Scholars in a wide range of fields have long identified population movement as an important variable. Demographers and economists, for example, have analyzed the effects of population movement on such matters as patterns of industrialization, income change, generational change, and race relations (see, e.g., Long 1975; Shin 1978; Biggar and Biasiolli 1978; and Biggar 1984). Political scientists also have long seen population movement as important. Early research by Lubell (1952) and Harris (1954) focused on some of the key political consequences of movement of people from central cities to suburbs. Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes (1960), in their groundbreaking analysis of political behavior in the 1950s, noted the political importance of interregional population movement, a line of inquiry later extended by others such as Feigert (1973) and Brown (1988). Scammon and Wattenberg (1970) pointed to population shifts as a factor contributing to the modification of the American party system; and Dye (1966), Sharkansky (1969), and Katzman (1978) examined the consequences of population mobility for state and local policy.
Similarly, and more relevant to the central focus of this chapter, examinations of political parties in the post–World War II South have frequently pointed to population movement into the region as one important factor in the dramatic transformation of the South’s party system from a one-party Democratic stronghold to one of Republican strength.
In this regard, despite some research findings to the contrary (e.g., Nie, Verba, and Petrocik 1976, 221; Petrocik 1987; Beck 1977), the impact of (especially white) in-migration has been generally identified as an important variable in the development of Republican Party strength in the southern electorate as nonsoutherners moving into the region brought their party identifications and voting habits with them. For example, a broad examination of Republican Party growth in the South between the 1940s and the mid-1960s by Topping, Lazarek, and Linder (1966) concluded that in-migration made a significant contribution to the development of southern Republicanism. Other research in Tennessee found that, in comparison with native southerners, nonsouthern in-migrants in that state tended to be more affluent, more Republican, and more inclined to support changes in existing morality legislation and in existing state political structures (Lyons and Durant 1980). Similarly, Campbell (1977b), in examining survey data for the 1952–1972 period, reported that in-migration explains roughly 25 percent of the change in southern partisanship during those two decades. He speculated, moreover, that the influence of in-migration might well be greater than these figures suggest inasmuch as “[t]he arrival of northern Republicans . . . may well have served to catalyze a movement into the Republican Party among large numbers of formerly Democratic southerners” (Campbell 1977b, 755). Additional research by Converse (1972, 314), Wolfinger and Arseneau (1978, 185), Welch and Brown (1979), Wolfinger and Hagen (1985, 10), Black and Black (1987), and Van Wingen and Valentine (1988, 131–134) further support the argument that population movement contributed significantly to southern partisan change in the electorate (for a good summary, see Stanley and Castle 1988).
While much of the research on in-migration has focused on its impact on partisanship and voting patterns in the South, there is some evidence that it has affected the region’s politics in other ways as well. For example, Black and Black (2002) cited a recent public opinion survey that reveals a number of attitudinal and ideological differences between native southerners and in-migrants. Focusing especially on the data for white men, they noted that by 1999 native white men tended to be more Republican than white men who had moved into the region and that they tended to be more conservative on a number of social, racial, and religious issues than in-migrants (see Black and Black 2002, 425, n. 11).
There is also a body of research that examines the impact of population movement into the South on the party organizations in the region. For example, Bowman, Hulbary, and Kelley (1990) found that in-migrants had become heavily involved in Florida’s party organizations inasmuch as almost two-thirds of precinct officials in both parties had moved into the state from outside the South; in turn, they found that these in-migrants had contributed significantly to the ideological realignment of the state’s parties. Similarly, analyses of data on state convention delegates and on precinct officials in South Carolina demonstrated that in-migration has had a clear impact on party organizations and activities in the state, particularly by pulling the Democratic Party ideologically to the left (see, e.g., Steed, Moreland, and Baker 1981; Moreland, Steed, and Baker 1986; Steed, Moreland, and Baker 1990; Moreland 1990b; Steed, Moreland, and Baker 1991; Steed, Moreland, and Baker 1995; Moreland and Steed 1998a; Moreland and Steed 1998b; Moreland and Steed 2001).
