Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington — Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate
33 published claims from this book.
- A Democratic black voting bloc slowed Southern whites’ natural dealignment from the Democratic Party.
- Anti-Catholic sentiment produced only a transitory Southern party switch, not a durable realignment.
- Civil rights, not other issue concerns, drove Southern whites’ falling approval of Kennedy
- Conservative racial views predicted Democratic identity among Southern whites only before 1963
- Democratic identification among Southern whites fell a full 17 percentage points
- Economic development cannot explain Southern Democratic dealignment
- Gallup data quality depends on original file format integrity
- Gallup public-opinion data on civil-rights salience are scattered and inconsistently coded across surveys
- Gallup surveys dating to 1958 contain untapped racial-attitude and preference data
- Higher-frequency newspaper data pinpoints the 1963 perception shift the ANES cannot date
- Historians still dispute whether race or economics drove white Southern exit from the Democrats.
- Income and urbanization controls barely shrink the Southern Democratic-dealignment effect
- Kennedy in 1960 lost the customary Southern Democratic advantage
- News coverage affects attitudes with a peak two-week memory window.
- Northern Catholic mobilization offset Kennedy’s Southern disadvantage
- Only one survey question spans the pre- and post-Civil-Rights eras
- Question wording and historical context make cross-year race-attitude survey items non-comparable.
- Race-versus-income analyses measure relative explanatory power by decade, not decomposed shares
- Racial views are analyzed as the central explanatory variable for dealignment
- Racially conservative Southern whites defecting explains all of the 1958-1980 Democratic decline
- Racially conservative white Southerners abandoned Democratic identification after 1964.
- Racially conservative whites’ defection drove the Southern realignment
- Southern and non-Southern whites agreed on economic policy in 1956
- Southern and non-Southern whites changed racial attitudes at equal rates
- Southern economic catch-up could independently explain realignment away from Democrats.
- Southern partisan change included independent and third-party moves, not only Republican shifts.
- Southern white partisan dealignment persists across many robustness specifications
- Survey questions deemed comparable still shift meaning across waves
- Surveying ‘fair treatment’ cannot cleanly measure racial attitudes because whites can deem segregation fair.
- The full Southern Democratic decline is attributable to conservative-race defection alone
- The racial-views mechanism nearly fully accounts for Southern whites’ partisan shift.
- Vague job-housing items show weak regional divergence unlike concrete school-integration items.
- White racial-egalitarian attitudes changed faster than modern gay-marriage support