouthernDemocrats We are interested in two differencesthat between nonsouthern Democrats and theircopartisans across the Southrsquos racial geography andthat between southern Democrats in and outsidethe Black Belt

Figure 10 shows the marginal effects of different re-gional specifications on member ideal points for sixtier 2 and tier 3 issue areas for the 73rd Congress66

With the exception of civil rights and immigrationsouthern representatives were consistently moreliberal in this period than their northern copartisansBut only on civil rights was there any significant differ-ence between the different regions of the South andhere there was no difference between the representa-tives of the Black Belt and other members of Congressfrom the former Confederacy By the 81st Congress(Figure 11) however the situation is quite differentOn civil rights the difference between the eleven-stateSouth and the full region had grown wider while thesmaller difference between Black Belt and nonndashBlackBelt representatives reflecting a series of votes on thepoll tax is statistically significant It is worth notinghowever that while some southerners from thebroader region were willing to enact antilynching legis-lation or a ban on the poll tax for federal officeholding not one congressional Democrat from any ofthe seventeen states publically opposed segregation67

Fig 10 Conditional Marginal Effect of Region on Ideal Point Relative to Mean Northern-Democrat 73rdCongress

65 The analyses of marginal effects are performed on idealpoints estimated across adjacent congresses in order to allow usto examine tier 3 as well as tier 2 preferences

66 The marginal effects were calculated from a regression thatestimated the effect on a memberrsquos issue-specific ideal point associ-ated with being one of four different categories of Democrat a non-southern Democrat (the intercept) a southern Democrat from thesix states of the full region a southern Democrat from outside theBlack Belt but inside the eleven states of the former Confederacy ora southern Democrat from within the Black Belt There were noBlack Belt districtsmdashdistricts where at least 35 percent of the popu-lation was African Americanmdashoutside the eleven-state South It isnecessary to account for both measurement uncertainty and sam-pling variability in the ideal points This problem can be addressedusing standard multiple imputation approaches We sampledtwenty iterations from the posterior distribution ran the analysison each and then combined the estimates taking into account

the within and between imputation variation The effect was ulti-mately to slightly increase the confidence intervals We would liketo thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion

67 The poll tax and soldier voting bills saw some southernersfrom outside the Black Belt support changes to a voting regime that



The difference among eleven-state southern repre-sentatives across the regionrsquos racial geography is alsosignificant for labor policy while almost all represen-tatives from the eleven-state South were further to theright than the mean northern Democrat this shift wasespecially pronounced among the representatives ofthe Black Belt And across all of these issues except ag-riculture where we again note the absence of any

conservative tendency among southerners the consis-tent effect of being from the eleven-state South andespecially from the Black Belt was to push Democraticmembers toward the Republican Party Different spec-ifications of the analysis consistently show the sameresult At both the beginning and end of theperiod there was a clear relationship between repre-senting a Black Belt congressional district and beingfurther right on civil rights and immigrationwhether looking at the full region or just the elevenstates of the Confederacy By the end of the periodhowever this pattern had extended to labor policyconcerns over whichmdashas we have seenmdashwere impli-cated in a variety of other issue areas and the eleven-state South had broken away on a range of domesticpolicy issues

A relationship between the Black Belt and conser-vative policy positions had clearly emerged by the81st Congress This occurred just as the South was be-coming the pivotal bloc in the House of Representa-tives and on those issues where the influence thataccompanies their holding the veto location wasgreatest One advantage of the Bayesian IRT modelused to estimate issue-specific scores is that theyallow for a very straightforward identification of thelocation of the median member of the chamber as

Fig 11 Conditional Marginal Effect of Region on Ideal Point Relative to Mean Northern-Democrat 81stCongress

disfranchised many whites along with blacks The only eleven-stateSouth- representative who might qualify as racially liberal by the tier2 estimates was Tennessee Republican Dayton Phillips elected fromthe first congressional districtmdashheld almost continuously by the Re-publican Party since 1859 and located in the eastern portion of thestate where unionism antislavery and support for free black votingrights had found support in the antebellum and Civil War eras Hewas located one-third standard deviations to left of the chambermedian The most ldquoliberalrdquo eleven-state South- Democrat wasNorth Carolinian Representative Charles Deane elected to theeighth congressional district a district whose black community con-stituted approximately 25 percent of the population He was locatedapproximately two-thirds to the right of the chamber median butnearly a full standard deviation away from the South-elevenmedian Deane would be defeated in the Democratic primary in1957 for refusing to sign the Southern Manifesto He would behonored for this by a Joint Resolution of the General Assembly ofNorth Carolina on July 17 2003 Resolution 2003ndash25HouseJoint Resolution 231



well as the probability that a given member or a blocof members will be located in the median position68

