Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship and...Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship and Policy Coalitions during the New Deal and Fair Deal Ira Katznelson Columbia University

Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship andPolicy Coalitions during the New Deal and Fair Deal

Ira Katznelson Columbia University

Quinn Mulroy Syracuse University

Committed to a situated historical approach to studies of Congress, this article demonstrates how the 17-state JimCrow South composed a structurally pivotal bloc during the New Deal and Fair Deal (1933–52) due to its size andcohesion and the need for southern votes to constitute majority coalitions. Empirically, it asks how southernmembers deployed this capacity and with what consequences. Utilizing a multilevel coding of policy substance, ittracks whether southern roll-call behavior was consistent with Democratic Party positions and traces changes overtime with consequences for lawmaking and party politics. Analytically, the article moves beyond central currentdebates about parties and preferences that provide no distinctive place for the South and advances ‘‘situatedpartisanship,’’ an approach that privileges temporality and policy substance to understand when and with regardto which issues political parties are able to organize the preferences of their members and control lawmaking.

‘‘Who is pivotal in U.S. lawmaking?’’ —KeithKrehbiel (1998, 20)

The place of the South in national lawmaking isboth theoretically and empirically underspe-cified.1,2 The array of theories of lawmaking

that we possess—including conditional party govern-ment and pivotal politics—usually finds no particularplace for the preferences and behavior of representativesfrom the country’s most distinctive region. This webelieve to be unfortunate, especially for students ofCongress and history. Just as it is impossible to under-stand antebellum lawmaking without taking the slave-holding interest into account, so post-Reconstructionlawmaking cannot be comprehended properly withoutidentifying how a distinguishing southern vantageshaped Congress both in the long era of Jim Crow andin the new world fashioned by its defeat.

Students of Congress have portrayed a world ofrepresentation in which the key actors either are two

competing, if sometimes internally heterogeneous,political parties, or individual members of the Houseand Senate with distinctive, well-ordered, and ratherfixed locations on an ideological map. In theseportrayals, the South dissolves as a coherent unit ofanalysis. Although the South and its representativescan make appearances—conditional party theory wasinitially built from the story of how changes to theDemocratic Caucus were driven by the demise ofsouthern Dixiecrats (Rohde 1991)—they have se-cured no enduring or distinguishing standing, andthus enter and exit in a rather ad hoc manner. Eventhe conditional party approach treats the South asone case among many, assuming that polarizationand party homogeneity, its key variables, arise fromthe distribution of preferences in Congress, withno connection to how this allocation is rooted inany particular regional alignment. Congressionalscholarship, in short, largely has left behind the

The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 2, April 2012, Pp. 604–620 doi:10.1017/S0022381611001940

� Southern Political Science Association, 2012 ISSN 0022-3816

1Data files and the online appendix are available at http://iserp.columbia.edu/content/american-institutions-project.

2Of course, there are some important book length exceptions. These notably include Bensel (1984) and Sanders (1999). There also is asignificant older body of work on what it calls the conservative coalition in Congress, an important precursor to our analysis (Manley1973; Moore 1967; Patterson 1966), and an important chapter on ‘‘the fifteen years between 1937 and 1952 when the conservativecoalition shaped policies under Democratic presidents’’ in Schickler’s account of institutional developments in Congress (2001, 136–88).While we aim at a fuller specification of the key issues raised in this body of scholarship, we abjure the term ‘‘conservative coalition’’because we find it to be both too broad and underspecified. Too broad because it implies an overarching shift, but at least in the periodwe cover the defection by southern Democrats to Republican positions occurred less often than the term suggests; underspecifiedbecause it tends to be used without sufficient reference to the substantive content of such defection votes by southern members.

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challenge posed by V.O. Key, Jr.’s landmark chapterson the South in Congress (1949), the wish tocomprehend the meaning, extent, and tensions ofDemocratic Party membership in tandem with astrong desire to protect southern interests.

Returning to the period in the 1930s and 1940s thathe highlighted, this article seeks to identify distinctfeatures of southern representation. We specify congres-sional partisanship in that era as a three-actor com-petition among Republicans, nonsouthern Democrats,and southern Democrats, and we discuss implicationsfor congressional theory. These, of course, are notwholly equivalent units. Yet in delineating southernrepresentatives as composing a ‘‘quasi-party’’—a coher-ent legislative grouping that sat uneasily within itspolitical party but was more than just a constellationof individuals who happened to share preferences at themoment—we treat these blocs as potentially analogousunits of action.

We do so on the understanding that it is impor-tant to distinguish circumstances where such intersti-tial groups simply are ad hoc from those where theycompose durable blocs with coherent preferences.Further, when groups of legislators actually combinein quasi-parties, we are challenged to understand whenand how often that bloc’s votes are pivotal to law-making, and whether, and to what extent, this capacityextends to significant legislation. Placing such actors inhistorical circumstances, it further is important toinquire about the duration of their coherent constel-lation and about the substantive content of issuesabout which bloc members remain loyal to partypositions as distinct from those where they bolt tofollow the distinctive preferences that define theirposition as a group within the legislature.

We approach southern Democrats in this manner.Like other members of Congress, they held all theobvious motivations for party loyalty, not least thewish to secure and maintain majority standingfor the Democratic Party, a status that could offerrewards of patronage, influence, and seniority, andlegislate to relieve their region’s deep poverty. But asthey also possessed a commitment to their racial order,they had to decide whether they simultaneously couldguard the autonomy of their section while promotingNew Deal and Fair Deal policies. How, they had to ask,could the tension between party loyalty and regionalracial preferences be managed? The manner in whichthey would answer this question determined the verycontent of New Deal lawmaking, and with it, thecharacter and fate of American democracy.

Two puzzles loom. Considered as a distinctivevoting bloc, did southern members possess the

capacity to be pivotal? With what empirical andhistorical consequences?

