National politics today is intensely competitive. In terms of the number of party identifiers, presidential votes received, and congressional seats held, the Democratic and Republican Parties are closely matched. A major factor contributing to the nation’s current political competitiveness, which stands in contrast to the eras of one-party dominance that have characterized much of American history, is the presence of genuine two-party politics in the South. As a result, while politics in the South has always been important, the outcome of the region’s elections has become an even more vital component of the nation’s electoral politics (Black and Black 1992, 2002). The “vital” role of the contemporary South is illustrated by the importance of the region’s Electoral College votes to Republican presidential candidates and the fact that since the 1960s the only Democrats to be elected president (Johnson, Carter, Clinton) have hailed from the South. Further, the Republicans’ current narrow majority in Congress is greatly aided by its control over more than half of the seats from the South.
Chapter 1 explained how a competitive two-party system has finally arisen in the modern South. Yet, while Republicans hold a clear advantage in presidential elections, Democrats remain quite strong in state legislative and local contests across the region, providing a strong farm team of potential candidates for more visible offices. What explains this puzzling feature of “uneven” Republican electoral strength across the “vital” South (Aistrup 1996; Shaffer, Pierce, and Kohnke 2000)?
Perhaps the modern Republican Party in the South remains too ideologically conservative for the average voter. Mississippi’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Kirk Fordice, was a construction company executive who had been active in the Republican Party organization since the Goldwater campaign in 1964. His outspoken and abrasive conservative philosophy was reflected in such actions as joking about calling out the national guard to prevent any judge from ordering a tax increase to better fund the historically black universities, declaring the United States a “Christian nation” at a national Republican governor’s conference, and in his second term having his all white-male slate of College Board nominees rejected by the legislature. Needless to say, Democrats retained control of the Mississippi state legislature and even briefly regained the governorship after Fordice’s term ended. Similarly, Alabama’s Republican governor Fob James was probably best known for his conservative and controversial positions on social issues such as school prayer, abortion, and the public display of the Ten Commandments. His performance as governor, however, received generally negative reviews from most Alabama citizens. As a result, he was easily defeated in his 1998 reelection bid by Democrat Don Siegelman.
Today’s southern Democratic Party may also be in the process of becoming ideologically out of touch with average voters, though in the opposite, liberal direction. In the 2003 state elections in Mississippi, Republicans won the governorship and three of the other seven statewide elected executive offices after a Democratic lieutenant governor switched parties, claiming that the national party had become too liberal and the state Democratic Party too partisan. Similarly, while Alabama’s Don Siegelman achieved some success early in his administration, he was later linked to rumors of scandal and corruption. In the 2002 election, Siegelman narrowly lost his reelection bid to Republican Congressman Bob Riley.
In this chapter we examine the similarities and differences in policy beliefs between the South’s party activists and voters to shed light onto this vital question of how well the political parties represent the views of average citizens. We also investigate whether the linkage between party activists and voters varies across types of issues or between different southern states. We employ unique data sources from the states of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as national survey data, to examine these critical linkage questions.
The linkage between political elites and the voting masses has been an important theoretical concern of scholars of voting behavior. In An Economic Theory of Democracy, Anthony Downs (1957, 300) hypothesized that “parties act to maximize votes” and that “citizens behave rationally in politics.” V. O. Key Jr. (1966, 7–8) used national opinion polls to test this theory and concluded that “voters are not fools,” as they are affected by “central and relevant questions of public policy, of governmental performance, and of executive personality.” He pointed out, though, that the electorate was limited by the “clarity of the alternatives presented to it” (Key 1949, 7) by candidates. Scammon and Wattenberg (1970, 279) in The Real Majority argued that the average voter’s policy preferences were essentially middle of the road, and that the “one essential political strategy” for parties and candidates was their “drive toward the center.” Some party strategists learned this lesson the hard way, as Republicans saw their very conservative candidate Barry Goldwater losing the 1964 presidential election in a landslide and Democrats eight years later suffered a similar fate with their very liberal presidential hopeful George McGovern.
This important theoretical concern of mass-elite linkage on political issues has largely been studied at the national level and related to major party fortunes in federal elections. In their pioneering article, “Issue Conflict and Consensus among Party Leaders and Followers,” McClosky, Hoffman, and O’Hara (1960) found that Republican national convention delegates in the 1950s were much more conservative than even their own party identifiers in the population, while Democratic delegates were much closer in views to average citizens, suggesting a mass-elite linkage explanation for Democratic Party dominance over federal elections since 1932. Other national studies using different definitions of partisan elites also found that Republican political elites were more out of touch with average citizens’ policy views than were Democratic elites. Such was the case in the 1960s for campaign activists, those who wrote letters to the editor, and political activists in general (Nexon 1971; Converse, Clausen, and Miller 1965; Verba and Nie 1972).
