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Zusatztext Southern whites found a comfortable new home in the GOP. Unable to dominate the Democratic Party after Jim Crow fell, whites found a home where political compromise was Unnecessary. As The Rational Southerner shows, this trend toward 'white flight' was also an act of political flight that enabled a two-party South. Informationen zum Autor M.V. Hood is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Georgia. Quentin Kidd is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Government Department at Christopher Newport University. Irwin L. Morris is Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies and University of Maryland. Klappentext What drove the transformation of post-World War II politics in the South? In The Rational Southerner, M. V. Hood, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris develop a theory of relative advantage to explain why whites fled the Democratic Party and what propelled black political mobilization. Collating decades of data, the authors demonstrate that race was, and is, the chief force behind political change in the region. Zusammenfassung Since 1950, the South has undergone the most dramatic political transformation of any region in the country. The Solid (Democratic) South is now overwhelmingly Republican, and long disenfranchised African Americans vote at levels comparable to those of whites. In The Rational Southerner, M.V. Hood III, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris argue that strategic decisions by politically active members of both races played a decisive and underappreciated role inthe development of the Southern Republican Party and the mobilization of the black electorate. They explain that mobilized blacks joining the Democratic Party made it increasingly difficult for conservative whites to maintain control of the Democratic Party machinery, making the increasingly visibleRepublican Party in the region more attractive to conservative whites looking to maintain political power in the region. The authors reach this conclusion by using their theory of relative advantage, which describes the way in which regional differentiation in demographics and electoral makeup produced an internally differentiated system. Following a theoretically-informed description of recent partisan dynamics in the South, Hood, Kidd, and Morris demonstrate with decades of state-level, sub-state, and individual-level data that GOP organizational strength and black electoral mobilization were theprimary determinants of political change in the region. The core finding of their research, that race was, and still is, the primary driver behind political change in the region, stands in stark contrast to recent scholarship which points to in-migration, economic growth, or religious factors as the locus oftransition. Original, groundbreaking, and strikingly relevant to the coming 2012 election year, The Rational Southerner provides a new perspective not only on Southern Politcs, but on the study of local political dynamics and party system transformation as a whole....