Figure 12 reports the proportion of times that themedian member of the 73rd House of Representa-tives belonged to different regional and partisanblocs across different tier 2 and 3 issue areas

With the massive Democratic majorities of the 73rdHousemdashapproximately 73 percent of the seats wereheld by Democrats as were 150 of the 152 seats inthe South (35 of the chamber)mdashthe South was po-tentially more important than they had been sincethe Wilson administration Still on most issues itwas northern Democrats who were most likely to bethe pivotal bloc in the House In the issue areas ofgeopolitics agriculture planning and resources po-litical economy and labor markets and unions theprobability that the median member would be a non-southern Democrat was 56 64 54 66 and 38 percentrespectively Only on labor markets and unions didthe South pull close to parity

At least in the early stages of the New Deal howeverthis heightened influence of the northern wing of theparty was not particularly threatening as across arange of issues the different factions had a remarkablysimilar distribution of preferences Figure 13 plots thedistribution of membersrsquo preferences for four tier 2and tier 3 issue areas for both the 73rd and 81st Con-gress69 In each the different segments of the Southhad broadly similar preferences to nonsouthern Dem-ocrats But in each this had changed considerably bythe 81st Congress with the Southmdashand especially therepresentatives of the former Confederacymdashmovingtoward the right70

The 81st was a critical congress for many reasonsElected in 1948 to follow the Republican congressthat had challenged New Deal arrangements it re-turned the country to unified government followingthe surprising victory of Harry Truman on a strongliberal Fair Deal platform The election campaignhad seen the adoption of a civil rights plank at the

Fig 12 Probability of Issue-Specific Median Member Across Region and Party 73rd Congress

68 We sampled legislatorsrsquo ideal points from the joint posteri-or distribution ranked the legislators by their ideal point identifiedwhich member was in the pivotal position and repeated this eighthundred times reporting the proportion of times that a set of leg-islators was pivotal See Clinton Jackman and Rivers ldquoStatisticalAnalysis of Roll Call Datardquo 360

69 These are kernel densities with fifty estimates generatedfor each subgroup

70 Separating out the Black Belt shows that these representa-tives were distributed even further from their nonsouthern coparti-sans than the nonndashBlack Belt southerners This was especially trueon the tier 2 issue areas of political economy and planning and re-sources as well as the tier 3 issue area of labor markets and unions



Democratic Party convention the Dixiecrat revoltthat produced the States Rights presidential ticketled by Strom Thurmond as well as PresidentTrumanrsquos Executive Order desegregating the militaryand his decision to campaign in Harlem It alsomarked a historical moment when as the sectionrsquosleading journalist John Temple Graves observedldquothe balance of political power in the 80th and 81stCongress has belonged to the Southrdquo71

But the change in southern preferences that hadplaced the balance of power in the Southrsquos handsmdashthe separation of the eleven-state from the seventeen-state South and the divergence of both from theDemocratic mainstreammdashwas not equally importanton all issues This is supported by the patterns inFigure 14 which shows that southerners were now es-pecially likely to be pivotal in matters of politicaleconomy and planning and resources with a clearpotential for a conservative coalition on labor Theregionrsquos influence over policy accordingly seemslikely to have varied considerably across issuedomains72 That southern representatives played animportant role in shaping the New Deal andpostwar policy regime is perhaps well recognizedbut as yet we do not have a strong sense of how thisrole might have variedmdasheither in the influence theyexercised or in the forms of policy they were willingto supportmdashacross issue areas

These results beckon us to follow Keyrsquos example ofstate-by-state analysis and the close policy-by-policyanalysis found in the congressional scholarship of

Fig 13 Changed Distribution of Preferences from 73rd to 81st Congress Selected Tier 2 and 3 Issue Areas