With the leftward shift of national Democratic Party activists in the early 1970s era of George McGovern’s presidential candidacy, national studies began to point out that either Democratic elites were more out of touch with the average citizen and average Democrats, or that both parties’ elites were ideologically polarized and distant from the more moderate citizenry. Such was the case for college-educated party identifiers in the early 1970s, campaign activists throughout the 1970s, convention delegates in 1972 and 1988, and members of Congress in 1970 (Ladd and Hadley 1975; Nie, Verba, and Petrocik 1976; Shaffer 1980; Kirkpatrick 1975; Kagay 1991; Backstrom 1977). These studies essentially found that elites of the two major parties were more ideologically polarized than were more centrist average citizens identifying with the two parties. Many analysts argued that Democratic elites had now become more distant than Republican elites from their citizenry party, helping to explain why Democrats lost every presidential election except one for the twenty years beginning in 1968.
A related theoretical concern is the nature of belief systems in the mass and elite parties. Ideological polarization between the two parties’ elites may reflect the generally “liberal” policy views of the Democratic elites and the largely “conservative” views of Republican elites, while the more centrist views of average citizens may reflect their cognitive shortcomings and inability to conceptualize politics in an ideological, unidimensional manner. Philip Converse’s (1964) pioneering “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” found little issue constraint (defined as views across public issues that are consistently “liberal” or “conservative”) in the general population but more significant constraint among congressional candidates, as did Jennings (1992). Therefore, the general population was not ideologically consistent and was not divided into two hostile camps of ideological liberals and ideological conservatives. Stimson (1975) and Nie, Verba, and Petrocik (1976) point out that the cognitive abilities of citizens may influence the nature of the voters’ belief systems. People who are more educated, who have more political information, or who are more interested in the campaign tend to view issues in a more unidimensional, “ideological” framework or in terms of a limited number of distinct issue areas. Those lacking such cognitive abilities tend to have belief systems that are less structured by a single ideology or by a limited number of policy areas.
Although there are a multitude of studies at the national level, few examine the mass-elite linkage on issues at the state level, even though electoral competition in the southern states has become increasingly fascinating. Using statewide public opinion polls from Alabama and Mississippi and county party organization surveys of the same states drawn from the 1991 Southern Grassroots Party Activists study, Breaux, Shaffer, and Cotter (1998) examined mass-elite belief systems and mass-elite differences on policy issues. Their findings supported studies conducted at the national level. Party elites had more sophisticated and constrained belief systems than did the masses, particularly those citizens having less cognitive ability. Issue differences between the party elites in 1991 were more pronounced than they were between the two citizenry parties. Democratic elites, though, were closer in views to average citizens than were Republicans, particularly in Alabama. The greater proximity between the Democratic elites and the masses was offered as a possible explanation for continued Democratic dominance of state and local offices in these Deep South states. The absence of longitudinal data precluded any conclusion regarding how ephemeral or long-lasting these mass-elite linkages were, a problem that is rectified with the current replication of this analysis. The absence of regionwide opinion polls precluded any generalization to the entire South, a limitation that is rectified with the current study that includes information from a national study with a significant sampling of southern voters.
This study of the similarities and differences in policy beliefs between the region’s party leaders, party members, and voters is based primarily on data collected in two states in the Deep South—Alabama and Mississippi—though some regionwide information supplements our analysis. These two states were selected for an in-depth study for both theoretical and methodological reasons.
Theoretically, both states represent the curious nature of contemporary southern politics, where the Republican Party has made great electoral gains but remains a minority party in many state and local races. Except for the 1976 Carter election, both states have voted Republican for president since 1972. Gubernatorial elections can now be won by either party and have been intensely competitive since 1986 in Alabama and since 1987 in Mississippi. Statewide executive offices below governor have also become more competitive with Republicans holding at least half of these offices in Alabama since the 1994 Republican national tsunami and winning a historic high of three of seven executive offices in Mississippi in the 2003 state elections. Yet Democrats remain dominant in other state and local elections, controlling roughly 60 percent or more of the state legislative seats in both states. As late as 1999 in Mississippi, only 7 percent of county supervisors were Republicans, as were less than 10 percent of the state’s county sheriffs, chancery clerks, circuit clerks, and tax assessors (Shaffer and Price 2001, 264–266).
