On the Southern Strategy (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Monday, 3 November 2003

On the Southern Strategy

Howie Dean’s latest gaffe has sparked a substantial discussion in the blogosphere about the so-called “Southern Strategy”; Steven Taylor has something close to the post I’d write if I had more time.

From the scholarly perspective, I think most political scientists have attributed the maybe-realignment of the 1960s to racial issues (see, for example, the book-length treatments by Carmines and Stimson and Huckfeldt and Sprague), but Abramowitz (1992 AJPS, I think; might have been JOP) makes a strong case that those issues weren’t driving Republican success in the 1980s—although he leaves the question of the 1960s aside, and I don’t think people in political science were particularly enamoured with his use of exploratory factor analysis to demonstrate his point. However, I think there’s a paper to be written either trying to apply Abramowitz’s methodology to the 1960s-era data or looking at it over the history of the ANES using the Cumulative file; unfortunately, from a publication standpoint, I think realignment is no longer the sexy topic it was in the late 80s and early 90s.

An aside: one of the funniest moments in my academic career to date came when a graduate seminar I was in—I think it was Parties—was discussing Abramowitz’s piece, and, right in the middle of it, one of my colleagues, an African-American woman, exclaimed “Abramowitz is a fool.” That rated right up there with the action of another of my colleagues (in fairness, at the time her command of English was limited), who dutifully made note of our professor’s jesting statement that “parties are evil.” Graduate seminars at Ole Miss… good times.