Southern representatives, by and large, were struc-turally no less pivotal than the other two collectiveactors in each Congress we study. Moreover, southernDemocrats often proved to be the most important ofthe three groupings because in the constitution ofmajorities their votes were more pliable in light of thecross-pressures of party and preference with which theycontended and the distinctive manner in which theyassessed the meaning of legislative proposals. At stakewas not just whether or how, but when they wouldexercise the advantages conferred by their pivotalposition. An effort to pinpoint southern congressionalbehavior by attending to the substance of lawmakingthus composes the heart of this article. Legislativecapacity, party voting, and the character of coalitionscrossing party lines depended on these southerndecisions. Based on this assessment, we can discernwhen and how a decisive shift in southern propensitiestriggered a transformation in national politics.

The empirical core of this investigation is asystematic examination of the boundaries, origins,and challenges to partisanship posed by southernrepresentatives within the Democratic Party by com-paring their roll-call behavior with that of non-southern Democrats and Republicans across the fullrange of 1,898 House and 2,533 Senate roll calls withpolicy relevance in the 73rd to 82nd Congresses.3 Todo so, we employ a substantive classification of issuesand utilize a typology of roll calls that distinguishespartisan, cross-partisan, sectional, and disloyal votingby southern members.

Our approach identifies the times and issues thatcharacterized the roll-call behavior of southern mem-bers set within their often challenging historicalsituation. It is intended to complement more familiarand commonly used empirical designations, especiallythe estimation of ideal points of legislators. UtilizingDW-NOMINATE scores, it is possible to show how,pulled by both party and region, southern representa-tives often ended up in a pivotal position at or near thefloor median. But absent a disaggregation by sub-stance, a certain kind of fallacy of composition ispossible. On some issues the tug of party proved

3We included procedural roll calls that are clearly linked to asubstantive policy issue. After reviewing the Congressional Recordfor each procedural roll call, we examined the surroundingdebate to determine whether a roll call was purely procedural(e.g., a vote on the election of the Speaker of the House) or wasclearly linked to a policy under discussion (e.g., a vote to adjournmade during fierce debate of a bill).

was the south pivotal? 605

strong, while on others the tug of region. Our goal isthus to understand how the substance of politics,studied in historical time, can reveal the sourcesthat underpin aggregate ideal-point depictions, whichportray legislators in a seemingly fixed two-dimensionallocation. In discerning and appreciating the selectioneffects of policy issues, and in designating how theyvary over time, our empirical analysis invites the esti-mation of ideal points by policy areas. Unfortunately,the number of roll calls for any single Congress forthe fine-grained policy coding that we believe to bemost revealing too often is insufficient to effectivelypursue this line of analysis with NOMINATE. But itis available in principle both as a way to follow-upand confirm our findings.4

These years, which include monumental legisla-tion about domestic and international relations, werecharacterized by strongly articulated ideological andpartisan differences which were especially fluid withrespect to party voting, cross-party coalitions, and thecapacity of the majority party to pass significantlegislation (Brady, Cooper, and Hurley 1977; Collie1988; Sinclair 1978). Stipulating that the era’s south-ern members had three central commitments—sustain the majority status of the Democratic partyto retain their power in the legislature; promote theeconomic development of the region; and protectthe racial order of the South—we wish to know whenthis potentially pivotal bloc maintained party loyaltyand when its members joined the opposition party tostop passage of legislation favored by the majorityparty to which they belonged or pass legislationagainst the party’s wishes. By identifying variationsto partisan, cross-partisan, sectional, and disloyalvotes across policy areas and over time, we detectmodifications to the policy choices southern Demo-crats made in Congress, especially in the 1940s.

We close by discussing the implications of thesefindings for debates about the status of partisanshipin congressional studies. We suggest the need toadvance beyond the partisan-preference antinomyby analyzing particular temporal configurations withregard to specific policy questions. Working fromwithin an understanding common to historical andrational choice institutionalists that situations induce

preferences and choices (Katznelson and Weingast2005), we offer an account of ‘‘situated partisanship’’to make sense of the southern role, an approach thatprivileges policy substance in historical time. On thisview stressing historical contextualization, the con-tent of a given policy agenda at a particular momentshapes the capacity of political parties to organize thepreferences of their members and control lawmaking.

Unlike much existing theory, this perspectivedoes not assume a necessary symmetry betweenparties and preferences, nor does it treat parties andpreferences as inherently competing alternatives.Political parties, after all, are composed not just ofindividuals, but of coherent clusters of members whoshare fates and hierarchies of preference. Thus it isimportant to identify those members who are pivotalactors within their party and in the legislature notonly as individuals but as parts of one or morebehavioral blocs and to offer questions and tools thatcan identify and explain bases for the relative cohe-sion of such quasi-parties.

During the New Deal-Fair Deal era, southernmembers of the Democratic Party constituted themost significant grouping of this kind. Because theexistence and character of internal party blocs canvary (some, like Jim Crow southern Democrats, maybe durable, while others may be more ephemeral andeven more issue specific), the lawmaking situations ofmany members are more complex than bulky labelslike ‘‘party’’ and ‘‘preference’’ can possibly capture.

The South as Structurally Pivotal

We define the South as the states that mandatedracial segregation.5 This is a designation both prior toand independent of the behavior of their representa-tives in Congress. The geography of Jim Crow took inMissouri, plus the states the U.S. Census counted assouthern—a West Central region (Arkansas, Louisiana,Oklahoma, and Texas), an East South Central Region(Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee), anda South Atlantic South (Delaware, Florida, Georgia,Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia,and West Virginia). Fifteen of these states had practicedchattel slavery on the eve of the Civil War. These, plusWest Virginia, which then was part of Virginia, andOklahoma, which only achieved statehood in 1907, all

4In future work we anticipate experimenting with different levelsof temporal and substantive aggregation to overcome thislimitation, and with alternative methods and measures, includingthe Bayesian approach of the IDEAL method (Clinton andJackman 2009). Here, we wish to show the potential power ofa rigorous content-rich historical approach as a way of pointinginquiry in new directions.

5Three states—Arizona, Kansas, and New Mexico—did notmandate segregation, but offered local governments the optionto require it.