Methodologically, extensive data are available in each state that permit numerous comparisons across samples of different kinds of people. Specifically, data used here to study the policy beliefs of party activists are based on the results of the 2001 SGPA survey, already described in chapter 1. Several of the policy items in that study were included in statewide public opinion surveys that are periodically conducted in Alabama and Mississippi by the chapter’s authors. In Alabama, a random sample of five hundred adults was conducted by Southern Opinion Research in October 2001. In Mississippi, two representative surveys of adult residents were conducted by the Survey Research Unit of the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University with 613 respondents interviewed from April 3 to April 16, 2000, and 608 residents surveyed from April 1 to April 14, 2002. Since both the Alabama and Mississippi polls rely on telephone surveys that tend to underrepresent lower socioeconomic status households lacking phones, census data were used to weight them so that they were representative of key demographic groups such as education, race, and sex. A similar study of party activists and average citizens was conducted in Alabama and Mississippi in 1991 (Breaux, Shaffer, and Cotter 1998). Thus, with the available data it is possible to examine how the similarities and differences in policy beliefs between the region’s party activists and voters have changed during the last decade.
We also included some information from the 2000 National Election Study (NES), which permitted a comparison between party activists in the entire South and the subset of average southerners in the NES study.1 Three agree-disagree items regarding the death penalty, affirmative action, and gay employment rights, as well as six federal spending items, were worded virtually identically in both the NES and the SGPA study, permitting some interesting regionwide comparisons between masses and elites. Other items in the NES and other national studies were either worded differently from the SGPA items or used different response categories, preventing the more in-depth analyses that the Mississippi and Alabama public surveys permitted (see Bishop, Tuchfarber, and Oldendick 1978 for validity problems involving items with noncomparable question wordings or response categories).
The Alabama and Mississippi mass and elite surveys included numerous policy questions, but we focus here on those questions that were asked in both states and in both the mass and elite surveys, in order to be able to make direct comparisons between the masses and elites in both states. We also focus on questions that were asked in both the 1991 masse-lite study and the current study, in order to study change in the southern party system over the last turbulent decade. This results in ten issue items that reflect a diverse range of policy concerns from social spending programs to divisive lifestyle or cultural issues and includes issues of special concern to African Americans and women. Eight of these issue items were asked in identical form in the 1991 study (except for one item omitted from the 1991 Mississippi public survey). In addition, ideological self-identification was asked in all surveys in both years, except for the 2001 Alabama public survey.
The exact wording of these issue questions is provided in the appendix. The issues are also examined in greater detail in chapter 5. All issue items for the Mississippi and Alabama comparisons are coded or recoded so that they range from 1 for most liberal to 4 for most conservative (5 for ideology), as in the 1991 study. In the regionwide comparisons using NES data, the three issue agreement items are coded the same way, but the six federal spending items are coded to range from 1 for those wanting to spend less to 3 for those favoring more spending. We decided not to attempt to recode these spending items so that they had the same ideological direction because of the difficulty of identifying the ideological nature of at least one of the issues. For instance, while fighting crime is normally regarded as a “conservative” issue, some conservatives oppose increased government spending in general or believe that most issues including public order should be left to the states. In addition, some liberals may favor more federal spending on “dealing with crime,” if the money goes to prevention and rehabilitation programs, such as summer jobs programs for inner-city youths or prison work training programs.
Two other general points follow: Whether activists are Democrats or Republicans is based on their membership in the party organization. The partisanship of the public is identified with the common party identification question used in our discipline. Independents who admit that they think of themselves as “closer” to one of the parties are classified as identifying with that party, since studies have found that such independent leaners have a similar voting pattern to strong and weak partisans. This also helps to maximize the sample size and minimize the sample error of our study. A second point is that we use some terms interchangeably, such as elites and activists, and masses and voters. The general theoretical concern is over policy differences between elites and masses, and our particular elites and masses are party activists and potential voters. We regard all adults sampled as potential voters and caution the reader that not all of these adults are actual voters. Identifying actual voters is beyond the scope of our study and would require violating our respondents’ anonymity in order to ascertain whether they actually did vote on election day, and even then one must define how frequently people should vote in order to be regarded as a voter. In any event, since party organizations make a major effort to convert historic nonvoters to voters favoring their party’s candidates, it makes more theoretical sense to define voters as potential voters.
The belief systems of the elites and of the masses of different cognitive levels were identified with factor analysis using principal components and varimax rotation. For the Mississippi public, only the 2002 survey was used in the factor analysis, since the 2000 survey excluded the death penalty and gun control issue items. Ideological self-identification was excluded from these factor analyses, since it was not included in the Alabama public survey. Among possible indicators of cognitive ability, education was employed since it was asked in identical form in all surveys. The public samples were divided into residents having a high-school degree or less and those having some college or more education. The current study is a methodological improvement over the 1991 study, since we employ all ten identically worded issue items in all six factor analyses.
We now turn to comparisons of the policy views of masses and elites, which rely on means, a well-established statistic employed in previous mass-elite studies. It merely identifies the issue orientation of the “average” potential voter and the average party activist and makes it quite easy to compare issue viewpoints across different groups of people.
