The South continues to be the most distinctive region in American politics. Its “peculiar institution” of slavery set the stage for the Civil War, which in turn led to the creation of the Democratic “Solid South.” Now the South is so interesting because of the enormous political change that has occurred over the last half century. Democratic dominance has given way to the emergence of a truly competitive two-party system that leans Republican in presidential elections. In some ways, the region is increasingly like the rest of the country, yet even the degree of change and the speed with which it occurred give the South a distinctive air.
How have these changes affected the South’s political parties? Political scientists widely agree that parties are essential for the operation of democracy. Scholars concerned about the vitality of American political parties in recent decades have produced considerable research on political party organizations at the national, state, and local levels. This study examines both the development of American political party organizations and the changing political character of the South, two interesting and important aspects of American politics. Our focus is on southern grassroots party activists—those who are involved in county party organizations. By studying these activists, we hope to learn about the development of party organizations in a region marked by great partisan change, an effort that we think should be of interest to both analysts of political parties and scholars of southern politics.
For the first half of the twentieth century, the South was solidly Democratic. Republicans enjoyed very little electoral success in the region. In the latter half of the century, the pattern changed, and by the start of the twenty-first century, the old Solid South was a two-party South. Electoral change occurred first at the presidential level, emerging in midcentury. Republican presidential candidates in the first half of the twentieth century ran very poorly in the South (Bartley and Graham 1975, 7–14). The only exception to this pattern was in 1928, when Republican Herbert Hoover won five southern states, due largely to the fact that the Democrats nominated a candidate, Al Smith, who was both Catholic and anti-Prohibition (Key 1949, 318–329). Republicans became more competitive in presidential elections in the 1950s, especially in the urban Rim South. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower carried four southern states in 1952 and five in 1956. Richard Nixon carried three southern states in 1960 and was competitive in several others. Support for Eisenhower and Nixon came disproportionately from urban areas and from the Rim South (Black and Black 1992, 176–199). The Eisenhower-Nixon voters typically were middle-class whites who favored Republicans on economic issues (Bartley and Graham 1975, 86–95).
Republican presidential voting took a new turn in 1964, when Barry Goldwater drew upon different sources of electoral support to win five southern states. Senator Goldwater, who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, did his best in the Deep South, among white voters of all income levels, who largely opposed the Civil Rights Act and other attempts to integrate southern society (Black and Black 1992, 149–158). By 1972, Republican voting in the South appeared to have come full circle, as incumbent president Richard Nixon carried every state in the region by a wide margin in his reelection effort (although it should be noted that his Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern, did poorly nationally, not just in the South). When the Democrats in 1976 nominated a more competitive candidate, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, they were able to win all but one of the southern states, albeit by narrow margins in several cases.
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Republican success in presidential elections in the South became firmly established. Ronald Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984 appear to have realigned white southerners toward the Republican Party. From 1984 on, the Republican presidential candidate has run significantly better in the South than in the North (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde 2002, 109). Even in 1992, when the Democrats nominated an all-southern ticket of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, they were able to win only four states in the region, and two of those were Arkansas and Tennessee, the home states of their two candidates. Perhaps the 2000 presidential election demonstrates the current Republican advantage in southern presidential voting best of all. George W. Bush carried every southern state, even though the election was extremely close nationally, in both the popular and Electoral College vote.
Republican success in other elections lagged behind the growth of presidential voting. For example, after the 1972 election, in which Richard Nixon carried the South in a landslide, Democrats still held two-thirds of the U.S. senators and representatives from the region. Democratic control of state government was equally strong. Republican success in subpresidential elections emerged first in prominent statewide contests, such as for governor or senator, then trickled down the ballot (Aistrup 1996, 211–242; Bullock and Rozell 2003b; Scher 1997, 118–159). Following the 1980 elections, five of the eleven states had a Republican governor, and ten of the twenty-two southern U.S. Senate seats were held by Republicans. Democrats did better during the remainder of the 1980s; and after the 1992 elections, only three governors and nine senators in the region were Republicans. Republicans responded with significant gains after 1992, however, and in early 2001 they had a majority of the governors and senators in the region—six governors and thirteen senators (for state-by-state summaries, see Bullock and Rozell 2003a; Clark and Prysby 2003; and Lamis 1999).