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required racial segregation before it was outlawed inpublic schools by the 1954 Brown decision. Further,only these states prohibited interracial marriage at thestart of 1967, the year the Court ruled such bans tobe unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. Such require-ments and prohibitions characterized Delaware asmuch as Mississippi, Missouri as well as Alabama.6

The South, in short, composed a long-standingcompulsory racial order of white supremacy. No memberof Congress at any time during the full New Deal erawould have thought that the region did not comprise aclear, discrete, and coherent entity. A future president ofthe Southern Political Science Association, the Florida-based political scientist Marian Irish, noted in 1942 that,like representatives from other areas, ‘‘the Southernersadvocate all legislation which favors their constituents.’’But ‘‘what makes their stand seem unique is the persis-tence of a single sectional motive’’ (Irish 1942, 92). At theend of that decade, Key identified that motive. ‘‘Weought to be both specific and candid,’’ he wrote, ‘‘aboutthe regional interest that the Democratic party of theSouth has represented in national affairs. It must beconceded that there is one, and only one, real basis forsouthern unity, the Negro.’’ Southern Politics, heobserved, ‘‘is at times interpreted as a politics of cotton,as a politics of free trade, as a politics of agrarian poverty,or as a politics of planter and plutocrat.’’ Yet ‘‘althoughsuch interpretations have a superficial validity, in the lastanalysis the major peculiarities of southern politics goback to the Negro’’ (Key 1949, 315, 5).

The election of Franklin Roosevelt and the 73dCongress in 1932 appeared to confirm the seeminglyfixed role a solid Democratic presence in the Southplayed as the region’s hegemonic political institution

and as a leading established force within the nationalparty. Broadly united in opposition to the RepublicanParty, the South’s one-party system had propelled theDemocratic Party in most presidential and congres-sional elections since Reconstruction and had served inWashington as a source of protection for whitesupremacy. ‘‘Two party competition,’’ Key famouslyobserved, ‘‘would have meant the destruction of south-ern solidarity in national politics . . . .Unity on thenational scene was essential in order that the largestpossible bloc could be mobilized to resist any nationalmove toward interference with southern authority todeal with the race question as was desired locally’’ (Key1949, 8–9). The protection of the white South’sregional interests depended on the ability of theregion’s representatives to behave as a voting bloc onpar with Republicans and with its copartisans to theNorth, and on its capability to produce and advancecoalitions that could support ambitions to develop thecountry’s poorest section while blocking legislation thatseemed to threaten its racial order. Under such circum-stances, did the South compose a pivotal bloc?

A felicitous balance in the distribution of partisanand geographic features of the era’s patterns ofrepresentation underpinned the region’s congressionalcapacity. As Figure 1 shows, at the start of the NewDeal, Democratic majorities in the House and Senatewere characterized by a preponderance of Democratsfrom outside the region. Southern representativesconstituted a minority of the majority, without whomthe party majority could not govern. Later, duringthe second half of the period we consider, starting inthe 76th House and the 77th Senate, southern memberscommanded the majority of seats amongst congres-sional Democrats, both when the party maintainedcontrol of the House and Senate, and during theRepublican 80th, when they, like other Democrats,were not essential to the achievement of majorities ineither chamber. This pattern of southern dominationinside the Democratic Party persisted through the endof the Truman Administration, with southern Demo-crats demonstrating cohesive voting comparable tononsouthern Democrats and Republicans.

Given the balance of forces in Congress, theseDemocrats comprised a pivotal bloc with abilities atleast as substantial as those of Republicans and theirnonsouthern compatriots in each New Deal and FairDeal Congress but the 80th. We can gauge thisstructural capacity with a measure of the coalitionalpivotality that identifies when, and on which issues,southern Democrats had the potential to play apivotal role on individual roll calls. To make thisassessment, we use an indicator variable that

6This is not the standard definition of the South in congressionalstudies, which, like Key, treat the 11 ex-Confederate states, or, morecommonly add Oklahoma and Kentucky to make a region of 13states. We choose our 17-state approach in order to capture the fullplace of segregation as a boundary condition for political behaviorin the legislature. But, like any such choice, it comes with a price.The broader the definition the more likely the region will meet testsof pivotality. In turn, though, the broader definition offers a hardercase than narrower approaches when it comes to finding instancesof low likeness within the Democratic Party. Further, it might beexpected that a 17-state South, as distinct from a smaller region,would demonstrate less cohesion as a bloc. But in fact thesedifferences are not large. To take one telling measure, V.O. Key, Jr.sampled sessions during the 1933–45 Congresses to discern an 11-state southern Rice cohesion score of 70.4 in the House (calculatedas the absolute difference between the percentage of members of adefined group who favor or oppose a given roll call [Rice 1925,1928]). When we replicate this measure using all roll calls, we find anearly identical cohesion score of 70.2 for the 11-state South. Whenwe expand the ken to a 17-state South for the same period,aggregate southern cohesion declines, but only slightly, to 67.4.


simultaneously considers the character of contest-ation on a roll call and the size of the southernDemocratic bloc, designating the bloc as ‘‘pivotal’’ ona particular roll call if the other two blocs (non-southern Democrats and Republicans) did notachieve a majority on the roll call and if there wereenough members of the southern Democratic bloc topotentially impact the vote outcome. In the Senate,with its filibuster possibility, we make an additionaldesignation for roll calls according to the then-required two-thirds cloture vote. We determine, then,that where yDn and yR are the numbers of non-southern Democrats and Republicans who cast yeavotes on a roll call, and Ds is the total number ofsouthern Democrats in the chamber, southern Dem-ocrats constitute a structurally pivotal bloc on a rollcall if (a) for a simple majority: [yDn + yR ,

0.5*total votes cast] AND [0.5*total votes cast—(yDn+ yR)—Ds , 0]; and (b) for a cloture vote: [yDn + yR, 0.67*total votes cast] AND [0.67*total votescast—(yDn + yR)—Ds , 0] on those roll calls onwhich nonsouthern Democrats and Republicansachieved a winning majority [yDn + yR $ 0.5].According to this measure of conditional pivotality,southern Democrats constituted a consistently piv-otal bloc over the entire time period, with thecapacity to influence the outcome on a majority ofthe roll calls taking place in the House and Senate(save the 80th Congress in the House) and the capacityto block over 80% of those votes on which non-

southern Democrats and Republicans had achieved awinning majority (see Figure 2).