The Southern Grassroots Party Activists Project survey invites a regionwide examination of in-migration’s impact on local party organizations. Here, we analyze data from the 2001 Southern Grassroots Party Activists Project to assess the current impact of in-migration on the South’s local party organizations (and to update the earlier findings of the 1991 Southern Grassroots Party Activists Project; see Feigert and Todd 1998). For our analysis here, we divide Democratic and Republican respondents into two groups each: natives (those who grew up in one of the eleven southern states) and nonnatives (those who grew up outside the South). For both parties, over a quarter of the respondents—26 percent of the Democrats (n = 929) and 29 percent of the Republicans (n = 1,020)—reported having grown up outside the South. Most of the nonnatives immigrated to the South from either the eastern or midwestern regions of the United States (see table 4.1).
As already noted, in-migrants constitute over a quarter of local party activists in each party. Table 4.2, which reports data by state, suggests two observations: generally, Rim South states show greater penetration than Deep South states, and local Republican Party organizations show greater penetration than Democratic organizations. Among Deep South states, South Carolina and Georgia show the most penetration, with Louisiana showing, by far, the least. Between the two parties, not surprisingly, in-migrants were more heavily involved in the local Republican Party organizations in almost every state in the region, although the overall pattern of greater penetration in the Rim South than in the Deep South still held. This latter pattern tends to confirm the important role in-migration has played in the development of Republican strength in the South during the past half century. When we compare the current data with data from the 1991 Southern Grassroots Party Activists Project, several differences are apparent. First, in-migrants still constitute larger percentages of local party officials in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party, although the gap has narrowed considerably in almost every state. Second, in-migrants are somewhat more prominently involved in the southern Democratic Party in 2001 than in 199l (with South Carolina having the most notable change as the proportion of in-migrant local party activists has jumped from 9 percent in 1991 to 22 percent ten years later). Just the reverse has happened in the Republican Party where the proportion of in-migrants has tended, on the whole, to decline. Finally, the gap between the Deep South and Rim South remains—more in-migrants are active in local party organizations in both parties in the Rim South than in the Deep South—but it has narrowed slightly in each party.
Table 4.1 Region of Childhood of Respondents in Southern States’ Local Party Organizations, by Party
Table 4.2 Penetration of In-Migrants into Southern States’ Local Party Organizations, by Party and State
Table 4.3 Socioeconomic Backgrounds of Local Party Officials in the South, by Childhood Region and Party
In most respects, in-migrants in both parties vary only marginally from natives, although women are better represented among in-migrants, and in-migrants tend to be somewhat better educated, tend to earn higher incomes, and tend to be somewhat older than natives. Among Democrats, in-migrants are also less likely to be African American as compared with natives (see table 4.3).
Table 4.4 Religious Backgrounds of Local Party Officials in the South, by Childhood Region and Party
The religious variables, however, show greater differences (see table 4.4; also see chapter 2 of this volume for a detailed examination of the importance of religious attitudes and behavior). On the whole, in-migrants tend to be substantially less Protestant and less religious, regardless of party. Among Democrats, natives tend to be significantly more Protestant than in-migrants (79 percent to 45 percent), less Catholic (13 percent to 22 percent), and less Jewish (1 percent to 15 percent). Native Democrats are also less likely to say they are nonbelievers (3 percent to 13 percent). Among Republicans, there is a similar pattern in that natives tend to be more Protestant (86 percent to 68 percent) and less Catholic (12 percent to 23 percent).
Similarly, and not surprisingly, native southerners tend to exhibit greater religiosity on other dimensions than in-migrants: they attend church more often and more regularly. Among Democrats over half (53 percent) of the natives attend church once a week or more, compared with less than a third (31 percent) of the in-migrants. Among Republicans, the pattern is not quite so striking, but natives remain more likely to attend religious services at least weekly (61 percent to 51 percent).