The 1990s also were the decade in which Republicans captured a majority of the southern U.S. House seats. Even as late as 1990, Democrats had a big edge in southern congressional elections, winning two-thirds of the House seats that year. In the historic 1994 midterm elections, Republicans made enormous gains in southern congressional races, winning an additional sixteen seats, giving them a majority of the region’s congressional delegation. They expanded their majority in subsequent elections; and after the 2000 elections, 58 percent of the southern congressional seats were held by Republicans. The 1990s also saw Republicans make gains in state legislative elections, although Democrats continued to maintain an advantage at this level. In early 2001, Democrats still had the majority in seven state legislatures, while Republicans had control of only three (one state legislature had divided control). For Republicans, even this limited success was a substantial improvement over the situation ten years earlier, when they were in the minority—often a very small minority—in every state legislature.
At the start of the twenty-first century, the South clearly had two-party competition. While Republicans appear to have gained a clear advantage in presidential elections and at least an edge in congressional elections as well, Democrats have managed to remain competitive overall. In almost every state, both parties have a reasonable chance of winning important statewide contests, such as for governor or U.S. senator, especially when no incumbent is running for reelection. Democratic strength in southern state legislatures continues to provide the party with a farm team of potential candidates for higher office. Whether Republicans will enjoy even greater electoral success in the next decade or two is uncertain now, but at the time that the data for this study were collected, a competitive two-party system existed in the region.
The growth of a two-party South in voting patterns and election results has been accompanied by the development of party organizations in the southern states. For most of the twentieth century, the South had very weak political organizations. During the Solid South era, Republicans were too weak electorally to create a strong party organization (Key 1949, 277–297). Democrats, on the other hand, did not need to create a strong organization, as they were able to dominate without one. Moreover, Democrats were generally divided into factions, whose leaders often feared that too much organizational infrastructure would give an unfair advantage to one group or another (Key 1949, 298–311). Studies of party organization in the 1960s and 1970s conclude that southern parties were weak even after the demise of the Solid South. Mayhew’s (1986) study of party organization in the late 1960s found weak party organization across the South, particularly compared to the Northeast, where traditional party organization was the strongest. Cotter, Gibson, Bibby, and Huckshorn (1984) measured the strength of state party organizations in the 1970s by examining such factors as budgets, staffing, activities, and organizational complexity. They found that both Democratic and Republican Parties in the South lagged far behind parties in the other regions in party organizational strength.
Once a foothold of two-party competition was established, party organizations became useful for recruiting candidates, providing campaign resources and assistance, and mobilizing voters. Republicans appeared to have moved first to strengthen their state organizations. The Republican Party pioneered a strategy of “top-down” organizational development by pumping money and other resources from the national party to the states (Herrnson 1994). Within the southern states, Republicans often also followed a top-down strategy, in which state party organization was emphasized over local party organization (Aistrup 1996, 65–89). Southern Democrats responded to the growing two-party competitiveness and the increased Republican organizational presence by improving their own party organizations. State headquarters for both parties became more permanent entities, engaging in activities year round. Staffing and budgets for the state parties increased dramatically. Of course, these developments varied in their extent and timing from state to state (for state summaries, see Clark and Prysby 2003; Hadley and Bowman 1995).
While southern state party organizations are much stronger than they were three decades ago, the strength of local party organizations in the South is less clear. Republicans had been more concerned with their state party organizations, but more recently they have emphasized grassroots developments (Stanley 1995). Democrats also have attempted to improve their county party organizations, which in many areas had decayed during the 1970s and 1980s. Democratic grassroots organizations have been greatly affected by the realignment of southern voters. Many conservative white Democrats who were active in earlier years ceased their activity and even became active in the Republican Party (Prysby 1998a). At the same time, blacks have become a much more important part of the southern Democratic coalition and have become more involved in the party organization (Hadley and Stanley 1998). These changes make southern grassroots party activists a very interesting group to analyze.
