Regional and Partisan Bases of Congressional Support for the Changing Agenda of Civil Rights Legislation

Abstract

THIS STUDY EXAMINES roll call voting within a single domain of public policy-civil rights legislation-in the U.S. House of Representatives during the extraordinarily important decade from 1963 to 1972. Initially centered around issues of public accommodations and voting rights in the South, the agenda of civil rights legislation also included controversies about racial discrimination in employment, housing, and public education across the entire nation. Precisely because the substance of legislative conflict has been transformed, as once controversial issues have become resolved and as more divisive matters have become salient, an effort to systematize our knowledge about congressional support for different types of civil rights policies is in order.' The decade we shall examine dis-