On other religious dimensions as well, natives differ from in-migrants. Among Democrats, natives are more likely to indicate a great deal or a fair amount of religious guidance in daily life (78 percent to 50 percent) and are much more likely (51 percent to 17 percent) to indicate a “born-again” experience. Among Republicans, the pattern is similar, although the differences are not as great. These patterns on religious attendance and on born-again status are generally consistent with those found in the 1991 data and suggest that in-migrants continue to constitute a significant secularizing influence on the southern Democratic Party.
Finally, on a political-religious dimension—a measure of closeness to the Christian Right—in-migrant Democrats are the least supportive among the four groups (84 percent indicate that they are very far or far from the Christian Right, compared with 59 percent of native Democrats). Among Republicans, while support for the Christian Right is much stronger, still less than half (48 percent) of natives and less than two-fifths (37 percent) of in-migrants indicate closeness to that movement.
These patterns suggest that in-migrants constitute a diversifying influence as well as a secularizing influence on both parties, although the pattern is stronger among Democrats. Conversely, population movement into the South has had less of a diversifying effect on the Republican Party’s local organizations than on the Democratic Party’s.
In-migrants differ from natives in mixed patterns with respect to their political backgrounds (see table 4.5). In both parties, natives tend to have longer histories of political activity and evince more political experience overall than in-migrants, but the differences are small and do not extend to every variable listed (e.g., holding a previous party office).
The most noteworthy political background differences occur on party switching and family political activity (see table 4.5). Among Democratic officials, slightly larger percentages of in-migrants are party switchers (15 percent to 8 percent) while the reverse is true among the Republican officials (26 percent of natives have switched parties compared to 21 percent of the in-migrants). Natives in both parties tend to come from politically active families more than in-migrants, and natives are more likely to come from families where one or both parents were Democrats. This latter point is a continuing reflection of the persistent impact of the Democratic dominance of the southern political system well into the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, it is not surprising that in-migrants in both parties are more likely to have had Republican parents than natives. The most interesting groups, perhaps, are the most “deviant” ones, that is, in-migrant Democrats (nearly a quarter of Democratic in-migrants) who had Republican parents and in-migrant Republicans (over a quarter of Republican in-migrants) who had Democratic parents. While the data do not allow us to confirm this, we might speculate that some of those in-migrants who had Republican parents and who moved to the South might have found the very socially conservative southern Republican Party to be sufficiently different from the party systems from which they came that they found the southern Democratic Party to be a more congenial home. On the other hand, those in-migrants who had Democratic parents and who subsequently became active in the southern Republican Party might have found that party—a strikingly ascendant party, particularly among white suburbanites—to be a more natural resting place.
Table 4.5 Political Backgrounds of Local Party Officials in the South, by Childhood Region and Party
Within parties, respondents’ state and national party identifications and feelings toward the parties at the national and state levels vary only marginally, and their voting patterns in the 2000 presidential election are nearly identical (see table 4.6). The main exception to this is found in examining the data for the Democrats on feelings toward the national party. Natives are somewhat less likely to say they feel close to the national party than in-migrants (71 percent to 77 percent). Moreover, while the percentages of both natives and in-migrants saying they feel close to the national party are lower than the corresponding percentages saying they feel close to the state party, the gap is larger for the natives. This suggests that some vestiges of the disaffection southern Democrats felt toward the national Democratic Party, and which haunted the party during the 1980s and 1990s, remain (see chapter 6 of this volume for a more detailed analysis of the data on party loyalty and party attachment).
