Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate

Abstract

A long-standing debate in political economy is whether voters are driven primarily by economic self-interest or by less pecuniary motives like ethnocentrism. Using newly available data, we reexamine one of the largest partisan shifts in a modern democracy: Southern whites' exodus from the Democratic Party. We show that defection among racially conservative whites explains the entire decline from 1958 to 1980. Racial attitudes also predict whites' earlier partisan shifts. Relative to recent work, we find a much larger role for racial views and essentially no role for income growth or (non-race-related) policy preferences in explaining why Democrats “lost” the South. (JEL D72, J15, N42)

Listening to Louisiana: what “climbing the empathy wall” can (and can't) tell us about the populist right

“…Conservatives in both politics and the media have spent decades crafting effective 'dog-whistle' approaches. Based on the extensive evidence we have about levels of racial resentment in communities like the ones Hochschild is studying, and their association with intense hostility towards government, it is hard not to question benign interpretations of this 'delicate' speech (Archaya, Blackwell and Sen 2016; Kuziemko and Washington 2015;Tesler 2012;Valentino and Sears 2005).…”

Compound Political Identity: How Partisan and Racial Identities Overlap and Reinforce

“…Our theoretical discussion and empirical tests focus on the relationship between two identities: partisanship and race. This builds on an extensive literature establishing the central importance of these identities for understanding American politics (Campbell et al, 1960;Carmines and Stimson, 1989;Dawson, 1994;Kinder and Sanders, 1996;Green, Palmquist, and Schickler, 2002;Hutchings and Valentino, 2004;Valentino and Sears, 2005;Tesler, 2013;White, Laird, and Allen, 2014;Kuo, Malhotra, and Mo, 2017;Kuziemko and Washington, 2018). Existing work makes three points relevant to our present focus.…”

“…First, partisanship and race are closely linked, both in actuality and perceptually. Racial and partisan identities have become more closely associated since the 1970s (Carmines and Stimson, 1989;Green, Palmquist, and Schickler, 2002;Tesler, 2016;Kuziemko and Washington, 2018). Perceptually, Ahler and Sood (2018) show that African Americans are regarded as prototypical Democrats, so much so that the public dramatically overestimates the share of the Democratic party that is black.…”

“…Several examples illustrate this point. The passage of high-profile civil rights legislation prompted the public to associate the Democratic Party with African-Americans (Carmines and Stimson, 1989;Green, Palmquist, and Schickler, 2002;Kuziemko and Washington, 2018). While this led white southerners to shift to the Republican party, the crystallized nature of partisan attachments meant this process took decades (Valentino and Sears, 2005;Schickler, 2016;Mason, 2018).…”

Narrative Economics

“…A search of the NBER working paper database finds less than one hundred papers with the words "textual analysis." Textual analysis has been used by economists, for example, to document changes in party affiliation (Kuziemko and Washington, 2015); political polarization (Gentzkow et al 2016); and news and speculative price movements (Roll 1988;Boudoukh et al 2013). But much more could be done.…”