The Evolution from a Democratic to Republican South

• In Event: Polarization and Partisanship in Congress

Abstract

The realignment of the South is one of the most significant developments in the history of the United States. Consequently, political scientists have expended great effort in trying to explain the origins and consequences of the monumental shift of Southern white voters into the Republican party. This literature, however, has been primarily focused on the changing relationship between Southern voters and the national-level political elites and parties. Relatively few studies have focused on the dynamics of the realignment within the Southern states. This gap is especially important because the timing of the national-level and state-level realignments are not in sync. Democrats, for example, dominated southern state legislatures for most of the twentieth century. To shed light on the steps of this evolution from Democratic to Republican dominance in southern lawmaking, we collect the roll-call votes of all Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas state legislators since the 1950s. Using these novel data, we estimate legislators' ideal points over time to investigate the voting patterns and coalitions of southern state legislators from the time of the Brown v. Board decision through the civil rights movement to the modern day. We find that party does little to explain first-dimension ideal points until the late 1980s.

Authors

• Nolan McCarty, Princeton University

• Steven Rogers, Saint Louis University