71 John Temple Graves ldquoRevolution in the Southrdquo The Virgin-ia Quarterly Review (1950) 190 It also was the subject of one of thefirst major behavioral studies of Congress David Trumanrsquos The Con-gressional Party A Case Study (New York Wiley 1959) His chapter onldquoDivision and Cohesion The Structure of Party Voting in the Houseof Representativesrdquo reported findings of particular interest to ourextension of the work of Key Three findings are perhaps most rel-evant He found that most of the time Democrats voted togetherbut that for low-cohesion votes ldquothe cleavage was essentially section-alrdquo Truman Congressional Party 150 But he also found that thesouthern faction exhibited far more ldquoshifting and unstable align-mentsrdquo ready to enter into coalition on specific questions withthe Republicans And while the South was especially ldquomultinuclearin formrdquo with ldquoa good deal of fluidityrdquo across issue areas the non-southern Democrats were by the 81st Congress an ever more unitedand left-oriented party wing that behaved with considerable inde-pendence Truman Congressional Party 158ndash59 161 Like Keywho along with Robert Dahl and Richard Neustadt is thanked aspart of a small group who read and commented on the manuscriptTruman did not have a policy classification with which to workIssues either appear one by one as illustrations of the trends inwhich he was most interested or are deployed in a very brief treat-ment of the degree of party cohesion classified by membership inspecific substantive House committees

72 The 81st Congress robustly debated civil rights initiativesespecially an antindashpoll tax bill and a controversial effort to createa permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) andextensions to the welfare state Only one of these the HousingAct of 1949 became law But it also produced a number of highlysignificant enactments concerned with geopolitics notably theNorth Atlantic Treaty the Foreign and Economic Assistance Actof 1950 and the National Security Amendments of 1949



Richard Bensel and Elizabeth Sanders73 Followingtheir lead we are particularly keen to pursue areasmarked by unusual policy voting Overall we wish tounderstand better David Trumanrsquos finding notedwith regard to the Senate that ldquocollective dissentfrom the majority as distinguished from random indi-vidual deviation was a peculiarly Southern character-istic and one not confined to matters of racerdquo74

IV BEYOND SOUTHERN POLITICS THE SOUTH INAMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

In Southern Politics Key recognized that the hub of therelationship between southern and national politicslies in Congress at the point where constituency rep-resentation and national participation join And yetneither historians nor political scientists have suffi-ciently integrated the South into the larger Americanexperience despite a growing recognition that muchin American political development cannot be ade-quately mapped and explained without a close atten-tion to the influence of southern politics in both stateand nation

The recognition of the regionrsquos centrality to con-gressional politics is especially important in light ofthe turn toward history undertaken by scholars ofCongress as scholars seek to better understand insti-tutional development and better testmdashwith a longertime horizonmdashmodels of legislative behavior andoutput Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal for in-stance have noted the regionrsquos importance in under-standing polarization and congressional politicsadvising scholars to consider the ldquoperiod from thelate New Deal until the mid-1970srdquo as constitutingthe ldquoonly genuine three-political-party system inAmerican historyrdquo with the southern Democrats con-stituting an entirely distinct party from the nonsou-thern Democrats75

Their admonition to treat the South as a distinctiveregion in congressional politics for an extendedperiod in the twentieth century is fundamentallycorrect but it is also only a beginning and thebroader set of issues upon which the supposedlysolid South cohered and broke apart remains poorlyunderstood This deficiency limits our analyses ofpolarization over time or of the ldquoend of Southernexceptionalismrdquo and potentially biases empiricalmodels of lawmaking that treat the regionrsquos repre-sentatives as being arrayed on the same dimensionas nonsouthern Democrats and Republican or that


73 Richard Franklin Bensel Sectionalism and American PoliticalDevelopment (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1984)Richard Franklin Bensel The Political Economy of American Industrial-ization (New York Cambridge University Press 2000) ElizabethSanders Roots of Reform Farmers Workers and the American State1877ndash1917 (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1999)

74 Truman Congressional Party 5975 Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal Ideology amp Congress

(New Brunswick NJ Transaction Press 2011) 54



treat NOMINATErsquos second dimension as relevantonly on votes pertaining to civil rights76 It is crucialto ldquoseparate out the Southrdquo in historical analyses ofCongress but to do so in a way that is sensitive tochanging patterns of southern behavior requires un-derstanding how the substance of representationstructured the willingness of southern members ofCongress to engage in coalitional politics with theirpartisan adversaries and copartisans The divergenceswe document heremdashof the South from the Democrat-ic mainstream and of the different regional group-ings within the Southmdashbegan at different times fordifferent issues highlighting the importance of a sub-stantive understanding of the particular historicalcontext in which these shifts occurred But on manyissues the South continued to vote with the broaderDemocratic coalition and unless variation in south-ern preferences is taken into account we riskgetting the story wrong or misestimating our modelsof polarization and lawmaking

