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One of the staples of American politics is the theory that party competition is a function of constituency diversity. In Federalist #10 (see Rae and Taylor 1970: 7; Fiorina 1974: 89-119; Sullivan 1973) Madison emphasizes that increased constituency diversity facilitates factional dispute. As diversity increases, it weakens the ability of any single faction to represent the multifarious demands of people in a geographic area (The Federalist Papers 1961: 77-83). Despite this relatively simple and normatively pleasing explanatory perspective, and despite this theory’s broad acceptance in political science, the study of the relationship between constituency diversity and party competition has been one of the more elusive and sometimes contradictory research topics of the past 30 years. This article analyzes county level data from the 1970s and 1980s—the period that forms the basis of much of this literature—to assess the theoretical and empirical purchase of three of the dominant operational definitions for constituency diversity and then compares these county level findings with parallel state level analyses. I find that reformulated Lieberson/Sullivan social diversity indexes and Koetzle’s political diversity index produce similar results at the state and county levels of analysis. Moreover, these results are consistent with the theory that constituency diversity has a strong influence on the level of party competition.

Natural resource management and education must account for both the natural and human components of a complex system, yet examples of such interdisciplinary approaches are still relatively rare, especially in education. This study discusses a graduate seminar on water management, developed from an interdisciplinary National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The seminar applied constructivist pedagogy which is not only best suited for interdisciplinary work, but also allows flexibility to redesign the course components and deliverables after each evaluation cycle. While the seminar was a successful experiment, several challenges remain when implementing such courses. These challenges include not only the organization and assessment of course deliverables, but also fitting such courses into the administrative structure of the university when represented disciplines are located in several colleges across campus.

Objective. This study develops and tests a model of political regionalism that posits that if regions are politically exceptional, then individuals sharing the same profile but living in these different regions will have divergent presidential voting patterns (King, 1996). Methods. Analyzing presidential voting behavior from 1952 to 2004, I use logistic regression techniques to test a regional model of homogeneity (southern exceptionalism) versus a unit model of homogeneity (South and Non-South are statistically similar). Results. The findings show that the South's presidential voting patterns are exceptional in the 1950s and during the civil rights era but, starting in the Reagan era, southern exceptionalism waned. These findings also show that the South is converging with the non-South (northernization) relative to the influences of race, family income, union membership, in-migrants, and gender, and the nonSouth is converging with the South (southernization) relative to the influences of education, blue-collar workers, and age. Conclusions. Both economic class and race variables contribute to the demise of regional exceptionalism; however, race plays a more persistent role. Given the process of ''southernization'' and the instability of the predictors of presidential voting for the South over time, I conclude that the study of the South as a region should continue until the process of change subsides and a new equilibrium is found.

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