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.

Interview

Well, at last, I have a real, bona fide campus interview, tentatively scheduled for the week after next, for a tenure-track job at a regional state university with a predominantly non-traditional student body in the lower plains (think “where the wind goes blowing…”). I already have a pre-interview scheduled for this weekend in Chicago (with a different school), but this is the first campus visit.

It actually seems like a fun job, where I’d get to play “big fish in a small pond,” and to be honest the idea of focusing on teaching rather than doing research is starting to appeal to me—not that research-oriented departments have been beating down my doors, mind you.

(Now to finish my preparations for the Chicago trip, including a couple of overheads for my paper presentation…)