Following Keyrsquos insight this article and the largerproject in which it is embedded seek to bring theSouth from the periphery to the center by emphasiz-ing the regionrsquos role in Congress and by exploring thesources of regional unity and fragmentation Our rep-lication of Keyrsquos analyses demonstrates that his find-ings still hold under more demanding specificationand with more data than he had available But wealso demonstrate the importance of disaggregatingacross issue areas raising further questions aboutthe origins content and character of member prefer-ences and especially the role played by the distinctive-ness of southern preferences in accounting forlegislative behavior and outcomes Over the courseof the period examined here southern Democratic

representatives began to break with longstanding par-tisan commitments and by the 78th Congress theyhad begun to move away from their long-held posi-tion anchoring the pole opposite the RepublicanParty But this change did not occur simultaneouslyacross policy areas or equally across the regionrsquosracial geography It occurred earlier and was consider-ably more marked on some issues than others Ourfindings also suggest the importance of anotherdynamic one that was by no means distinct fromthe Southrsquos changing preferences an increasinglycohesive and forceful left-wing nonsouthern Demo-cratic Party We do not believe these dynamics wereunrelated

Southern members of Congress flanked by region-al apartheid and an increasingly robust national liber-alism were far more intensely concerned with andunited about the race question than virtually anyother actors on the national political scene Despitean overarching national indifference that set blackrights aside or found ways to manage racial tensionsduring periods of great stress southern fears that po-tentially effective external pressure might be broughtto bear were not easily allayed The result was a persis-tent southern exaggeration of threat or so we believeto have been the case77 ldquoIronicallyrdquo David BrionDavis observed about antebellum America ldquoby con-tinually overreacting to a somewhat neutral compla-cent and racist North Southern militants createdan antislavery Northrdquo78 Likewise southern fearful-ness ultimately made it impossible for Jim Crow andmassive southern influence over most spheres of na-tional public policy to persist But in making thatclaim we are moving well beyond the bounds of thisarticle

76 Byron E Shafer and Richard Johnston The End of SouthernExceptionalism Class Race and Partisan Change in the Postwar South(Cambridge Harvard University Press 2009)

77 Daniel Kryder Divided Arsenal Race and the American StateDuring World War II (New York Cambridge University Press2000) Ira Katznelson When Affirmative Action Was White AnUntold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America(New York WW Norton 2005)

78 David Brion Davis Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery(Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2003) 90



Southern Politics Revisited On V O Keyrsquos lsquolsquoSouth in the Housersquorsquo

ampemphasis type=

Policy Content and Southern Preferences

The Pivotal South

Beyond ampemphasis type=

absences3 Most notable are the voices of black south-erners perhaps a reflection of the all-white researchteam W M Brewer a reviewer for the Journal ofNegro History wryly noted how ldquothe exploration resem-bles that of Myrdalrsquos An American Dilemma without ofcourse any such able colored participants as DrRalph Bunche who would have been indispensablefor reporting the realities regarding Negroesrdquo Strik-ingly too there is no mention of Myrdalrsquos work byKey though surely he knew its content thoroughlyWriting in the American Political Science ReviewArthur Holcombe observed that ldquothere is method inthis neglectrdquo4

Indeed there was Keyrsquos text was narrower thanMyrdalrsquos synoptic overview within which by contrastpolitics played a relatively modest role In centeringattention on the strategic role and patterns of actionwithin white-initiated and white-governed political in-stitutions most notably the regionrsquos anomalous elec-toral system Key wished to reveal its implications forpolicy and political representation A Texas-bornsoutherner who had been trained in politicalscience at the University of Chicago during the earlyperiod of the behavioral revolution Key sought to dis-close the systematic roots and expose the baneful con-sequences of the Southrsquos race-obsessed politicalarrangements He revealed mechanisms that gaveevery advantage to the regionrsquos semi-modern planta-tion aspects especially its black-belt counties ldquothehard core of the political Southrdquo where whites oftenwere or approached being a demographic minority5

