Ideological Realignment and Partisan Change in the American South, 1972–1996

Abstract

The political transformation of the American South from one‐party dominance to a competitive two‐party system has attracted considerable attention from scholars and has generated competing explanations of the causes of this partisan change. This paper addresses one explanation—the ideological realignment of white conservatives. It extends the research of Black and Black (1987) and Carmines and Stanley (1990), both of whom examined ideological realignment into the 1990s. Findings suggest that the gradual ideological realignment of partisan identifications accelerated in the 1990s with white conservatives increasingly holding Republican partisan identifications. Moreover, ideological realignment was evident not only with respect to general political ideology but also with respect to specific issue preference. This ideological realignment has had a profound impact on southern party politics and electoral competition which explains the spectacular Republican gains found at the subpresidential level in the 1990s.