When asked about their activity at different electoral levels, in both parties larger percentages of natives than of in-migrants said they are “very active” in local and state elections. However, the pattern is reversed in both parties in national elections. Moreover, the differences in each case tend to be small enough so as to be essentially inconsequential. The picture that emerges for both groups of officials in both parties is that they are quite active at all electoral levels. Even so, there is one other point worth noting in these data. Consistent with the data on feelings toward the national party versus feelings toward the state party, native Democratic officials are considerably less active in national elections than in state and, especially, local elections. Looking at those saying they are “very active,” there is a drop among natives from 63 percent (local) to 50 percent (state) to 43 percent (national). Of the four groups in the analysis, only native Democrats demonstrate this pattern. It appears, then, that one of the ways in which in-migration is impacting the southern Democratic Party is by helping to reduce the support gap between southern Democratic Party officials and the national Democratic Party, a gap that has been a nagging problem for the Democratic Party since at least the late 1960s.
The 1991 data on local party officials showed a sharp ideological (and issue position) division between Democratic and Republican activists (Steed 1998; McGlennon 1998b). This picture of party sorting among party officials is consistent with a wide range of research on southern party activists at various organizational levels (see, e.g., Bowman, Hulbary, and Kelley 1990; Steed, Moreland, and Baker 1995; Moreland 1990a). In general the consistent pattern over the past two decades has been for Republican activists to be heavily conservative and for Democratic activists to be comparatively more moderate to liberal but also to be more widely spread across the ideological spectrum.
Table 4.6 Party Attachment and Levels of Campaign Activity of Local Party Officials in the South, by Childhood Region and Party
Table 4.7 Ideology of Local Party Officials in the South, by Childhood Region and Party
This pattern holds for local party officials in the South in 2001 as well, both in terms of general ideology and in terms of stands on specific issues (see chapter 5 and chapter 8 of this volume for more detailed examinations of the role of ideology). Both native and in-migrant Republicans overwhelmingly tend to classify themselves as some type of conservative with natives only slightly more likely than in-migrants to call themselves very conservative (see table 4.7). Democrats, on the other hand, are more heterogeneous ideologically than the Republicans. However, unlike in the Republican Party, there are some ideological differences between the natives and the in-migrants. Most clearly, in-migrants tend to be more liberal than natives when comparing only those who label themselves “very liberal” (31 percent to 18 percent) and when comparing those in the two liberal categories combined (73 percent to 52 percent). Conversely, natives tend to be more moderate (31 percent to 19 percent) and more conservative (17 percent to 8 percent) than the in-migrants.
These same patterns are found in table 4.8, which presents data on these officials’ positions on a series of twenty social, economic, and political issues, roughly grouped into three broad categories (social/lifestyle issues, governmental program issues, and spending/tax issues). First, on every issue listed the Democrats are more liberal than the Republicans, and these differences are quite large in a majority of the cases. Still, in spite of this differentiation, Democrats are not uniformly liberal. For example, on two issues—federal welfare spending and preferential hiring of blacks—a majority of Democrats, both natives and in-migrants, are conservative (just less conservative than Republicans), and on an additional three issues—school prayer, the death penalty, and government provision of jobs—a majority of native Democrats are conservative. Second, among Democratic activists, natives tend to be less liberal than in-migrants on eighteen of the twenty issues; on a number of these issues—school prayer, the death penalty, environmental spending—these differences are substantial, and on eight issues the differences equal or exceed ten percentage points. The consistency of the pattern more than the size of the differences underscores the ideological variations between native and in-migrant Democrats. Third, with the lone exception of supporting an equal role for women, the traditional conservative homogeneity of the Republicans shows up on these issues. Moreover, unlike the Democrats, there is relatively small variation between the natives and in-migrants (on no issue do the differences reach 10 percent and on sixteen of the twenty issues they are 5 percent or less), and the variations that do exist do not run consistently in one direction (natives are more conservative on nine of the issues, in-migrants are more conservative on eight issues, and the percentages are identical on three issues). To tease as much as possible out of these data, though, it is worth noting that on the seven social/lifestyle issues, in-migrant Republicans are somewhat more likely to take a liberal position on six of them, although the likelihood is modest. On governmental program issues and spending/tax issues, Republican in-migrants are somewhat less likely to be liberal than natives.