It is quite clear from our data that the average voter in Alabama and Mississippi is not an ideologue of either the left or the right, reflecting national studies (Scammon and Wattenberg 1970). Instead, most voters are conservative on some issues but progressive or liberal on other issues (using 2.5, the midpoint of each issue item’s scale, as the basic dividing point). The average voter in both states is more conservative on such cultural issues as school prayer, abortion, affirmative action, and the death penalty (table 8.1 and table 8.2: column A). On the other hand, the average voter is liberal on social service spending programs such as health and education, jobs, and programs benefiting the economic and social status of women and African Americans. These findings support studies at the national level that conclude that “most citizens do not engage in the ideological thinking of the sort found among political elites” (Erikson and Tedin 2003, 74; this book provides an informative review of the literature in this area).
Table 8.1 Policy Views of Mississippians
Partisans in the general population also have differing views depending on different types of issues, though they appear a little more ideologically distinct than voters as a whole (who include political Independents). Democratic voters in both states are somewhat more liberal than all voters on every issue, while Republican voters are generally more conservative (table 8.1 and table 8.2: column B and column C). Indeed, on the cultural issues of affirmative action and abortion, where voters generally are more conservative, Democratic voters are moderate or slightly left of center. On the social service spending items of health and education and jobs, where voters are generally more liberal, Republican voters are essentially moderate or slightly to the right of center.
Table 8.2 Policy Views of Alabamians
Compared to voters, activists of both parties are more ideologically consistent, particularly Republican Party activists (table 8.1 and table 8.2: column D and column E). Liberals and even moderates are a dying breed in today’s Republican Party, as the typical activist is midway between “somewhat” and “very” conservative in terms of ideological self-identification. Republican activists in both states are conservative on every issue except for equal rights for women. Democrats have a broader tent, with the average activist self-identifying as somewhere between moderate and “somewhat liberal” but closer to moderate. Democratic activists are often more liberal or conservative than the issue item midpoints depending on the issue’s popularity among average voters, being more liberal on social services such as health and education and on improving the social and economic situations of women and blacks, and more conservative on such cultural issues as school prayer, affirmative action, and the death penalty. Unlike the more centrist or conservative views of most voters, however, Democratic activists in both states are essentially liberal on some cultural issues that are emotional ones for key voting groups, such as abortion and gun control.
Table 8.3 Changes in Policy Views of Mississippians, 1991–2001
While Republicans are more ideologically homogeneous than are Democrats, both parties’ activists appear to be growing more ideologically distinct, with the average Democrat becoming more liberal and the average Republican more conservative. In both Alabama and Mississippi, Democratic activists have grown somewhat more liberal over the last decade on abortion, school prayer, and affirmative action, and noticeably more liberal on social services, black socioeconomic improvements, women’s equality, and ideological self-identification (table 8.3 and table 8.4: column D and column E). Only on public jobs have Democratic activists grown slightly more conservative. Republican activists in both states have become slightly more conservative since 1991 on school prayer and affirmative action and noticeably more conservative on women socioeconomic improvements, abortion, jobs and living standards, and ideological self-identification. Republican activists have not moved in as uniform an ideological direction as have Democrats, however. Republican activists have become slightly more liberal on social services and black socioeconomic improvements and noticeably more liberal on women’s equality.
These patterns of growing ideological polarization between party activists may reflect different processes at work within the two states’ citizenry parties—a growing liberalism of Democratic voters, but no consistent shifts in the views of Republican voters. In both states Democratic voters have become somewhat more liberal on public jobs and a variety of issues relating to women and African Americans—women and black socioeconomic improvements, women’s equality, and affirmative action (table 8.3 and table 8.4: column B and column C). Only on social services have Democratic voters become slightly more conservative over time. Republican voters in both states exhibit more contradictory and unclear patterns, becoming clearly more conservative over the years on abortion; slightly more conservative on social services and jobs; and slightly more liberal on women’s equality, black socioeconomic improvement, and affirmative action. These conflicting shifts in partisan voters over time therefore yield few consistent attitude shifts among aggregated Alabama and Mississippi voters since 1991. Democrats, Independents, and Republicans combined in these two states are slightly more liberal on affirmative action, black socioeconomic improvement, and women’s equality, but also slightly more conservative on abortion and social services.
Table 8.4 Changes in Policy Views of Alabamians, 1991–2001
The result of growing ideological polarization between the elite parties is that Democratic and Republican Party officials are frequently found on opposite sides of policy issues. In both states, on the issues of government efforts to improve the social and economic positions of women and African Americans, social service spending, abortion, gun control, and ideological self-identification, Democratic activists are to the left of the scale midpoints, while Republican activists are to the right (table 8.1 and table 8.2: column D and column E). Even on issues where both party activists are on the same ideological side (liberal on equal rights for women and conservative on school prayer, affirmative action, and the death penalty), Republicans are consistently more conservative than are Democrats.
