Presidential Address: Southern Parties in State and Nation

Abstract

One-half century ago, V. 0. Key, Jr., published his masterpiece, Southern Politics in State and Nation. Key's analysis of the failure of democracy in the South must count as one of the great achievements of our discipline. His explanation is rich and complex. Certainly the anti-liberal basis of society in the midtwentieth-century South was crucial-"Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro," he wrote (1984[1949], 5). But it was not only that the South was an illiberal society, what really mattered was that the South was also non-democratic. The failure of democracy can be traced to the absence of party competition and, according to Key, the consequent failure of a coherent and organized party system to emerge. His explanation is that the lack of organized partisan competition to win the support of the great body of the people, as James Madison might have put it, by itself accounts for the failure of democracy. In this account, therefore, if only there was regularized competition, there would be organized parties, and if only there were at least two organized political parties, democracy would inevitably follow. A cottage industry then arose to study, first, the possibility of partisan realignment in the South (e.g., Converse 1966; Phillips 1970), subsequently it sought to assess the inroads Republicans were making in their ability to compete in the South (e.g., Beck 1977; Black and Black 1987), and most recently that industry turned to examine the culmination of the process, ending with a fully competitive (perhaps even dominant) GOP in the South (e.g., Aistrup 1996; Black 1998; Lamis 1990). The attraction of this stream of research is understandable. These are scholars considering whether trends are pointing toward sustained, organized partisan competition. If that were to be so, we would then conclude that the full flowering of democracy would at last be expected to appear in the South.