What is especially striking at this moment ofAmerican political history, in short, is the extent towhich the quasi-party of southern Democrats pos-sessed a capacity to alter the outcome of a largemajority of the roll calls. Even more, southernmembers possessed this capacity with respect to theera’s most significant legislation. Utilizing a measureof the importance of lawmaking developed by JohnLapinski (2008) that assigns a score to each publicstatute drawn from several empirical markers, wedesignate as ‘‘significant’’ the period’s 100 top-ratedlegislation. Regarding such significant bills, the Southwas pivotal to the passage or blockage of an over-whelming majority of the roll calls on landmarklegislation (save for the 80th House).7

Research Decisions

With southern Democrats achieving structural piv-otality during this era, each congressional blocneeded coalitional allies to pass any legislation. Our

FIGURE 1 Bloc Composition and Cohesion by Congress

7Compared to the other two blocs, across the period southernDemocrats were the most pivotal regarding significant legislation.On such roll calls, the South was pivotal on 67% in the House and77% in the Senate; nonsouthern Democrats were pivotal on 63%of such votes in the House and 72% in the Senate; Republicanswere pivotal on 56% in the House and 61% in the Senate.


central questions concern the form and content ofthese coalitions. The key actor in these circumstanceswas the most pliable group of representatives, thequasi-party of southern Democrats who simultane-ously were partisan players and fierce protectors oftheir regional interests. Suspended in this field oftension, these representatives not only had thecapacity, but the propensity to constitute a pivotalvoting bloc that would prove essential to New Deallawmaking. The behavioral questions thus raisedconcern when, and with regard to which issues,southern members of the House and Senate resolvedtheir inherently cross-pressured circumstances on thebasis of party; and when, and with regard to whichissues, their regional preferences were triggered suffi-ciently to overwhelm party loyalty and broadly liberalideological propensities.

To uncover these patterns and ascertain how theydeveloped over time, we classify each roll call bothsubstantively, utilizing the Katznelson-Lapinski clas-sification scheme,8 and by organizing roll calls into

four types of votes—partisan, cross-partisan, sec-tional, and disloyal.

The multitiered coding scheme that categorizesvotes by policy type is composed of three nested tiers.Each offers more particularized policy detail than theprevious tier, which makes it possible to analyze patternsat different levels of aggregation (for fuller discussions,see Katznelson and Lapinski 2006; Lapinski 2008). Eachroll call in the House and Senate is assigned a code inTiers One, Two, and Three. Tier One designates fourbasic elements common to policies in all modernstates. The first category is sovereignty, the cluster ofpolicies that bear directly on the state’s indivisibleclaim to rule legitimately over particular people andplaces and thus is concerned with the very existence,boundaries, and membership of the national regime.The second, organization and scope, concerns thesubstantive reach, range of activities, and institutionalelaboration of the national government’s instrumentsfor governing, including its basic constitutional rules,norms, formal organization, and terms of politicalparticipation. The remaining two categories in thefirst tier of coding concern the outputs of govern-ment. International relations refers, of course, to thegeopolitical and economic transactions between theUnited States and other sovereign states and the in-ternational system, while domestic affairs concernspublic policies that shape the ties between govern-ment and the economy and between government andthe welfare of its citizens.

FIGURE 2 Coalitional Pivotality, by Roll Call

8Summarized online in Appendix A. Other earlier coding schemesmap the policy terrain of congressional roll calls and place thecategorization of public policy at the center of their researchagendas (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Brady and Stewart 1982;Clausen 1967, 1973; Peltzman 1984). The classification we deploywas developed in part to overcome several weaknesses in theseearlier schemes, particularly the overaggregation of policy catego-ries that often are period specific (Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder1993; Katznelson and Lapinski 2006).


The second tier divides each into three or four‘‘blueprint’’ subcategories. Thus, sovereignty in a rep-resentative democracy entails decisions about liberty,membership, and the demographic composition ofthe nation, civil rights, and physical boundaries.Organization and scope in such a regime is composedof decisions about constitutional structure, govern-mental organization, and rules of political representa-tion. International relations divides into the triad ofdefense, geopolitics, and international political econ-omy, while domestic affairs partitions into policyjudgments about agriculture, planning and resources,political economy, and social policy. These distinctionsstill are not fine-grained enough for many analyticalpurposes. These classifications are further brokendown into 70 inductively created substantive codes,with each second tier category subdivided into two tothirteen Tier Three substantive and mutually exclusiveclassifications that compose the most fine-grained levelof policy classification.

The second way we categorize our data maps thelocation of every substantively based roll call in eachCongress in scatterplots that are organized by twomeasures: likeness between southern Democrats andnonsouthern Democrats (displayed on the horizontalaxis) and likeness between southern Democrats andRepublicans (displayed on the vertical axis), desig-nating the conventional definition of elevated likenessas a Rice score of 70 or above to set the boundaries ofthe four categories.9 The positioning of the rollcalls is spatially arrayed in an upper-right ‘‘Cross-Partisan’’ quadrant in which southern Democratsvote similarly to both nonsouthern Democrats andRepublicans; a lower-right ‘‘Partisan’’ quadrant inwhich southern Democrats join their party in oppos-ing Republican voting; a lower-left ‘‘Sectional’’ quad-rant where southerners stand apart from bothnonsouthern Democrats and Republicans, remainingseparate on regional concerns; and an upper-left‘‘Disloyal’’ quadrant, where southern Democratic

voting behavior differs from other members of theirparty and aligns with Republicans (see Figure 3).