He wanted most of all to empower what he calledldquothe unknown political Southrdquo whose range includedprogressivism and populism and a preference forurban and industrial modernization as well as ten-dencies that were not obsessed with racial hierarchy

In all Key aimed to shape a discussion that wouldempower sympathetic southern moderates muchlike himself who yearned for steady if slow reformwithout externalmdashthat is federalmdashintervention thatmight engender fierce white resistance His hopeand hedged prediction was that the growth of citiesthe relative decline of agriculture and the out-migration of blacks would prove to be ldquounderlyingtrends that probably will in due course further free[the South] from the effects of the Negro on its

politicsrdquo thus making southern politics more likethat of the rest of the nation6

Most historically minded Americanists know thecentral features of Keyrsquos analysis of what he labeledthe ldquounfathomable mazerdquo of political structures inthe Jim Crow South7 ldquoThe presence of the Negrordquohe wrote ldquohas created the conditions under whichthe political process operatesrdquo8 Southern politicsbased on a white regional consensus about racialsupremacy was organized in a plethora of factionalpatterns under the umbrella of what he designateda nonparty system Unguided by strong and competi-tive political parties the character of the segregation-ist politics chronicled by Key varied from state to statetaking one of four principal forms battles betweena hegemonic machine and its opponents battlesbetween geographic areas battles among competingcolorful and often demagogic leaders and com-pletely unstructured patterns

These patterns all operated as arrangements ofminority rule directed by leaders selected in Demo-cratic Party primaries by small to moderate-sizedoverwhelmingly or exclusively white electoratesOverall this patterning of political participation andcompetition was not equivalent to standard practicesbut was characterized by Key as ldquono party at allrdquo9 Thenonmajoritarian rules of the game were organizedabove all to underpin the regionrsquos deepest and mostintensely held racial commitments It was as aleading student of political parties has put thepoint ldquothe maintenance of an illiberal societymdashthewithholding of the rights of citizenship from a suffi-ciently large number to assure minority elections ina putatively majority systemmdashthat was the goalrdquo ofwhat Key called one-party factionalism10

Southern Politics sought to unpack the mechanismsprocesses procedures and consequences of this pe-culiar semi-organized and heterogeneous patternof politics But Key went beyond cataloguing theregionrsquos peculiar political diversity While southernpolitics and its ldquononpartyrdquo system was the great excep-tion to ordinary two-party competitive politics inAmerican life the South was an integralmdashindeed apowerfulmdashactor within national politics especiallyCongress There the white South a community ofshared fate and intention acted to guard theregionrsquos autonomous capacity to regulate its systemof racial hierarchy and humiliation That responsibil-ity demanded cohesion despite divisions of style po-litical practice and ideology ldquoThe one-party systemof the Southrdquo Key famously observed ldquois an institu-tion with an odd dual personality In state politicsthe Democratic party is no party at all but a

3 Gunnar Myrdal with the assistance of Richard Sterner andArnold Rose An American Dilemma The Negro Problem and ModernDemocracy (New York Harper amp Brothers Publishers 1944) Foran examination of Southern Politicsrsquo absences see the contributionsin Angie Maxwell and Todd G Shields Unlocking VO Key Jr South-ern Politics for the Twenty-First Century (Fayetteville University ofArkansas Press 2011)

4 Arthur N Holcombe ldquoReview of Southern Politics in State andNation by VO Key Jrrdquo American Political Science Review 44(1950)192

5 Valdimir Orlando Key Southern Politics in State and Nation(New York Knopf 1949) 666

6 Key Southern Politics 671ndash727 Key Southern Politics 6648 Key Southern Politics 6719 Key Southern Politics 392 38710 Aldrich ldquoSouthern Partiesrdquo 662




























































































(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)Congress(Year)


73 (1933) 56 47 839 57 47 839 46 821 129 107 82974 (1935) --- --- --- 115 73 635 82 713 184 128 69675 (1937) 77 50 649 77 53 688 53 688 142 106 74676 (1939) --- --- --- 76 58 763 60 789 199 148 74477 (1941) 67 50 746 67 49 731 45 672 117 68 58178 (1943) --- --- --- 74 45 608 39 527 126 62 49279 (1945) 75 47 627 74 50 676 44 595 165 80 48580 (1947) --- --- --- 65 35 538 33 508 126 61 48481 (1949) --- --- --- 91 45 495 42 462 202 104 51582 (1951) --- --- --- 88 47 534 44 50 146 69 473

