The partisan identification index has come under increasing criticism. Many of the difficulties in interpreting the index disappear once one realizes that the partisan identifi cation question is a bidimensional measure of partisanship and independence. As a consequence of this bidimensionality, partisan independents are neither more nor less partisan than weak partisans but are instead more independent. This relationship between the weak partisans and partisan independents explains the oft-observed transitivities, intransitivities, and nontransitivities that have appeared in the index.

Although the friends-and-neighbors factor helps explain the results of Democratic primaries in several Southern states, an adequate measure of the phenomenon is conspicuously missing. A procedure for measuring the hometown support, the concentration of that support, and the importance of friends-and-neighbors is developed herein. The 1947 special general election and the 1978 Democratic primaries for the Mississippi U.S. Senate seat are analyzed to show how the measure is better than a previous one, how the importance of friends-and-neighbors in determining election outcomes can be calculated, and how one can detect if the importance is spurious. The analysis demonstrates that friends-and-neighbors was as important in the 1978 first primary as it was in the 1947 special general election. The high importance in the 1978 runoff is partially explained, however, by the emerging North-South cleavage in Mississippi politics.In spite of the conventional wisdom that friends-and-neighbors' vote-i.e., the tendency for &dquo;candidates for state office ... to poll overwhelming majorities in their home counties and to draw heavy support in adjacent counties&dquo; (Key, 1949: 37)-is crucial for understanding politics in several Southern states, little research about the phenomenon has been published. A consequence of this paucity of research is a lack of consensus as to how the effects of friends-and-neighbors can be measured. V. O. Key (1949) identified the presence of the phenomenon by showing that the counties in which a candidate received a high percentage of the vote tended to be those counties that were close to the candidate's hometown; and Earl and Merle Black (1973) used a similar procedure to demonstrate the importance of friends-and-neighbors A UTHORS' NOTE: The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of the Quarterly for their most helpful suggestions and comments. A special thanks goes to William Gilmore for his assistance in identifying the hometown of R. L. Collins.

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In his classic, Southern Politics, Key used the term “one-party factionalism” to describe the electoral politics of the South during the 1930s and 1940s: “one-party” because the Republicans offered, at best, only minimal opposition to the Democrats, and “factional” because several groups tended to vie for control of the top state offices via electoral victories in the Democratic primaries. According to Key, severe consequences accompanied one-party factionalism. In most of the southern states, primary voters could not even vote the “ins” out of office, for the competing factions were so fluid that it was never clear who, if anyone, represented the ins. The haves in southern society normally controlled government; although those in power had their differences, particularly in style, most of them agreed that the status quo needed protection. The less privileged lacked organized avenues for expressing their needs.

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