Factionalism in the South: A Test of Theory and a Revisitation of V. O. Key

Abstract

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The Impact of Electoral Rules on Factional Competition in the Democratic South, 1919–48

“…A better approach could be to apply pooled time-series cross-section methods with county-level observations in a manner similar to previous studies of the consequences of Republican Party development on statewide Democratic factions (Berry and Canon, 1993;Black, 1983;Canon, 1978), with the caveat that particular care should be taken to choose the appropriate statistical techniques. The concern is that, during the period through the 1940s, bipartism cannot explain variation in local factional structures because in most states of the region there was no variation in the level of two-party competition, although once the Republican Party became a political force, variations in its strength could reasonably influence Democratic factional structures.…”

“…Together, these cases provide the best example of durable unipartism across a substantial area of time and space when nominations were conducted by a primary election. Extending the work of Canon (1978) and Black (1983) on statewide factional structures, this article shows that Key (1949) is correct that at the state level Southern states did not typically follow the Duvergerian logic (Duverger, 1951) that for single-member districts there should be two competitors in plurality-rule primaries and three or fewer competitors in majority-rule with runoff primaries (Cox, 1997). However, the number of candidates in Southern counties and parishes can be predicted by a state's electoral rules.…”

“…On the other hand, the major parties were characterized by high levels of infighting, despite the presence of a strong opposition in Italy's multi-party democracy. Similarly, Canon (1978) notes that there was not a rise in factional organization in the South in the postwar period when the Republican Party gained influence; however, Berry and Canon (1993) find that as the Republican Party became stronger, the incentive to enter a double-primary system waned because the probability of ultimately winning office became lower. Overall, the literature offers little evidence that interparty competition is necessary or sufficient for bifactionalism.…”

“…3 E S is essentially equivalent to the index of fractionalization (IF) used by both Canon (1978) and Berry and Canon (1993). IF = 1 -E S -1 .…”

Runoff Voters Will Do the Darndest Things: An Analysis of the 2008 Georgia Democratic Senate Runoff

“…A variety of researchers have found that runoffs encouraged candidate involvement during the one-party era of Southern politics (Canon 1978;Wright and Riker 1989;Berry and Canon 1993). Even with the emergence of the Republican Party in the early 1990s, the increased competitiveness of Southern primaries is still pronounced.…”