Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South

• Published in: American journal of political science Vol. 49; no. 3; pp. 672 - 688
• Main Authors: Valentino, Nicholas A., Sears, David O.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 350 Main Street , Malden , MA 02148 , USA , and 9600 Garsington Road , Oxford OX4 2DQ , UK Blackwell Publishing, Inc 01.07.2005; Blackwell Publishing; Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Subjects: Conservatism; Ideology; Partisanship; Party identification; Party realignment; Political Affiliation; Political Attitudes; Political Parties; Political partisanship; Political science; Political theory; Presidential elections; Race; Racial discrimination; Racism; Regional disparities; Right Wing Politics; Southern States; Survey data; U.S.A; Voting; Voting behaviour; White people; Whites; Southern states
• ISSN: 0092-5853; 1540-5907
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00136.x

Our focus is the regional political realignment that has occurred among whites over the past four decades. We hypothesize that the South's shift to the Republican party has been driven to a significant degree by racial conservatism in addition to a harmonizing of partisanship with general ideological conservatism. General Social Survey and National Election Studies data from the 1970s to the present indicate that whites residing in the old Confederacy continue to display more racial antagonism and ideological conservatism than non-Southern whites. Racial conservatism has become linked more closely to presidential voting and party identification over time in the white South, while its impact has remained constant elsewhere. This stronger association between racial antagonism and partisanship in the South compared to other regions cannot be explained by regional differences in nonracial ideology or nonracial policy preferences, or by the effects of those variables on partisanship.