Monday, 12 April 2004

Southern strategies

Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia takes on virtually all the existing scholarship on Southern politics in the latest Claremont Review of Books—and, IMHO, comes up a bit short of proving his point to my satisfaction, although a proper treatment of the article will have to wait until sometime tomorrow.

I will note that Alan Abramowitz came to virtually the same conclusion* in “Issue Evolution Reconsidered” (The Journal of Politics, 1994), which was a rebuttal to Carmines and Stimson’s Issue Evolution, which, along with Huckfeldt and Sprague’s Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics is probably the classic academic work that promotes the “southern strategy” explanation for the Southern realignment—the Black brothers, however, see dealignment rather than realignment to the GOP, and in a lot of their discussion, they actually support what Alexander says, at least to some extent.

Link via Lily Malcolm (a recent victim of a minor paring knife accident).

* This conclusion prompted one of my fellow classmates in a seminar to exclaim, as the sum total of her analysis, “Abramowitz is a fool!” Funnily enough, though there was a general consensus in the room that Abramowitz was wrong, none of us could conceive of a way to disprove it—although one of these decades I do plan to analyze the National Election Studies from the 1960s and see if Abramowitz’s thesis holds then (as opposed to the 1980s, which is the period his piece covers). Also see this post from last year, wherein I recounted this event.