Studying southern grassroots party activists not only will enlighten us about contemporary southern politics but also will inform us about developments in American political party organizations. Some may question whether party organizations deserve more study, as elections are commonly viewed as becoming increasingly candidate-centered (Wattenberg 1991). We believe that such an endeavor is worthwhile for two important reasons. First, parties are widely considered to be essential organizations for the operation of a democratic system. Theorists like Schattschneider (1942, 1) have argued that “modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties.” More empirically minded researchers have shown that parties provide structure to political conflict, among both elected officials (Aldrich 1995) and voters in elections (Schaffner, Streb, and Wright 2001). While public support for the two-party system waxes and wanes, most political scientists (even though they may be critical of the contemporary parties) share the belief that politics without parties would be worse than the system we have today (Epstein 1986, 9–39).
Second, there has been concern over the health of American political party organizations. A prevalent view in the 1970s and 1980s was that American political parties were in decline.1 Numerous indicators seemed to point to that same conclusion. Additional limits were placed on the use of patronage in awarding government jobs, robbing party organizations in some areas of a ready-made campaign staff. The Democratic Party’s McGovern-Fraser reforms led to an opening of the presidential nominating systems of both parties. At lower levels, the ability of party organizations to slate candidates for nomination was reduced. Voters seemed less aligned to the parties when casting ballots. Split-ticket voting increased, as did the number of nonaligned or independent voters. Finally, lower levels of party voting were observed in Congress. Reforms that gave more power to individual legislators appeared to weaken the already low levels of cohesion within parties (other reforms strengthening the leadership were less visible at the time). Considering all of these trends, some observers went so far as to suggest that the two major parties would soon fade into oblivion.
More recent scholarly views argue that this decline-of-party thesis is wrong. Most would agree that the parties are weaker in some ways. The number of voters who identify with the parties has not rebounded to earlier levels, for example, and party leaders have ceded control over the presidential nominations to a mix of primary voters and campaign fund-raisers. Still, the parties are stronger in other ways. The national party organizations, for example, are much larger and better financed organizations than they were thirty years ago (Herrnson 1994). Similarly, in many states, the state party organizations have improved their headquarters in recent years. The use of the “soft money” loophole provided resources for this purpose, but many state parties were effective fund-raisers in their own right (La Raja 2003; Morehouse and Jewell 2003).
Less attention has been given to local party organizations, especially outside of major metropolitan areas. The available evidence suggests that here, too, party organizations may be strengthening, at least in some places. The notoriety of Tammany Hall and other urban machines creates an image of the local party as dominant in an earlier era, yet it is not clear whether such organizations were exceptions or the norm. Perhaps more telling is the overall weakness of county parties in the South in the late 1970s (Cotter et al. 1984). The precursor to our study (Hadley and Bowman 1995) and our own state-level analyses (Clark and Prysby 2003) show markedly different levels of organizational activity in 1991 and 2001, respectively, than those uncovered by Cotter and his colleagues.
Although most local party organizations may lack the resources to provide significant services, they can and do affect electoral outcomes. Trish (1994) notes that tight networks of party and campaign officials contribute to the success of presidential candidates.2 Strong local organizations can lead to higher vote totals for candidates farther up the ticket (Frendreis, Gibson, and Vertz 1990). Contacting voters directly, a task often handled by party workers at the grassroots, has an impact on voters’ decisions (Wielhouwer and Lockerbie 1994). Overall, strong party organizations have been shown to improve citizen evaluations of and appreciation for parties (Coleman 1996).