Not only are Republican activists consistently more conservative than Democratic activists, but also this polarization between the two parties’ elites is greater on every issue than are differences between the parties in the general population (table 8.5 and table 8.6: first two columns). Indeed, the greater polarization between elites compared to masses has become more noticeable since 1991 in both states on women and black socioeconomic improvement, social services, and jobs, and growing polarization is evident in Alabama on school prayer, affirmative action, and women’s equality and in Mississippi on abortion (compare tables with Breaux, Shaffer, and Cotter 1998, table 10.4 and table 10.5). Obviously, the day when candidates could claim like George Wallace that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties” is long past, as the southern party organizations are increasingly becoming as ideologically distinct as the national parties have been for over half a century. Such an ideological gulf between party officials can lead to increasingly bitter and divisive political debate among political leaders, as we saw in national politics with the impeachment of President Clinton and the increasingly negative rhetoric directed by Democratic presidential hopefuls against President Bush.
With both party organizations becoming even more ideologically distinct than they were ten years ago and possibly moving away from the more centrist views of average citizens, it is important to examine which party’s elite is more in touch with its own partisans in the general population. If a political party is so ideologically extreme that it cannot even retain the support of its own party loyalists among voters, it has almost no hope of reaching out to independents and supporters of the other party in an effort to elect its candidates to office. Given the opposing ideological movements by Democratic and Republican activists, the net change among activists has failed to change the situation of mass-elite differences within each party that existed ten years ago. Once again, Republican activists are more conservative than are Republican voters on all public issues and in both southern states (table 8.5 and table 8.6: third and fourth columns).
Democratic activists in both states, on the other hand, are sometimes more conservative than Democratic voters but often more liberal than Democratic voters. On balance, as was found at the national level in the 1950s and 1960s, Democratic Party elites are more in touch with their party’s masses than are Republican Party elites. Only on the cultural issues of abortion and school prayer are Republican activists in both states closer to their party’s voters than are Democratic activists close to their voters. Both party activists are about equidistant from their respective voters on social services, women’s equality, and the death penalty. Democratic activists in both states are closer to their party’s voters on women and black social and economic improvements, affirmative action, gun control, public jobs, and (in Mississippi) ideological self-identification.
Table 8.5 Differences in Policy Views between Mississippi Groups
Table 8.6 Differences in Policy Views between Alabama Groups
The central question remains—which party’s elites are closer to the average voter, not just to their own party identifiers in the general population but also to the other party’s identifiers and to independents? The answer is similar to what it was in Alabama and Mississippi ten years ago—the ideologically inclusive, biracial Democratic Party. Only on the issues of abortion and school prayer are Republican activists in both states closer to average voters than are Democratic activists (table 8.5 and table 8.6: last two columns). On women and black socioeconomic improvements, affirmative action, public jobs, gun control, and ideological self-identification (measured only in Mississippi), Democratic Party officials are closer to average voters than are Republicans. Indeed, Republicans are more conservative than the average voter on every issue.
Lest Democrats grow complacent over their greater proximity on issues to average voters, we point out that the growing liberalism of Democratic activists over the last decade has created a growing distance between themselves and average voters as well. Compared to the more mixed pattern found in our 1991 study, when Democratic activists were sometimes more conservative than average voters rather than more liberal, today’s Democratic activists are more ideologically consistent. On all issues except public jobs and (in Alabama) affirmative action, Democratic activists today are more liberal than the average voter in both states. In other words, Democratic activists appear to be growing increasingly out of touch with average voters because of their party’s greater liberalism than the general public’s. The only reason that Democratic activists today remain closer to average citizens’ policy positions is that Republican activists are even more out of touch with average voters (though in a more conservative direction).
In the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi, both party organizations have become more distinctive in terms of issue orientations with Democrats becoming a more left-of-center organization and Republicans becoming an even more clearly conservative group. Average voters who are less ideologically consistent on issues, being more conservative on cultural issues and more liberal on social program spending, are philosophically located between the two party organizations. Generally, voters are closer to Democratic organization members on issues than to Republicans, but an increasingly liberal Democratic organization threatens the historic image of the Democrats as being a broad tent party. We now examine whether these findings can be generalized to the South as a whole by matching the policy views of southern residents in the 2000 NES dataset with party activists in all eleven southern states.