Employing this typology to capture patterns ofchange in southern congressional voting behaviorduring the New Deal period, we probe four principalquestions: (1) How did the location of southernvoting alter over time, especially at key moments ofchange and transition? (2) What was the content ofvotes that were marked by sectional or, especially,defection voting by southern Democrats? (3) Weresouthern members pivotal voters on these roll calls?(4) Did votes in the two left quadrants concernsignificant lawmaking, where party pressures argu-ably were greatest?

An Inflection in Time

Our analysis begins in 1933 with the 73rd Congress(which includes the legislative avalanche of the first100 Days)—a moment marked by considerable par-tisanship. As members of the newly elected majority,southern Democrats voted alongside nonsouthernDemocrats at this early moment to pass landmarkNew Deal legislation. Democratic members votedwith high similarity on the vast majority of roll callsin the House and Senate in a display of party loyalty

FIGURE 3 Typology of Southern Roll-CallBehavior

9Rice’s likeness scores are calculated by subtracting the differ-ences in the percentages of ‘‘yea’’ votes cast by two voting blocsfrom 100 (Rice 1925, 1928). A high likeness score above 70indicates that the two voting blocs under comparison votedsimilarly on a roll call. This simple instrument has well-knownlimits. It is agnostic about sources of roll-call behavior (Krehbiel1993, 2000), which might include party pressures and thepredilections of representatives. It lacks an inherent baseline setof expectations (Weisberg 1983). It also fails to distinguish partyfrom bipartisan votes (Hammond and Fraser 1982; Shade et al.1973). Yet, as Key (1949) and many others have shown, suchscores can be revealing of coalitions and their character inhistorical context. They also possess the advantage over mostother measures of being ‘‘experience-near,’’ thus comprehensibleboth to actors and observers.


captured by the large pools of roll calls located withinthe Partisan and Cross-Partisan quadrants ofFigures 4.1 and 4.2.10 Of these roll calls displayinghigh cross-regional Democratic voting, only a smallportion were attributed to ‘‘cross-partisan’’ roll callson which southern Democrats, nonsouthern Demo-crats, and Republicans voted similarly. Rather, south-ern and nonsouthern Democrats voted together tooppose Republicans on 73% of these roll calls in the73rd House and 58% in the 73rd Senate—evidencedby the dense collection of roll calls falling within thePartisan quadrant in each chamber.

Roll-call voting in the first New Deal Congress, inother words, was largely defined by partisanship. Thesouthern and nonsouthern blocs of the Democraticparty united against the members from the Repub-lican bloc, with only a few roll calls venturing into theSectional and Disloyal quadrants. This pattern con-tinued through much of the early New Deal periodwith southern Democrats diverging from non-southern Democrats on fewer than 13% of roll callsin any of the first four New Deal House and SenateCongresses, as represented by the extreme bias ofroll calls grouped on the right-hand side of thatmoment’s scatterplots.

But this did not prove to be a stable pattern.Rather, this early New Deal coalitional configurationchanged dramatically, with several breakpoints mark-ing the evolution of southern bloc behavior in thetwo chambers. First, even as southern Senatorscontinued to engage in primarily partisan votingthrough the 77th Congress, southern Democrats inthe House began to disengage from their coalitionalrelationship with nonsouthern Democrats, with lowparty likeness characterizing their votes on more thanone-in-five roll calls. As southern members began tobehave less reliably as party voters, two patternsemerged. First, southerners began, on occasion, tofind new coalitional allies with members of theRepublican Party. By the 76th House, the proportionof roll calls within the Disloyal quadrant (7.2%)nearly doubled that in the 75th as southern Demo-crats voted increasingly with the Republicans. Butmore significant and substantial at this moment wasthe sudden and dramatic accumulation of roll calls inthe Sectional quadrant. On these roll calls, southernmembers broke away as a distinct and independentbloc, diverging both from Republicans and theircopartisans nearly 12% of the time in the 77th House.

Southern Democrats in the House, in short, had

begun to shed some partisan loyalty in favor of

regional preferences.By the 78th Congress, sectional stress within

Democratic Party nearly reached the same level in

the Senate as in the House. Low likeness defined

Democratic voting on nearly a quarter of House and

Senate roll calls. This pattern marked a dramatically

different configuration than that which existed at

the start of the New Deal, with a quadrupling of

low party-likeness voting as compared to the 73rd

Congress. By this time, moreover, southern Demo-

crats were no longer primarily voting in a purely

sectional manner when they deviated from non-

southern Democrats. Rather, in both the 78th House

and Senate, the Disloyal quadrant became a reser-

voir for a massive deluge of roll calls as southern

Democrats—quite suddenly and considerably—

began to ally with Republicans in proportions that

far exceeded any previous New Deal Congress. Dur-

ing this Congress—which falls in the middle of the

period we are considering—southerners joined with

Republicans on 15% of roll calls in the Senate, and

17% in the House. Previous defection rates reached

2% in the 77th Senate and 9% in the 77th House.Even more striking was the noteworthy quality of

the votes now clustered in the Disloyal quadrant. Inthe 78th House, southern votes were pivotal to theoutcome of a majority (56%) of votes falling withinthe Disloyal quadrant, and fully 82% pertained to oneof the 100 most significant pieces of legislation passedduring the New Deal period (compared to 41%across all the quadrants).11 Votes on landmarklegislation, therefore, fell disproportionately in theDisloyal quadrant, with southerners breakingaway from their copartisans and defecting to theRepublican party. Southern behavior likewise wasimportant to lawmaking in the 78th Senate. Southernvotes were pivotal for 94% of votes located in theDisloyal quadrant (compared to 77% for all thequadrants). Further, these were important ballots;65% of the South’s Disloyal votes pertained tosignificant legislation (compared to 55% in all thequadrants). More than mere position taking, south-ern Democratic defection built winning coalitionswith the Republican opposition and shaped law-making, resulting in decisive contributions to theoutcomes of significant legislation.

10See online Appendix B for a figure displaying the percent of rollcalls falling within the quadrants for each Congress.

11Online Appendix D provides a complete accounting of thepivotality and significance measures for each quadrant, byCongress.


