Why Parties Matter ─ Political Competition and Democracy in the American South

Party competition in the South has been a subject of perennial interest to political scientists at least since V. O. Key’s famous 1949 book on southern politics. The fascination stems from the fact that, unlike every other region in in the United States, for much of its history there has been precious little party competition in the South. Why Parties Matter argues that a competitive party system is essential in order to have the public’s preferences and wants expressed and satisfied in elections. Or, in other words, a competitive party system is necessary for democracy to operate effectively. Aldrich and Griffin focus on the history of political parties, electoral competition, and effective democratic governance in the south during four historical eras ? the Whig period that preceded the Civil War, the period after Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the modern era. In each instance, they trace how party competition emerges and the conditions under which it can fail or succeed. While many scholars have argued that strong parties at the national level are necessary for change at the state or local level, the authors bring much evidence to bear showing that it is, instead, a bottom-up, candidate-centered phenomenon. Party competition arises when aspiring office holders determine that their prospects for a successful career are greater in what they call a ?nascent party.” These candidates first put together a party organization on the local level. Organizing then moves to the state level, and only when the party is solidified at that level will it be able to find sustained success at the national (Congressional) level. In the Whig period, the legacies of the pre-Jacksonian era stunted the development of a Southern party system, but the region was catching up to the North in terms of party competition in the years prior to the collapse of the Whig Party just before the Civil War. In the post-Reconstruction period, a nascent two-party system was abruptly and dramatically thwarted by the ?Redemption” of the South by the white southern Democratic Party and in the Jim Crow period, competitive politics virtually disappeared. In the modern era, they find, by virtually every measure, that the Southern party system has caught up to the party system in the North, despite the seeming dominance of the Republican party in much of the south. According to the authors since 1980 the South has progressively become more electorally competitive, and, as a consequence of these more competitive elections, Southern elected officials, according to the authors, have become measurably more responsive to their constituents. In their concluding chapter, Aldrich and Griffin evaluate how, over time, democratic attitudes and behaviors in the South have evolved as compared to the North as the South has acquired a more developed party system and more competitive elections and they also assess the effectiveness of government in the two regions over time.

John H. Aldrich is the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke University. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. John D. Griffin is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and coauthor of Minority Report.