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More than 70 years ago, V.O. Key (1949) published a book titled Southern Politics in State and Nation. The culmination of several years’ worth of meticulous research, his goal was to better understand the politics of the South and how those political traditions emanated from the culture and history of the region. The research covered the states of the former Confederacy in great detail, even developing regional distinctions within states. Key argued the eleven former Confederate states all have individual personalities, but they act politically as one unit. He compared southern states to siblings: brothers and sisters who may have distinct dispositions but share common family traits. These shared traits include a plantation tradition that had been supported by slavery, implicit political conflicts that have been repressed by a one-party system, and the unique American experience of wartime defeat and devastation (Bass & DeVries, 1995). Key intuitively understood a fundamental dichotomy of the South as a region: although the South seemed to be cohesive as a region (and very different from the rest of the nation), he also understood that the individual southern states, and even areas within states, were unique. How could the South seemingly show such solidarity, and yet reveal so much fragmentation within the region? Was the cohesiveness strong enough to overcome the fragmentation within the South?
Key’s focus was clearly on the politics of the South. At the time of Key’s writing, politics in the South were dominated by a single party (the Democratic Party), and the issues of race and civil rights dominated both political and public life. Jim Crow regulations were fully in force, segregation was the law, and social, racial, and economic divisions ran deep. Key’s important insight was that the South was different from the rest of the nation, in that the politics of how southern states addressed these issues was fundamentally different than that of non-South states. Single-party control, coupled with a strong conservative ideology, a cultural distrust of people outside the region, and long-standing traditions of agrarianism (Reed, 1983), racism (Acharya, Blackwell, & Sen, 2018; Black & Black, 1987), religion (Baker et al., 1983; Elazar, 1972), and a healthy distrust of government combined to give the South a very distinct “personality.” Moreover, this distinction mattered in ways that could be detected empirically.
Today the South is again dominated by a single party, but it is now the Republican Party. Although the labels have changed, the underlying conservative political ideology has changed little. Indeed, the 1990s saw a significant number of southern politicians switch parties without making substantial changes in their ideologies, their offices, or their constituencies. The net result was that party labels changed, but little else about the politics of the South changed. Many of the other factors considered by Key (and legions of scholars of southern politics since) are still in place, but much has changed in the South as well. Southern culture (see Cooper & Knotts, 2017) has changed as a result of years of in-migration; technological changes such as the widespread availability of television in the 1950s and 1960s, and of broadband internet service in the 1990s and 2000s have all served to alter and dilute traditional southern culture. However, in spite of these changes (or, perhaps, because of these changes), southern identity remains strong, and the politics of the South maintains enough distinctiveness to be of interest to scholars.
In the 70 years since the initial publication of Key’s work, there has been a steady stream of scholarly work to better understand the South as a distinct political region. Key’s work effectively founded the field of southern politics; one can now find courses at universities across the nation that focus on southern politics. There are textbooks specifically designed for such courses (see, e.g., McKee, 2019; Woodward, 2013). The Military College of South Carolina (The Citadel) in Charleston, South Carolina, has hosted the biennial Citadel Symposium on Southern Politics since 1978, attended regularly by the most active scholars of southern politics in the discipline. This work has found its way into mainstream journals and some of the most respected scholarly presses in the world and stands today as the single largest body of regional politics scholarship in the United States. In sum, southern politics remains a vibrant field of study, and one which strives to continue the work begun by Key more than 7 decades ago.
One of the underlying questions of this work is the degree to which the South remains politically distinct (Steed et al., 1990). This is a question of no small importance; if the South is not distinct politically from the rest of the nation, then the justification for studying the South is obviated. A region that is not distinct from other regions is thus, in essence, a distinction without a difference. On the other hand, if elements of southern distinctiveness can be detected, then the nature (and causes) of that distinctiveness become both relevant and interesting. If the South is distinct as a region, in what ways is it distinct? How does the region compare to the rest of the United States? More importantly, do the distinctions matter in any relevant manner? If the region is distinct, but the distinctions have no practical or social-scientific basis, should we even be asking the question?
In terms of distinctiveness, the general consensus among scholars of southern politics is that yes; the South is distinct. We see patterns in election outcomes (Maxwell & Shields, 2019), redistricting (Aldrich & Griffin, 2017; Bullock, 2010), citizen ideology (Levendusky, 2009; Lublin, 2004), cultural identity (Cooper & Knotts, 2017; Wilson & Ferris, 1989), electoral preferences (Aistrup, 2010; Bass & DeVries, 1995), and partisanship (Black & Black, 1987; Campbell, 1977; Nadeu & Stanley, 1993) that show evidence that southern states are different. In addition, a less-traveled path has examined policy choices in southern states. The logic of this work is as follows: if southern states are indeed unique in terms of election outcomes, ideology, partisanship, etc., then we should be able to see those differences translate into different state policy choices. In other words, the kinds of policy preferences (and policy outcomes) sought by southern states should also be different. If policy outcomes are indeed the net result of a political process, the differences in the processes only matter if the policy outcomes are different. It is the goal of this book to examine the degree to which policy choices in the South differ from those in the rest of the nation – in essence, the degree to which politics in the South really matters at the state level.