This transformation of the coalitional behavior ofthe southern bloc gained further momentum in theHouse. By the period’s end, in the 82nd Congress,southern Democrats diverged from nonsouthernDemocrats on over one-third of the roll calls. Bycontrast, southern alignment with the Republican blocgradually diminished in the Senate, where southern

Democrats returned, if modestly, to the partisan foldin the Republican 80th Congress, and then votedincreasingly like their fellow party members throughthe end of the period. The party loyalty of thesesouthern Senate members, however, never returned toa rate approaching those that characterized the pre-77th Congress phase of the New Deal. Until the end of

FIGURE 4.1 Southern Roll-Call Behavior, by Congress

FIGURE 4.2 Southern Roll-Call Behavior, by Congress


our period, southern Democrats remained the wildcard, shifting between coalitional voting with theRepublicans and nonsouthern Democrats.

An Inflection in Substance

The temporal features of New Deal roll-call behaviorchallenge us to understand the conditions underwhich southern Democrats, occupying a structurallypivotal position, chose to significantly increase theirpropensity to break with fellow Democrats and withthe normatively and substantively median positionsof their political party. Not until the partial anduneven partisan defection of southern Democratsstarting in the 77th and 78th Congresses did theyemerge, in practice, as a distinctive quasi-party,caught in the cross-fire between party loyalty andregional preferences. This development invites atten-tion to why this change in southern congressionalvoting occurred so precipitously during the 77th and78th Congresses. What issues motivated the decisionof so many southern members at that moment toexercise their pivotal capacity by joining with Re-publicans in opposition to the substantive position oftheir own party’s leaders?

To bring clarity to this transformation, we turnto an identification of the substantive bases of thebreakpoints in southern roll-call behavior. Whichissues began to divide the Democratic Party bysection? How did the content of policy affect theways southern members balanced their partisanshipand their preferences?

We thus track the issues on which southernDemocrats allied with Republicans, engaging inpartisan voting on some roll calls and pursuingoverriding regional preferences on others. The trans-formation of the southern bloc from a loyal partyvoter to a potential defector, we argue, was definedfirst and foremost by the region’s fear that localcontrol of its racial order was under attack. Posi-tioned at the intersection of partisan and regionalconcerns, southerners exercised their pivotal capacityto form new coalitions that, they believed, couldbetter protect their regional interests. On roll callsthat directly and, over time, indirectly threatened thatcontrol, southerners parted from their party, at firststanding largely alone on race issues, but later findingwilling Republican allies.

On the heels of the 1932 election, Democratsproposed massive economic reforms that they trustedwould lift the nation out of a major economic depres-

sion. Southern Democrats, eager to recover their ownregion’s depressed economy and enjoy the benefits ofmembership in the newly elected majority party,voted with nonsouthern Democrats to enact fiscaleconomic measures and experiment with corporatistand centralized planning models, policies that con-flicted with the Republican party’s more conservativepositions on deficits and government intervention inthe economy. But even at its earliest moments, whensouthern Democrats remained loyal to party posi-tions on the vast majority of issues, their behaviormanifested some distinctive features. This variationcan be observed even in the four broad substantivecategories contained in Tier One. While Democratsvoted with high likeness on roll calls pertainingbroadly to international relations, government or-ganization, and domestic policy during the first fourNew Deal Congresses, southern Democratic votingdiverged on issues pertaining to ‘‘sovereignty’’ (seeonline Appendix C).

Moving to more fine-grained levels of our clas-sification, we can see that most of these roll callsconcerned civil rights for African Americans.12

Located squarely in the sectional quadrant, as Figure 5shows, southern Democrats stood alone on most ofthese roll calls—roll calls which met the test ofsignificant legislation more than 90% of the time—notonly voting separately from the rest of the DemocraticParty, but from Republicans as well. At this earlymoment, southern voting crisply divided most of thetime between how the region’s representatives opted tojoin the rest of their party regarding substantivequestions that lay along a left to right continuum,and how they acted alone, striking a defensive posture,regarding the minority of issues that directly andunambiguously concerned race and region. Coherentparty government dominated outside the ken of civilrights.

Even during these initial New Deal Congresses,southern unease sometimes transcended this boundedpolicy area as members began to evaluate othersubstantive questions in terms of their racial concerns.While voting on labor issues, for instance, was relegatedlargely to the partisan and cross-partisan quadrants inthe 73rd and 74th Congresses, southern Democrats inthe House began to defect from the rest of their party,voting more closely with Republican members on 71%of labor votes in the 75th House, and on 90% in the76th House. Wary of the potential social and economic

12Online Appendix E presents a full table of the percent of rollcalls falling in the Sectional and Disloyal quadrants by the policyclassifications in each substantive tier.


impact that unionization and the federal regulation oflabor practices could have on the established southernracial order (Farhang and Katznelson 2005), southernHouse members began to express theses concernsindirectly through their voting on labor issues. By the79th Congress, southerners in the Senate also weredeserting the party position on a majority of suchvotes, partnering with Republicans to form a coalitionagainst the interests of what by then had become aformidable labor movement.

More than any other issue, labor questionsgenerated the shift of southern Democrats from astructural to an actual pivot. While southern Dem-ocrats in the early years of the New Deal singularlyopposed civil rights initiatives, they began to regu-larly join Republicans on antilabor votes for the firsttime, departing from their party’s position on apolicy issue central to the Democratic coalition.Crucially, of the labor votes falling in the Disloyalquadrant in the 75th to 79th House and 79th Senate, avast majority (93%) pertained to significant legisla-tion. Further, southern decisions on these roll callswere overwhelmingly pivotal, reaching 87% in theHouse and 93% in the Senate. This area of policy, so

central to the region’s low wage and racializedpolitical economy, proved a wedge. It showed south-ern Democrats that when New Deal policies outsidethe boundary of civil rights might affect their region’srace relations they could successfully join with Re-publicans to oppose enactment. By the middle of theextended New Deal period, as Figure 6 shows, thisrange of policy issues grew well beyond labor as thedegree to which southern Democrats defected fromthe party position dramatically expanded. In the faceof policy proposals to grant the federal governmentgreater regulatory capacity and enhanced controlover entitlement programs, the South increasinglyabandoned earlier partisan voting proclivities andvoted to protect its regional power by forming votingcoalitions with Republican members.

