The impact of race, industrialization and modernization on electoral change in the South, 1940-1984.

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the impact of race, industrialization and modernization on Southern realignment toward the Republican party. A prevailing belief is that the Republican party's success in the South can be attributed to racial tension spawned primarily be the civil rights movement. Both individual and aggregate-level data were used to test this hypothesis. Based on individual-level panel data, the civil rights thesis gained considerable support. Party identification tended to be better transmitted and more persistent among non-Southern parents and youth than among South parents and youth. And, with much less consistency, civil rights attitudes tended to be more effectively transmitted and more persistent among Southerners than non-Southerners. Party identification also proved to have a stronger impact on the voting behavior of Southerners than non-Southerners. And although the evidence was more mixed, civil rights attitudes tended to have more import in voting of Southerners than non-Southerners. In the aggregate context, data on racial concentration and the ratio of black to white income were used to evaluate the racial tension thesis. Racial concentration, assessed in the context of the Blackbelt thesis offered by V. O. Key, tended to be strongly associated with Republican support in the South when Republicanism was measured over long time intervals and during the primary period of the civil rights movement. The black-white income ratio measure used the degree of equality (or inequality) in the income of blacks and whites as a measure of racial tension. The performance of the model using this measure was generally weak. But, as in the case of racial concentration, more support was found for the civil rights thesis when Republicanism was operationalized in terms of longer time spans and when the timing of the civil rights movement was taken into account. With respect to economic development, the basic hypothesis is that the Republican party is gaining in the South because of increases in industrialization and modernization. A fair amount of support was found from static or cross-section analysis of aggregate data for the idea that the Republican party is the beneficiary of economic change in the South. But when looked at dynamically, industrial and modernization indicators showed weak and often contradictory associations with electoral change in the South. The conclusion of this dissertation is that electoral change in the South can be explained in part by economic development and racial considerations.