Related to this, much of the extant work in southern politics is focused on electoral outcomes with national implications. The bulk of scholarship in this realm addresses issues such as the effects of redistricting (see Bullock, 2010), the outcomes of congressional elections (McKee, 2010), or presidential elections (Black & Black, 1992; Kapeluck et al., 2009). A smaller body of work has examined the composition of state legislatures or state gubernatorial control.1 We do know there is a link between national-level and state-level electoral outcomes, but if the focus of the work is placed on national political outcomes, we are left with gaps in our knowledge about state politics and their effects. The lack of focus on state-level politics leaves unanswered questions about the real-world effects of those politics in the form of policy.
Luckily for scholars and students of southern politics, it does appear that the South retains at least some uniqueness as a region. Culture, history, economics, and race were integral elements for Key (1949), and these still play a role in the 21st century. Moreover, race still plays a central role in the politics of the South (see Aistrup, 2010, 2011), even nearly 60 years after the Civil Rights Act and nearly 70 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Although the South may be distinct, the differences are not static – they change over time. Indeed, depending on the factors one examines, the South may be thought of as less distinct (Steed et al., 1990) and, paradoxically, more distinct (Travis et al., 2016). The result is a patchwork of changing dynamics.
There are two schools of thought regarding change in the South. On the one hand, the migration of people from the “Rust Belt” states to the southern states has been an ongoing process; the population of the South has grown steadily as the populations of states in the Northeast and Midwest have shrunk. This in-migration, argue some, has the effect of diluting both southern culture and long-standing political uniqueness (see Hillygus et al., 2017; Hood & McKee, 2010). The net effect of this change is that the South has lost its uniqueness and become much more like the rest of the nation in political terms. Whereas the South was once a bastion of conservatism, the result is a move toward the liberal end of the scale, particularly in the “Rim South” states.2 However, the available evidence on this point is, at best, muddled.
A competing school of thought suggests that the South has actually become a national political trendsetter (Appelbome, 1996). This argument suggests that the electoral trends prevalent in the South for generations have been spreading to states outside the South, and that politics across the United States exhibit features once thought to be unique to the South. In short, the South is not becoming like the rest of the nation; the rest of the nation is becoming more like the South (see Applebome, 1996; Breaux et al., 1998). When one examines state policy choices, this school of thought is supported by empirical evidence. For example, Breaux et al. (1998) argued that Mississippi was the de facto model for the 1996 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) law that allowed states to become much more restrictive with their welfare benefits. While this would suggest that the rest of the nation is becoming more like the South, the causality has not been firmly established. Additionally, if it is the case that the rest of the nation is becoming more like the South, then it is also likely the case that the South is becoming less distinct as a political region. A straightforward method to determine southern distinctiveness is to compare the policy choices of states in the South and non-South states, and to compare the factors that appear to drive policy choices in each group. To the extent that policy choices, or the drivers of policy, are different, we may conclude that the South also is distinct as a region.
What about Policy Outcomes?
The importance of state policy decisions and state policy action cannot be overstated. As practiced in the United States, federalism results in shared powers between the national, state, and local governments. While the nature of federalism has changed in practice over the years (see Kettl, 2020; Wright, 1988), states have never lost their policy making power. In a “dual federalism” model (Wright, 1988), the national government and the states each maintain primary authority in their own unique policy spheres. In an overlapping model of federalism (Agranoff & Radin, 2015) the authority of the national government and states is intertwined, but there is still coordination in policy implementation (Burke, 2014). This is evident in the move toward the use of block grants in the 1980s, as evidenced by the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) and Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grants; with the added incentives of “progressive federalism” (see Gerken, 2014, 2017) during the Obama administration. In each of these models of federalism, state politics (and, therefore, state policy making) matters. States make policy decisions in the “lanes” within their policy authority, whether those decisions are completely within the realm of state authority (e.g., setting voter ID requirements; see Aistrup et al., 2019), or concern the state implementation of national policy (e.g., Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act; see Morris et al., 2019). In either case, these state-level policy decisions have consequences for citizens, the state, and the nation.
While the politics of the South has been studied and cataloged by many, less attention has been paid to policy making in the South. Electoral outcomes are important in that they determine the composition of the formal policy makers – that is, the group with the most direct influence over the agenda-setting and policy adoption processes. If the outcomes of elections matter, then we would expect to see differences in the kinds and types of policies promulgated by formal policy makers. And, if the politics of the South are truly unique, then we would ...