A powerful exogenous factor, American partic-ipation in World War II, produced a growingassertiveness of organized labor in the South andheightened African American restlessness about theirracial condition (see Farhang and Katznelson 2005;Katznelson 2005). These developments forced south-ern members to choose ever more uncomfortablybetween partisanship and racial preferences. In these

FIGURE 5 Southern Roll-Call Behavior: Prominent Issues, 1933–38


circumstances, southerners came to see racial con-cerns as embedded within a range of New Dealproposals beyond civil rights legislation, thus extend-ing the scope of issues on which they were signifi-cantly cross-pressured.

The scope of southern defection extended both inthe House and Senate to include New Deal policiesthat concerned the subsidization of agriculture andthe regulation of its work force; wage and pricecontrols on products central to the southern econ-omy; the federal disbursement of unemploymentcompensation and job placement activities;13 na-tional resource issues at stake in the government’sseizure and regulation of war production plants; thenationalization of absentee ballots for soldier voting;loyalty investigations during the war that included

charges of Communist influence in CIO unions; androll calls concerning the House Un-American Activ-ities Committee. Torn between New Deal legislationthat called for an enhanced federal role on a widerange of social and economic issues and regionalinterests in maintaining a racialized ‘‘way of life,’’southern Democrats prioritized their regional prefer-ences in a growing constellation of policy areas. AsFigure 6 shows, southern Democrats split from the restof the party on these policy issues starting in the 77th

House and 78th Senate, even as they remained loyal tothe Democratic Party on other policy questions.

This trend persisted well into the TrumanAdministration (see Figure 7). Southern and non-southern Democratic roll-call behavior divergedmore widely and with greater frequency. Low like-ness inside the Democratic Party in the Houseoccurred on virtually half of domestic policy rollcalls in the 82nd Congress. This heightened partisantension was due in part to southern Democrats


13For a discussion of southern interests in keeping such disburse-ments at state and local—rather than national—level, seeKatznelson (2005).


splitting with their party more frequently on someof the same issues that had provoked partisantensions in the wartime Congresses. Southern par-tisan divergence on policy concerning nationalresources and wage and price controls, for instance,topped off at a rate higher than 89% in the 82nd

Congress, while labor questions continued to gen-erate a large proportion of the intrapartisan tensionin the House, especially during the Republican-dominated 80th Congress that passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto, whensouthern Democratic votes were necessary to over-ride. But this surge of sectional stress in the postwarperiod also grew in response to other policy pro-posals like job placement and the potentially non-discriminatory provision of public housing andhospitals that southern members came to believewould threaten local southern control.

There were long-term consequences. The masspartisan change that originated in the policy deci-

sions taken by southern members in the House andSenate during the second half of the period weconsider and the resulting partial independence ofthe South’s elected representatives from their partycaucus altered the conditions for electoral competi-tion. These, we now know, provided first steps for anextended process that ultimately produced a dramaticsouthern political realignment.

Discussion: On Party andPreferences

Was the South pivotal? Emphatically yes, and wellbeyond the region’s impressive structural capacities.Acting as it did, the South altered the vectors oflawmaking, including the era’s most significant policydecisions. When, and about what, was the regionpivotal? By identifying answers, our analysis has



pinpointed the moments and the substantive concernsthat ultimately detached most of the white South fromthe Democratic Party. In addition to its historicalsignificance, our account offers a vantage on what hasbeen a robust theoretical debate. Much contemporarycongressional literature has been shaped by disagree-ment about whether lawmaking reflects the preferencesof individual members who possess well-ordered andrather fixed locations on an ideological map, or thepositions of the two competing, if sometimes internallyheterogeneous, major parties. The preference-centeredposition designates members of the House and Senateas autonomous actors who cluster around a medianposition. The party-centered position underscores howparty leaders can compel obedience by utilizing advan-tages conferred by an array of institutions and incen-tives that promote organizational deference and loyaltyto party positions even when these might be at oddswith the preferences of individual members.

There is a long research tradition that privilegespolitical parties and studies partisan similarities anddifferences. Classic books such as David Truman’s TheCongressional Party (1959) and David Mayhew’s PartyLoyalty among Congressmen (1966), joined by hundredsof learned studies have taken the centrality of parties asa given. With parties offering brand names, reputa-tions, signals of predictability, agenda control, and setsof material and normative inducements, their capaci-ties to discipline potentially heterogeneous and chaoticlegislatures long has been thought to be at the core ofcoherent, credible, and legitimate substantive represen-tation. More recent efforts to formalize and testpartisanship’s structuring, disciplining, and organizingroles, and to extend the long-standing position thatparties matter most for understanding and predictinglegislative behavior, signify important, but not drastic,intellectual advances (Aldrich 1994; Aldrich 1995;Aldrich, Berger, and Rohde 2002; Aldrich and Rohde1997, 2000, 2001; Aldrich, Rohde, and Tofias 2007;Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005; Rohde 1991).

By contrast, the deep skepticism signaled byKeith Krehbiel’s ‘‘Where’s the Party?’’ (1993) wasremarkably heretical. Of course, there is older workon the electoral connection and the ‘‘home style’’ oflegislators that stresses the importance of constitu-ency and the ways a homology of views linkingmembers and their districts can transcend or sup-plant party loyalties (Fenno 1978; Mayhew 1974). ButKrehbiel’s claim that what appears as party behavioractually is a reflection of individual legislator prefer-ences burst on the scene as a radical challenge.