As we found in Alabama and Mississippi, the average southern voter is not ideologically consistent. Voters of both parties are conservative (right of the issue item midpoints of 2.5 for the first three issues and 2 for the six spending items) on such cultural issues as affirmative action and the death penalty and on preferring that the federal government spend more on national defense but less on welfare (table 8.7: column B and column C). Both parties’ voters are liberal on most social programs, backing more federal spending on Social Security, public schools, and the environment. Democratic voters are more concerned about protecting the employment rights of gays than are Republicans, while both parties’ voters back more federal spending to deal with crime.
Party activists, on the other hand, have more ideologically distinctive views than do voters (table 8.7: column D and column E). Republican activists across the South take a conservative position on every issue except Social Security. The average Republican activist wishes to spend less money not only on welfare but also on such popular programs as public schools and protecting the environment. Democratic activists take a liberal position on every issue except affirmative action and on crime and defense where they prefer more federal spending. The average Democratic activist opposes the death penalty and favors current levels of spending on welfare, while most Democratic voters support the death penalty and wish to cut back slightly on welfare spending. The basic liberalism of Democratic activists and essential conservatism of Republican activists, compared to the more centrist views of voters, may heighten partisan conflict between Democratic and Republican public figures. On every issue except affirmative action, there is a greater distance between Democratic and Republican Party activists than there is between the two parties’ voters (table 8.8: column 1 and column 2).
Republican activists appear to be particularly out of touch with voters, even voters of their own party, compared to Democratic activists. Taking differences between groups of a magnitude of .3 as an arbitrary rule of thumb for substantive significance, we find that Republican activists are more conservative than average voters on affirmative action and gay rights. Republican activists also prefer to spend more on national defense than average voters and are much more in favor of cutting federal spending on welfare, social security, the environment, and public schools. Indeed, Republican activists on every one of these issues except affirmative action are more conservative than even voters of their own party (table 8.8: column 4 and column 6). Democratic activists are more liberal than average voters on the death penalty and affirmative action, but their preferences on federal spending programs are consistently more in line with the views of average voters than are those of Republican activists. Democratic activists are also pretty close to the views of Democratic voters on every issue except the death penalty, where activists are too liberal for party voters (table 8.8: column 3 and column 5).
Table 8.7 Policy Views of Southerners of All States
The differing issue items used in this regional analysis compared to the two state studies do not permit a more direct comparison, but a common theme nevertheless emerges. The Republican Party organization in the South is a pretty conservative one, while the Democratic organization is becoming a somewhat left-of-center group. Indeed, the Republican Party is so conservative that it is generally more conservative than its own voters. As such, Democratic activists are closer on most issues to the average voter than are Republican activists. Yet, as other chapters of this book have pointed out, both parties’ activists have become more polarized over the last decade, as Democrats have become more liberal while Republicans have become more conservative. And there are some hot button issues, such as the death penalty, on which Democratic activists are more out of touch with voters than are Republicans.
Table 8.8 Differences in Policy Views between Southern Groups
Chapter 9 demonstrates how “purists” oriented toward promoting their policy preferences instead of seeking a winning candidate can be harmful to a party’s electoral hopes by being less deeply involved in the party organization on a long-term basis. It also points out that conservative Republicans are particularly likely to be purists, while ideology is not related to a purist orientation among Democratic activists. Political activists live a life of politics and are more likely than average voters to view debate over public policy as a struggle between the ideologies of liberalism and conservatism. Such “gladiators” in political struggles may view people and issues as being arrayed along a single dimension with extreme liberals being on the far left of an ideology scale, extreme conservatives being on the far right, and moderates being in the center of the scale. They may believe that every issue, every political leader, and nearly every voter can be placed at a unique point on that single ideological scale. Such a simplistic interpretation of politics can lead to electoral disaster. Barry Goldwater supporters argued that eligible voters could be arrayed along a single ideological dimension and that most Americans were conservative but that few conservatives voted because the major parties did not offer a candidate who was a “real conservative.” The Republican Party in 1964 was convinced to rectify that situation by nominating conservative Barry Goldwater, and the party lost the presidential race in a landslide (Converse, Clausen, and Miller 1965).
One of our clearest findings regarding the belief system of today’s southerner is the absence of a simple unidimensional, liberal-conservative ideology that encompasses a diverse range of public policy issues. Members of the Alabama public require three dimensions (factors) to organize their preferences on public issues, and even then only 52 percent to 56 percent of the variance in all ten issue items is explained by these three dimensions (table 8.9). Members of the Mississippi public require four dimensions to organize their issue attitudes, though a higher percentage of 64 percent to 68 percent of the variance in all ten items is explained by them. Even each state’s elites fail to organize their views into a single “ideology” dimension. Mississippi’s party elites require two dimensions, which explain 57 percent of the overall variance in all issue items, while Alabama’s party elites require three dimensions, which explain a higher 65 percent of the overall variance. Clearly, any political candidates who rely on a strictly “liberal” or “conservative” campaign appeal run the risk of being irrelevant to a public that views issues in a multidimensional manner.
