In a lengthy and sometimes heated exchange in the American Political Science Review in 1974, Walter Dean Burnham, Philip E. Converse, and Jerrold G. Rusk clashed over two topics which have long been matters of debate among political scientists: the role of legal institutions in shaping human behavior, and the generalizability to other populations of findings based on a particular method and drawn from a specific place or era. 1 Nine years earlier, Burnham had challenged the American Voter's survey-based portrait of the United States electorate by compiling, from aggregate electoral data, five indices of late nineteenthcentury American voters' involvement in politics. Contending that these earlier Americans were much more interested in and seemingly informed about politics than their mid-twentieth century counterparts, Burnham asserted that the overwhelming 1896 McKinley victory and the succeeding political hegemony of major business interests had alienated previously active lower-class voters from the electoral system by robbing them of a real and effective alternative to corporate domination. Exogenous events-the decline in the non-Southern opposition to the Republicans and a capitalist takeover of the GOP-had caused a shift in the pattern of electoral participation. 2 Converse and Rusk countered with the argument that different exogenous events produced legal changes which in turn caused apparent alterations in behavior. Aiming only to reduce corruption and free individuals to express their political opinions fully, Mugwumps and Progressives, according to Converse and Rusk, introduced strict registration and Australian ballot laws. Such laws decreased fraud

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How did the no-party, extremely-low-turnout, fragmented political system that V.O. Key, Jr. described in his 1949 book Southern Politics get transformed into the Republican-dominant, average-turnout, highlyorganized political structure that propelled Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich into the House Speakership in 1995? After a long series of analytical narratives that focused on racial explanations for the shifts in white voting behavior, several of the most recent works have emphasized class and economic development. I suggest that both explanations are misleading because they treat race, class, and party as stable phenomena, when it is the changes in these phenomena and in their interactions that ought to be the focus of explanations for the reshaping of southern politics. A comprehensive successor to Key's masterwork will have to blend religion and ideology (which have also undergone dramatic changes in the six decades of southern history since Key wrote) with race and class, and it will have to describe and explain changes in governance, as well.

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