The most persuasive reproach he mounted toparty models concerns the two ‘‘conditions’’ posed

by conditional party government: the existence in atwo-party game of a crisp cutpoint that distin-guishes the preferences of members of one partyfrom those of the other, and the homogeneouscomposition of preferences in each party (see thefigure in online Appendix F). When these tworelated circumstances hold, parties, it is predicted,behave appreciably and meaningfully as units ofaction. But in such situations, Krehbiel insists,parties do not add analytical value (Krehbiel 1999,33–35). The questions we have asked follow fromthe paradox he poses: ‘‘Parties are said to be strongexactly when, viewed through a simple spatialmodel, they are superfluous,’’ and, reciprocally,parties in fact are strong when they can maintainthe voting loyalty of legislators who possess prefer-ences that are distant from the party median andoverlap with those of the opposing party (Krehbiel1999, 35).

Though we agree that party strength cannot beappraised independently of preferences, we have notattempted to adjudicate the party versus preferencesdispute. Nor do we offer a distinct regional orfactional model as an alternative to these twoapproaches. We broadly share Steven Smith’s view(2000) that well into the second decade of discipli-nary debate the core issue remains unresolved in partbecause it is so difficult to isolate the effects of partiesand preferences. After all, they are not hermeticallysealed. Political actors self-select into parties, andparties manifestly help shape and organize preferen-ces. Focusing on the South, we have sought to betterunderstand and specify what happens when thedistribution of preferences between the parties over-laps in a zone within which legislators are cross-pressured by party and preference. Southern mem-bers of the House and Senate lacked the formalorganization or the leadership ladder of a politicalparty, but possessed a hierarchy of salient and distinctpreferences that facilitated tacit understandings, rhet-orical signaling, and the coordination of strategieswhen their particular interests were thought to be atstake.

With sufficient size, members who fall withinsuch an intersecting spatial location can constitutethe legislature’s pivotal group in circumstances whenlawmaking depends on whether they resolve theircross-pressures of partisanship and preferences bystaying faithful to their party. Asking when suchquasi-parties appear, and offering a temporally andsubstantively grounded account of their content andbehavior that is both situated and contingent, makesit possible to enrich portraits of legislative behavior


and its consequences, especially in conditions whena stark antinomy of party and preferences forceschoices that analytically marginalize or dissolve suchclusters of members as legislative actors.

On this approach, interactions between historyand content at T1, are understood to shape therelationship between partisanship and preferencesfor such a bloc and thus determine when and howit might choose to exercise its structural capabilities.In turn, as a specific configuration of historicalelements produce issue-specific roll-call behavior,new circumstances for legislative action at T2 emerge.More abstractly, it is this dynamic pattern, goingforward to Tn with no a priori assumption that eachtemporal shift will be just like the prior one, that isthe hallmark of ‘‘situated partisanship,’’ an analyticalposition that refuses to choose between preferenceswithout party or parties as simply arrayed againsteach other on a single right to left dimension.

Conclusion: The South’s SituatedPartisanship

These considerations have guided our analysis ofsouthern Democratic behavior during the Rooseveltand Truman Administrations. A focus on the Southin this period reminds us that reflections on whenand how partisanship shapes lawmaking are besttransformed into a historical problem that can beinvestigated rigorously. Our foray from the early1930s to the early 1950s reinforces the need to turnclaims about the strength and capability of partiesto designate and organize competing political posi-tions into historical questions. The descriptive andsubstantive composition of political parties is notgiven or fixed; rather, it is contested and variable.Across the great swath of American history, the mostdeep-seated alternatives have contrasted genuinelynational, bisectional, parties, like the antebellumJacksonians, with nonnational regional parties, likethe Republican Party until the past half-century, orthe short-lived Dixiecrats. Party competition thus canbe asymmetrical when it counterposes political par-ties that have the same analytical name but possessrather different qualities and content.

When parties are national in character—as Dem-ocrats were during the New Deal era, but Republicanswere not—they have to internalize and control sec-tional differences. A crucial question for the party’sdecision-making procedures, selection of leaders, andpolicy judgments is how they manage the potential

emergence of coherent, geographically based blocsof members who latently compose quasi-parties thatmight act as a pivot both within the party and withinthe legislative chamber. Such groups are locatedat the intersection of party and a distinctive con-figuration of personal, constituency, and sectionalpreferences.

The approach we prefer, in short, situates parti-sanship in time and by subject. It does not assume anecessary symmetry between parties and preferencesacross partisan lines or treat parties and preferencesas defining simply competing alternatives. To analyzethe role of partisanship during the era we havestudied, we have had to go beyond broad and abstractlabels to consider the kind of parties these were, andhow their qualities changed under the impact ofimportant historical developments. We thus havesought to thicken the categories of ‘‘party’’ and‘‘preference’’ by heeding how behavior varies overtime, by policy subject, and by the peculiarities of thethen-existing party system.

During these 20 years, older patterns of partisan-ship were put under stress by how southernersreconciled their preference for racial hierarchy withthe advantages of party cohesion. Marked by agrowing sectional stress within the Democratic Partyand by a dramatic increase to the inclination ofsouthern Democrats to join with Republicans to rolltheir own party, the era’s lawmaking is explicableonly if we attend to how particular policy questions atspecific moments were perceived by southern Dem-ocrats for how they affected their region. The sameissues acquired dissimilar meanings at distinctivemoments, just as diverse policies induced differentconfigurations of partisanship by the same membersat a given time.

A focus on lawmaking sensitive to such concernscan provide a fruitful vantage from which to grapplewith the intersection of party competition withrace and region, arguably the greatest challenge tothe liberal and democratic constitutional order. TheFounders were obsessed with this problem. Theirsolution failed when the Constitution’s arrangementsthat were intended to produce a cross-regionalbalance broke down when a majority came to powerthat opposed the extension of slavery without south-ern consent. Ever since, the clash between the socialpeace and social justice across lines of section andcolor has haunted the polity and has continued to bea fundamental aspect of the relationship betweenparties and preferences. For this reason, attention tothe place of the South in Congress bids for enhancedattention.


Acknowledgments

This article was written within the framework of theAmerican Institutions Project (AIP) of the Institutefor Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP)at Columbia University. Support was provided byNational Science Foundation Grant 0318280.

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Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship and...Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship and Policy Coalitions during the New Deal and Fair Deal Ira Katznelson Columbia University