All 275 194 705 783 502 641 488 623 1536 933 607













agreedwith NDem

majority

RCs whereSDs

disagreedwith N Dem

majority


Dems voteagainst N

Dems


Dems voteagainst N

Dems

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

73 (1933) 56 28 500 28 0 411 19 372 074 (1935) --- --- --- --- --- 250 22 245 075 (1937) 77 25 325 20 5 218 129 155 4576 (1939) --- --- --- --- --- 302 50 366 1977 (1941) 67 35 522 32 3 299 114 231 078 (1943) --- --- --- --- --- 167 143 127 6379 (1945) 75 24 320 21 3 182 100 152 4080 (1947) --- --- --- --- --- 175 45 167 14381 (1949) --- --- --- --- --- 173 286 119 082 (1951) --- --- --- --- --- 68 100 62 0

All 275 112 407 101 11 223 90 189 24






























Maritime




Continued







TABLE 4 Continued
































































































































































































ampemphasis type=


The Pivotal South



























































































(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)Congress(Year)


73 (1933) 56 47 839 57 47 839 46 821 129 107 82974 (1935) --- --- --- 115 73 635 82 713 184 128 69675 (1937) 77 50 649 77 53 688 53 688 142 106 74676 (1939) --- --- --- 76 58 763 60 789 199 148 74477 (1941) 67 50 746 67 49 731 45 672 117 68 58178 (1943) --- --- --- 74 45 608 39 527 126 62 49279 (1945) 75 47 627 74 50 676 44 595 165 80 48580 (1947) --- --- --- 65 35 538 33 508 126 61 48481 (1949) --- --- --- 91 45 495 42 462 202 104 51582 (1951) --- --- --- 88 47 534 44 50 146 69 473

All 275 194 705 783 502 641 488 623 1536 933 607













agreedwith NDem

majority

RCs whereSDs

disagreedwith N Dem

majority


Dems voteagainst N

Dems


Dems voteagainst N

Dems

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

73 (1933) 56 28 500 28 0 411 19 372 074 (1935) --- --- --- --- --- 250 22 245 075 (1937) 77 25 325 20 5 218 129 155 4576 (1939) --- --- --- --- --- 302 50 366 1977 (1941) 67 35 522 32 3 299 114 231 078 (1943) --- --- --- --- --- 167 143 127 6379 (1945) 75 24 320 21 3 182 100 152 4080 (1947) --- --- --- --- --- 175 45 167 14381 (1949) --- --- --- --- --- 173 286 119 082 (1951) --- --- --- --- --- 68 100 62 0

All 275 112 407 101 11 223 90 189 24






























Maritime




Continued







TABLE 4 Continued
































































































































































































ampemphasis type=


The Pivotal South










agreedwith NDem

majority

RCs whereSDs

disagreedwith N Dem

majority


Dems voteagainst N

Dems


Dems voteagainst N

Dems

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

73 (1933) 56 28 500 28 0 411 19 372 074 (1935) --- --- --- --- --- 250 22 245 075 (1937) 77 25 325 20 5 218 129 155 4576 (1939) --- --- --- --- --- 302 50 366 1977 (1941) 67 35 522 32 3 299 114 231 078 (1943) --- --- --- --- --- 167 143 127 6379 (1945) 75 24 320 21 3 182 100 152 4080 (1947) --- --- --- --- --- 175 45 167 14381 (1949) --- --- --- --- --- 173 286 119 082 (1951) --- --- --- --- --- 68 100 62 0

All 275 112 407 101 11 223 90 189 24






























Maritime




Continued







TABLE 4 Continued
































































































































































































ampemphasis type=


The Pivotal South


























Maritime




Continued







TABLE 4 Continued
































































































































































































ampemphasis type=


The Pivotal South






TABLE 4 Continued
































































































































































































ampemphasis type=


The Pivotal South


























































































































































































ampemphasis type=


The Pivotal South


Southern Politics Revisited: On V. O. Key’s “South in the ... · the political scientist,...

Documents

Transcript of Southern Politics Revisited: On V. O. Key’s “South in the ... · the political scientist,...