We believe, then, that grassroots party organizations remain important. They may be less visible than state or national organizations, but that does not make them irrelevant. Candidates may no longer be dependent on them to gain access to the ballot or to mobilize voters, but that does not make them useless. Local party organizations help to recruit candidates for lower-level offices. They provide a base of possible volunteers for campaigns, especially local ones. They, along with local office holders, help to define the image that the party has at the local level. By their actions, grassroots activists can help to bring voters and activists into the party or they can drive them away. The fact that these county-level organizations are important is demonstrated by the fact that southern Republicans in many states, after first concentrating on developing the state party organization, have been working on improving their local party organizations. Democrats, to a lesser extent, have followed suit.
The substantial evolution of party competition in the South makes it a useful laboratory in which to study change in party organizations. Scholars have long posited a relationship between the competitive environment and the development of party organizations in the South and elsewhere (see, for example, Key 1949; Beck 1974; Harmel and Janda 1982). Key (1949, 386–405) noted the general weakness of local party organizations in the one-party South compared to those found in the rest of the country. The rare organization that “most closely approximates the usual concept of a party” would most likely be found in the parts of North Carolina, Virginia, or Tennessee where party competition was the greatest (Key 1949, 388). Similar conclusions for the region were reached by subsequent researchers (Crotty 1971; Beck 1974).
The corollary to this finding is that party organizations should show signs of development as electoral competition increases. As elections become more competitive, their outcomes are less certain. Likewise, the shift in voter allegiance from overwhelming Democratic support to greater balance between parties, with many nonaligned voters, gives each party the opportunity to win any given election. Under these conditions of uncertainty, every possible vote counts. As a result, candidates from the same party have greater incentive to cooperate with one another (Schlesinger 1985). Party organizations are ideally constituted for such a task. The party organization, malleable to the goals of ambitious politicians, has adapted to meet the needs of candidates for all levels of office (Aldrich 1995; Herrnson 1988; Francia et al. 2003). Of course, increased competition does not guarantee organ-izational development. Other characteristics of the political environment can encourage or discourage organizational growth. Likewise, characteristics internal to the party, notably leaders themselves, may play a role as well (Herrnson and Menefee-Libey 1990; Appleton and Ward 1994).
Aside from campaigning for candidates, the parties may have changed in other ways. Prior empirical evidence is limited, but several possible developments can be suggested. For example, the types of activists who are recruited into the party may change as the party shifts to a more competitive political environment. Activists who are attracted to a distinctly minority party may have different goals and values than those who are attracted to a party with a strong possibility of winning elections. As the level of competition increases, we might find that party activists become more concerned with winning rather than with maintaining ideological purity. Other questions also might be raised regarding changes in party activists. For example, are the policy preferences of southern party activists becoming more in line with the positions of the national parties? Is there more emphasis placed on day-to-day organizational maintenance as the level of competition increases? An environment in which change is taking place provides an opportunity to explore such questions about party organizations and the activists who work in them, questions which in many cases have not received systematic study.
This study focuses on grassroots political party activists in the South, defined as the eleven states of the old Confederacy. Our approach is to consider party organizations in terms of the people who staff them. This conceptualization is consistent with Eldersveld (1964, 1):
The political party is a social group, a system of meaningful and patterned activity within the larger society. It consists of a set of individuals populating specific roles and behaving as member-actors of a boundaried and identifiable social unit. Goals are perceived by these actors, tasks are assigned for and by them, and communication channels are maintained. The party is thus one social organism.
We believe this approach complements those who view parties in terms of candidates or officeholders, as individual citizens with partisan attachments, or at the level of the organization itself.
The data employed in this study are drawn primarily from the 2001 Southern Grassroots Party Activists Project.3 The 2001 SGPA study is a follow-up to the original SGPA study conducted in 1991.4 The goal of both SGPA studies was to analyze the attitudes and behavior of southern grassroots party activists, generally defined as county chairs and other members of the county executive committees.
The 2001 SGPA study surveyed over seven thousand party activists. Respondents were almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. The details of the sampling plan for each state and a summary of response rates by state and party can be found in the appendix to this book. A mail questionnaire was used to collect data on the attitudes, behavior, and characteristics of party activists. In most cases, three waves of questionnaires were mailed out in an effort to maximize the response rate, which exceeded 50 percent overall. These data have been weighted as described in the appendix in order to improve the representativeness of the sample. The sample for the original SGPA study, which surveyed over ten thousand party activists, was similar to the one for the current study; a full description of that sample can be found in Hadley and Bowman (1995, 211–214).