Table 8.9 Factor Analysis of Mass and Elite Policy Views in Two Southern States
Party activists in Alabama and Mississippi have belief systems that are organized in terms of either fewer dimensions than voters or into dimensions that include a primary dimension that is a more central one than it is to voters. In Mississippi, only two factors emerge to organize activists’ issue attitudes, while the masses require four dimensions (table 8.9). Furthermore, that first factor is a more dominant dimension than it is for voters. It incorporates a greater number of issues (which load on it, being more highly related to it than to any other factor), and responses on those items are more highly intercorrelated than they are for voters (activists tend to take similar or consistent positions on these issues). Alabama activists organize issues into the same number of dimensions as voters, but the first dimension is also a more dominant dimension incorporating issues on which activists have more interrelated or consistent views than do voters. This slightly greater centralized organization of issue beliefs among activists compared to voters nevertheless falls far short of constituting a single, ideological dimension that organizes all public issues. A single ideological dimension organizing all issue opinions would theoretically explain 100 percent of the variance in activists’ issue attitudes. In reality, this primary factor explains only 34 percent of the variance in all issue attitudes of Alabama activists and only 39 percent of the variance in Mississippi activists’ issue orientations.
Table 8.10 Factor Numbers that Issue Items Are Most Highly Loaded On
The lack of a unidimensional, ideological framework that organizes the belief systems of southerners today is reflected in the difficulty of labeling each of the six groups’ issue dimensions. The Mississippi elite’s belief system appears most understandable, as there are only two factors and one is pretty clearly a social spending dimension and the other is a cultural dimension, but even here some confusion is introduced by affirmative action and gun control loading most highly on the social spending dimension (table 8.10). The Alabama elite belief system is even farther from a unidimensional ideological framework than is the Mississippi elite because of the introduction of a third “women’s” dimension. This women’s dimension incorporates the two women’s issues from factor 2 of the Mississippi elite belief system, leaving a second cultural dimension that includes only school prayer and the death penalty.
Voters have belief systems that are even more complicated and farther removed from a single ideological dimension. Indeed, Alabama college-educated voters even possess a third factor on which social services and the death penalty are loaded in opposite directions, reflecting the existence of death penalty supporters who wish to spend more on social services (table 8.10). Mississippi college-educated voters possess a first dimension that includes diverse economic, race, and cultural issues; a second factor pertaining to women’s rights; and a third factor reflecting people who favor school prayer but also the death penalty. High-school-educated Alabamians and Mississippians possess even more confusing belief systems that are unstructured by any single ideological dimension.
We find that the belief systems of Alabama and Mississippi voters are not sophisticated in a unidimensional, ideological manner but are instead multidimensional and focused around groups of substantively related issues. Rather than being consistently conservative or liberal, many southern voters are conservative on cultural issues such as school prayer and the death penalty but progressive or even “liberal” on social spending programs such as education and health care. Party activists, however, have belief systems that are less multidimensional and more organized around a dominant dimension that includes a diverse range of issues. Activists also have more ideologically homogeneous views than voters, with Democrats being somewhat to the left of center on most issues and Republican activists being a pretty conservative group.
A decade ago the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi possessed a political system where Republican Party activists were not only more conservative than the average voter but also more conservative than their own partisans in the general population. Hence, the biracial, ideologically inclusive Democratic Party was clearly closer to the issue preferences of average voters. Since then party activists in both states have become more polarized on issues, with Republican activists becoming even more conservative and Democratic activists becoming more liberal than they previously were. As Republicans have closed the gap in party identification in the general population, a numerically smaller Democratic Party among eligible voters has become a more liberal one (Shaffer and Johnson 1996). Therefore, the Democratic Party organization remains less distant from its party in the electorate, compared to the Republican Party’s generally greater distance from its own party electorate.
The result of the growing ideological polarization of the party elites in the modern Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi is that both party organizations today are somewhat out of touch with the more centrist voter. Democratic elites are generally more liberal than the average voter, while Republican elites are consistently more conservative than voters. Republican elites, however, as was the case ten years ago, are even farther from the average voter than are Democratic elites. The same situation exists in the South as a whole, as Democratic activists are more liberal than average voters on nearly every public issue, while Republican activists are more conservative on every issue studied, often quite substantially.
The greater overall issue distance between Republican Party elites and average citizens helps explain why the Democratic Party continues to dominate state and local offices in many southern states. However, the leftward shift of Democratic activists found in Alabama and Mississippi, reflecting the party’s diminishing base of identifiers in the general population, may help the Republican Party mask its own very conservative nature. Hence, increasing Democratic elite liberalism may eventually enable Republicans to make more gains in state and local offices in various southern states. Moreover, our finding that the overall Democratic advantage does not exist on some cultural (and, in general, more nationally oriented) issues such as abortion and school prayer in Alabama and Mississippi and the death penalty in other states helps explain Republican successes in presidential and congressional elections.
