PARTISAN DEALIGNMENT AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOUTHERN REPUBLICANISM (REALIGNMENT)

The solid one-party Democratic South has been transformed in the past three decades. The increasing competitiveness of the Southern Republican party is well documented in academic research. The causes of this phenomena, however, elicit considerable controversy. Two alternative explanations for the emergence of Southern Republicanism are examined in this research: the Dealignment and Behavioral Conversion hypotheses. According to the former explanation, Republican success in the South is a result of the national rise of self-identified independents. Actual conversions to the Republicans have been virtually non-existent. It is a national decline in the strength and importance of political parties which has produced the changes in southern electoral behavior. The Behavioral Conversion explanation, however, maintains that the Republicans have developed an idigenous power base in the region. The party's recent successes are the result of actual conversions, behavioral if not always in self-identification. Correlation coefficients of county level two-party vote percentages from each southern state for President, U.S. Senate and Governor from 1954 to 1980 are utilized to test these hypotheses. These statistics demonstrate how well one can predict, by county, where a party's strength lies in one election knowing how well it performed in another. If a political party is stronger as a predictor of voting patterns as southern party competition increases then there should be a greater continuity of Republican strength in states with more advanced Republican parties. Consequently, according to the Behavioral Conversion explanation, correlations of Republican two-party vote percentages in the Rim South should be significantly greater than in the Deep South. The contrary is implied by the Dealignment hypothesis. The results of this research, while by no means unequivocal, indicate that the rim states exhibited significantly greater continuity in partisan voting patterns, during this period, than their less competitive brethren. Therefore, greater levels of two-party competition appear to be associated with greater stability in the parties' electoral coalitions. There were, however, no consistent changes in the correlation coefficients over time as two-party competiton developed.