The 2001 SGPA study asked respondents about a variety of attitudes and behavior, including their reasons for becoming and staying involved in party politics, their attitudes toward party activity, their involvement in campaign activities and in party organizational activities, their orientations on issues of public policy, and their social and demographic characteristics. Many of the questions employed in the 2001 study were also used in the 1991 study, providing an opportunity to study change in attitudes and behavior over time. Other questions asked in 2001 were not asked in 1991, so it is not possible to examine change over time for all items. A copy of the 2001 questionnaire is in the appendix to this book. A copy of the 1991 questionnaire can be found in Hadley and Bowman (1995, 219–226).
The ability to examine change over time in the attitudes and behavior of party activists rarely exists. Systematic collection of data on party activists beyond a single state is unusual. Having such data for two points in time is even more so. Moreover, the period from 1991 to 2001 is one in which much political change occurred in the South. As discussed earlier, Republicans made substantial gains in congressional and state legislative elections during this decade, making them much more competitive up and down the ballot than they were during the 1980s, when their strength was displayed primarily in presidential and statewide races. These facts suggest that this study will be of interest to many scholars interested in political parties or in southern politics.
The chapters in this volume examine several important research questions. One broad set of questions has to do with conflict within and between the parties. One aspect of the divisions between and within parties in the South has to do with social factors, of which race and religion are the most important. The divisions between and within the parties also can be examined in terms of the attitudes of activists. Differences in their ideological orientations, their issue positions, and their partisan attachments all are important for understanding conflict.
In addition to examining conflict between and within the parties, we are interested in the involvement of activists in their organizations. The involvement of activists can be examined from two perspectives. One has to do with the attitudes that they bring to their involvement. What motivates activists to become involved, and what kinds of orientations do the activists display toward involvement in the party organization? In particular, we are interested in determining whether the grassroots activists tend to be uncompromising ideologues who would sacrifice the prospects of electoral success for ideological purity or whether they tend to be a more pragmatic group, concerned primarily with winning elections. Another dimension of involvement is the actual activity level of the activists. Their activities can be divided into two types—involvement in election campaigns and involvement in ongoing party activities. Both are desirable for a healthy party organization.
The three chapters in Part A discuss social factors and their impact on party conflict. John Clark’s chapter on religious orientations among southern political party activists (chapter 2) focuses on a key political division in the contemporary South, the split between white fundamentalist Protestants who support the Christian Right and those who oppose or at least do not support this political movement. The conflict occurs both between parties—as Democrats are unlikely to be supporters of the Christian Right—and within the Republican Party, which is divided in its enthusiasm for the Christian Right agenda.
Jay Barth’s chapter (chapter 3) examines another key social division in the South—race. The Democratic Party depends on holding together a biracial coalition to achieve electoral success, but racial divisions within the party make this coalition a tenuous one. Republicans are not racially divided, as few blacks are active in the party. Race is a divisive social factor because several race-related issues, such as affirmative action, are a basis for political conflict, which occurs between the two parties as well as within the Democratic Party.
Change in the party organizations occurs not only because activists change their views but also because the activists themselves change. Some of this occurs through generational (and other) replacement. Newer activists replace older ones. The newer activists, who usually are younger, grew up in a different political environment; consequently, they often have different attitudes. Another source for newer activists is the sizable number of individuals who have moved to the South, a group that has been particularly important in the South, especially for the Republican Party. The impact of migration on the party activists is examined in chapter 4 by Laurence Moreland and Robert Steed.
