Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington — Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate

15 published claims from this book.

• ANES race-attitude data gives only one pre-1964 baseline year.
• Economic class, not racial anger, fails to explain Southern Democratic defection.
• Gallup data is preferred over ANES for this realignment analysis.
• Nearly half of white Southerners refused to vote for a Catholic president.
• Over time racial conservatism got rebranded as economic conservatism in surveys.
• Pre-1962 survey phrasing ambiguously mapped opposition to integration.
• Social desirability bias makes present-day racial preference measurement difficult
• Southern Catholics were nearly nonexistent, so the Catholic vote mobilized only outside the South
• Southern economic development and party liberalization did not cause the exodus
• Southern whites opposed to integration were staunchly Democratic before 1964.
• Survey data-file encoding artifacts can corrupt key variables.
• Survey items were reoriented so answers increase in the liberal direction.
• The mechanization of cotton freed Southern elites from paternalist duties toward black labor.
• V.O. Key established race as central to pre-dealignment Southern politics
• Vague survey wording can make racial prejudice undetectable in response data