The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave by Devin Caughey

Reputation as Articulation: Alliance Building of Career Politicians in the Jim Crow South

“…Politicians vying for public support in the region could not depend on party identification to signal their policy preferences given the dominance of the Democratic Party, a regime conflated with the state apparatus, effectively curtailing the electorate, marginalizing opposition parties and enforcing a racially segregated civil sphere (Mickey 2015). While some scholars conceptualize one-party South as "authoritarian" (Gibson 2005;Mickey 2015), our research supports recent empirical work that finds that Southern politicians were responsive to variation in the interests of those citizens who could participate in their election (Caughey 2018). In the case of a selectorate, where members of one party determine the outcome of an election, political actors must differentiate themselves through other means, including having reputations that constitute (and are constituted by) the groups they embrace or oppose and setting a policy agenda that prioritizes the issues those constituencies find most salient.…”

“…To extend articulation theory, connecting personal reputation with ideological expression, we examine the agency of politicians in the so-called Solid South. As recognized, the label Solid South is misleading, given sharp regional and class divides (Key 1949;Caughey 2018;Bateman, Katznelson, and Lapinski 2018). The South is only "solid" given the institutional dominance of the Democratic Party and the commitment of the permitted electorate to White supremacy.…”

“…In Alabama politics of the 1920s, political debates over racial policies were less salient because the 1901 Alabama constitution established a structure of explicit White supremacy that lasted until the 1960s Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In other words, the Southern segregationists maintained social control by excluding race relations from the political agenda and preventing Black political participation (Schattschneider 1975(Schattschneider [1960; Bateman et al 2018;Caughey 2018). Thus, while White supremacy defined social relations in Jim Crow Alabama, racial contestation was marginal in the political arena in contrast to issues surrounding prohibition, religious tolerance, cotton prices, and labor rights (Feldman 2013).…”

“…In contrast to current studies of contentious politics, following the Gramscian perspective, which treat parties as the foremost political actors, we recognize the agency of politicians in burnishing reputations and forging alliances. While considering national electoral outcomes, a state might be characterized as politically uniform, the reality is more complex in light of intra-party politics as demonstrated by recent empirical work (Caughey 2018). In such contexts, politicians cultivate distinct reputations by situating themselves in their presentation of their politics by suturing a body of supportive constituents.…”

Intraparty Republican Factionalism as Identity in the Modern American South

“…The South is an appropriate region to conduct this study because it has become the base of Republican strength in the United States (Black & Black, 2007;Hood et al, 2012;Maxwell & Shields, 2019). Additionally, the South has a long history of intraparty factional conflicts (Caughey, 2018), perhaps most pronounced when Key (1949) elucidated the region's heightened one-party Democratic factionalism near the end of the 1940s. In the present day, we find that MAGA Republicans are a sizable portion of the southern Republican electorate, but not the dominant one.…”