Table 4.8 Issue Orientations of Local Party Officials in the South, by Childhood Region and Party
Consistent with the 1991 data, the data in the 2001 Southern Grassroots Party Activists Project show that in-migrants tend to pull the ideological center of gravity of the Democrats in a more liberal direction while, for Republicans, in-migrants tend to reinforce the already strongly conservative orientations of native Republicans. This also suggests that there is greater potential for intraparty divisions to develop along ideological lines between natives and in-migrants within the Democratic Party than within the Republican Party. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the broader potential for intraparty ideological divisions among Democrats is probably lessened somewhat by the presence of in-migrants who serve to pull the party more fully toward the liberal end of the scale, thus contributing to greater homogeneity than would otherwise exist.
Population movement into the South following World War II affected the region’s party system in a number of ways. Its major early impact was to boost the initial growth of the Republican Party as Republicans moving into the South brought their voting habits and organizational skills with them. Vestiges of this early pattern remain in the early twenty-first century in that in-migrants still generally constitute larger percentages of local party officials in the Republican Party in the South than in the Democratic Party (though the gap has narrowed in recent years).
Research on party activists at different organizational levels in the 1980s and the 1990s revealed that a second key effect of in-migration was to diversify the ranks of party officials in both parties, and especially in the Democratic Party. Our data show that this is still the case in the contemporary southern party system. Local party officials native to the South are different from those who have moved into the region from other parts of the country on a number of background variables, particularly on those related to religion. Even in the Republican Party, with its greater homogeneity, in-migrants differ on these religious variables rather consistently and thus serve to diversify the party. In the 1980s and early 1990s in-migrants and native party activists also tended to differ rather sharply in terms of their political backgrounds (see, e.g., Steed, Moreland, and Baker 1981), but in this regard diversification has lessened by the turn of the century.
A third major area of impact for in-migration historically concerned its role in helping to differentiate the parties in terms of their ideological and issue positions. The past pattern has been for in-migrants to pull the Democratic Party toward the liberal end of the ideological scale both on subjective self-identification of personal ideology and on more specific positions on a range of policy issues; at the same time on these points, in-migrants differed little from natives in the Republican Party and, thus, they served more to reinforce the long-standing conservativism of the party’s activists. Our data show these patterns to be applicable still in both parties in 2001. Clearly, in-migration has worked to further the process of party sorting that has taken place in the South over the past two decades and that has pretty much resulted in the region’s party system coming to mirror the national party system.
This process in the Democratic Party represents the most dramatic picture. The party that was once the standard bearer of southern traditionalism as it related to such matters as race relations, economic conservatism, states’ rights, defense of the status quo, and individualism has undergone a significant transformation that has brought it ever closer to the national party. A number of factors have had an impact—older, more conservative Democratic Party leaders have left the political arena through death or retirement, or they have switched parties in an effort to resolve the dissonance resulting from the party’s liberal makeover, and blacks have become more heavily involved in party organizational work, to mention two of the more important factors. Our data, coupled with earlier research demonstrating the same pattern, demonstrate that in-migration should be given a great deal of credits as well. The Southern Republican Party has become the party more closely aligned with the values and symbols of the traditional, conservative South, and, in this, in-migrants have served as reinforcing agents. Indeed, there is some irony in the conclusion that over the long term the Southern Democratic Party has been changed qualitatively more by in-migration than the Southern Republic Party.
One final observation in this vein is relevant to the discussion. Much of the earlier research on the effects of in-migration generally concluded that the impact of population movement on the South’s parties was limited by the relatively small numbers of party activists who were nonnative. Feigert and Todd (1998, 143) noted in their analysis of the 1991 data that this no longer held true inasmuch as in-migrants were present in sufficient numbers to make substantial contributions to the alteration of southern politics in recent years. The 2001 SGPA data confirm this observation and point to in-migration as a key factor in understanding the contemporary southern parties.