The Rational Southerner Black Mobilization, Republican Growth, and the Partisan Transformation of the American South

Since 1950, the South has undergone the most dramatic political transformation of any region in the country. The Solid (Democratic) South is now overwhelmingly Republican, and long disenfranchised African Americans vote at levels comparable to those of whites. In The Rational Southerner, M.V. Hood III, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris argue that strategic decisions by politically active members of both races played a decisive and underappreciated role in the development of the Southern Republican Party and the mobilization of the black electorate. They explain that mobilized blacks joining the Democratic Party made it increasingly difficult for conservative whites to maintain control of the Democratic Party machinery, making the increasingly visible Republican Party in the region more attractive to conservative whites looking to maintain political power in the region. The authors reach this conclusion by using their theory of relative advantage, which describes the way in which regional differentiation in demographics and electoral makeup produced an internally differentiated system. Following a theoretically-informed description of recent partisan dynamics in the South, Hood, Kidd, and Morris demonstrate with decades of state-level, sub-state, and individual-level data that GOP organizational strength and black electoral mobilization were the primary determinants of political change in the region. The core finding of their research, that race was, and still is, the primary driver behind political change in the region, stands in stark contrast to recent scholarship which points to in-migration, economic growth, or religious factors as the locus of transition. Original, groundbreaking, and strikingly relevant to the coming 2012 election year, The Rational Southerner provides a new perspective not only on Southern Politcs, but on the study of local political dynamics and party system transformation as a whole.

Section I: Theory and Background; Ch. 1: Introduction; Ch. 2: A Half Century of Political Change in the South; Ch. 3: The Strategic Dynamics of Southern Political Change; Ch. 4: Relative Advantage in Action: Case Studies in the Evolution of Republican State Parties in the South; Section II: Republican Growth; Ch. 5: Putting Relative Advantage to the Test: State-Level Republican Growth in the Modern American South; Ch. 6: Relative Advantage and Republican Growth at the Sub-State Level; Ch. 7: An Examination of the Theory of Relative Advantage at the Individual-Level; Section III: Black Mobilization; Ch. 8: Relative Advantage in a Post-VRA World: Black Voter Registration in the Modern South; Section IV: Conclusion; Ch. 9: Summary and Concluding Thoughts; Appendix A: Data Sources; Appendix B: Variable Operationalizations; Appendix C: Ancillary Statistical Models Works Cited

M.V. Hood is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Georgia. Quentin Kidd is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Government Department at Christopher Newport University. Irwin L. Morris is Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies and University of Maryland.