In Part B we examine the political attitudes of southern political party activists, again concentrating on conflict within and between the parties. The ideological and issue orientations of activists are examined by Patrick Cotter and Sam Fisher in chapter 5. They point out how Democratic and Republican activists have become more ideologically polarized over the past decade. The deep differences between the two parties range over a wide variety of issues, but some are more divisive than others. Jonathan Knuckey’s chapter on party loyalties (chapter 6) finds that the activists are also more loyal to their parties now than they were ten years ago, a development that may have much to do with the ideological polarization of the parties. Still, activists differ in their degree of attachment, and these differences are related to other differences in attitudes and behavior.
Divisions within the parties remain important, even though party differences are sharper and deeper than before. John McGlennon examines party factionalism in chapter 7. His discussion of factionalism within the Democratic and Republican Party organizations ties together a number of points that are brought out in the preceding chapters, such as the role of race and religion. While factionalism can be based on several factors, ideology and policy issues are the key factors that underlie most divisions.
An important question regarding party activists is, how much do they resemble the broader electorate? The usual assumption is that party activists are more ideologically extreme than the electorate, meaning that Democratic activists are more liberal than Democratic voters and Republican activists are more conservative than Republican voters. Chapter 8 examines this proposition, comparing the two parties on this dimension and examining changes over time.
Another important set of research questions has to do with the strength and vitality of the party organizations. Have the local party organizations become stronger or weaker over the past decade? How do the two parties compare to each other? In Part C we attempt to assess the health of the party organization by examining several aspects of the attitudes and behavior of the grassroots activists. Chapter 9 examines the orientations that activists have toward parties and issues, distinguishing between purists and pragmatists. Purists emphasize ideological purity; pragmatists emphasize electoral success. High levels of purism among party activists may hamper the party’s ability to compromise, even when necessary for electoral victory. For this reason, the differences between the parties on this dimension and the changes that have occurred over the past ten years are significant for the vitality of the party organization. A related topic, the factors that motivate individuals to become and remain active in party organizations, is covered in chapter 10. Individuals who are motivated primarily by issues are likely to differ from those who are motivated by other factors as well, such as the social benefits of involvement. The findings of this chapter complement the discussion of purism in chapter 9.
Finally, we examine the extent to which grassroots activists are actively involved in their party organizations. Robert Hogan discusses the involvement of activists in campaign activities in chapter 11, comparing the two parties and examining change in activity levels over time. John Bruce and John Clark look at another aspect of organizational involvement, communication within the organization, in chapter 12. Communication levels provide a picture of organizational involvement apart from campaign activities, involvement that is aimed more at organizational maintenance. Both of these chapters find that the grassroots party activists are more active now than they were a decade ago, suggesting that local party organizations are becoming stronger in the contemporary two-party South.
In the concluding chapter, we summarize and integrate the findings of the individual chapters. We locate the findings within two theoretical traditions important to students of parties generally, the responsible parties’ perspective, and the party renewal perspective.
The focus of this book is on the South as a whole. We believe this focus is justified because there are important commonalities to party politics across the entire region, and examining these commonalities should help us to better understand politics in the South. While some of the chapters briefly examine state-by-state variations, a thorough examination of how the topics covered in this volume play out in each state is beyond the scope of this study. However, those who are interested in individual states should refer to a special double edition of the American Review of Politics, which contains articles that examine party activists in each of the eleven states covered by the SGPA studies (Clark and Prysby 2003).
1. The list is lengthy and includes many (if not most) textbooks on American government. See, for example, works by Broder (1972), Crotty and Jacobson (1980), and Wattenberg (1994).
2. For an example of the opposite situation where a dysfunctional local organization costs candidates votes, see Blumberg, Binning, and Green (2003).
3. The 2001 Southern Grassroots Party Activists Project was funded by NSF grants SES-9986501 and -9986523. John A. Clark and Charles L. Prysby were the principal investigators. The surveys in the eleven states were administered by a set of state investigators, who also are the authors of the various articles in this study.
4. The 1991 SGPA Project was funded by NSF grant SES-9009846. Charles D. Hadley and Lewis Bowman were the principal investigators, and the surveys in the eleven states were administered by a set of state investigators, many of whom also participated in the 2001 SGPA Project.