Legislative Factions in the Solid South

• In Event: New Measurements for Studying Representation in State Politics

Abstract

Are intra-party factions capable substitutes for political parties, even intermittently? Existing scholarship on this question, led by V.O. Key’s state-by-state analysis of the U.S. South, has generally relied on analysis of voting patterns, concluding that factions exist when meaningful correlation across time or offices is found in primary election returns. The core representative function that one expects parties to play, however—forging a link between citizens’ policy preferences and legislators’ policymaking behavior—is missing from these analyses. In this paper, I draw on original data on legislative roll call voting in the state legislatures of the U.S. South between 1935 and 1946 to explore whether meaningful legislative divides exist in this context. I use a variety of measurement strategies to quantify the structure of roll call voting in these states and to assess whether factionalism in roll call voting corresponds to Key’s typology of southern states. Finally, I explore the bases of factionalism by exploring district-level correlates of roll call voting in these state legislatures. These results fill an important gap in understanding the importance of parties and factions for facilitating legislative representation in the United States.

Author

• Michael P. Olson, Washington University in St. Louis