During recent years, American national politics have included several occurrences—involving subjects such as gays in the military, health reform, efforts to cut the budgets of popular social programs, and impeachment—that suggest that today’s political party leaders are out of touch with average Americans. Our finding that in both Alabama and Mississippi Democratic and Republican Party elites have become more polarized than their loyal voters and farther removed from the average voter suggests that such occurrences may increasingly characterize southern politics.
Contemporary Mississippi politics illustrates some of these sharp ideological differences and partisan bickering between the parties. Despite a national recession generating declining tax revenues, Democratic Governor Ronnie Musgrove increased state spending to enact an expensive multiyear teacher pay raise, to enhance programs at the state’s historically black universities, and to expand the health care coverage of low income children, producing a massive budget deficit. In a special election, voters trounced his “politically correct” move to remove a Confederate symbol from the state flag. Republicans in the 2003 state elections nominated as their gubernatorial challenger wealthy Washington, D.C., lobbyist Haley Barbour, a “hero” of the right wing because of his position as RNC Chair during the 1994 national Republican tsunami. The conservative Barbour proceeded to label government as “the beast” and to oppose any tax increase that would simply “feed the beast” and encourage more government spending. Both campaigns turned negative with one Musgrove television ad even accusing Barbour of lobbying for tobacco companies that “poison our kids.” Voters chose Barbour as the lesser of the evils as he garnered 53 percent of the popular vote. After being criticized by the state press for racial insensitivity and for wearing an emblem of the state flag during his campaign, Barbour appointed a biracial transition team and pledged to appoint Democrats and African Americans to his administration.
Ideological and partisan bickering also dominated the Mississippi campaign for lieutenant governor and events leading up to it. Lieutenant Governor Amy Tuck, a centrist elected in 1999, found herself unwelcome in a Democratic Party increasingly influenced by liberal activists. Despite her support for Musgrove’s expensive education programs, partisan liberal Democratic activists blasted her stance on congressional redistricting. Tuck had followed the desires of local communities to maintain geographically distinct congressional districts rather than create a district that benefited an incumbent Democrat facing a Republican incumbent (a situation necessitated by the state’s loss of one House seat after the 2000 Census). With the Democratic congressman’s electoral defeat in 2002 and Tuck’s support for enacting limited tort reform, she found it prudent to switch to the Republican Party. The state Democratic Party chair’s parting words were to characterize her loss to their party as being like a patient getting rid of “cancer.”
After Democrats in 2003 nominated an African American state senator (Barbara Blackmon) to challenge her, Tuck blasted her opponent’s liberal legislative record, mentioning the abortion issue. Blackmon responded that she had two children of her own and would not publicly state her “public” position on abortion until the divorced lieutenant governor signed an affidavit proving that she had never had an abortion in her “personal” life. Meanwhile, Tuck ran an ad where she was driving a car stuck in the mud, claiming that “Mississippi’s economy is stuck in the mud, so that’s why we need more tort reform,” prompting Blackmon to charge that the Republican lieutenant governor had herself driven the state’s economy into the mud. While most political observers credited Blackmon’s landslide defeat to her liberalism and her “getting personal” on the abortion issue, the Democratic candidate and state party chair claimed that many whites were not yet willing to vote for an African American. A second African American Democrat, Gary Anderson, had also lost to a white in the treasurer’s race, but some political observers pointed out that Anderson performed well by outpolling Democratic governor Musgrove by 1 percent of the popular vote despite being greatly outspent by his Republican opponent.
Both parties face significant challenges from the more ideologically extreme activists within their own membership, challenges that unless dealt with may produce parties that are increasingly irrelevant to more centrist voters. Further, such a condition poses serious problems to state and local governments within the region. Perhaps the best hope is that pragmatic, centrist-ruling officeholders will emerge once elected to office. Even with such officeholders, however, success is not assured. In 2003, Alabama’s Republican governor Bob Riley fought for a tax reform plan that would benefit lower income people and greatly increase funding for the public schools. Riley’s efforts placed him on the cover of Governing magazine as a Public Official of the Year who provided a real-life Profile in Courage (Gurwitt 2003). However, his tax proposal was soundly rejected by the state’s voters. A major factor contributing to this defeat was opposition from Riley’s fellow Republicans. Still, pragmatic leadership efforts by elected officials in the South likely remain the best approach for blunting the challenges posed by the region’s partisan ideologues.
1. The NES data were made available by the ICPSR, which bears no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented in this chapter.