Regional issue evolution: Partisan change in the South since 1972

It has been widely noted that the mid-1980s saw a sharp increase in Republicanism among southern whites, and a corresponding decrease in identification with the Democratic party. Prior to 1984, clear majorities of southern whites invariably claimed to identify with, or "lean toward" the Democratic party. Since 1984, at best a plurality southern whites have claimed either level of allegiance to the Democratic party and the Democrats' lead over the Republicans in this area is now slight if they have a lead at all. In short, a fundamental "sea change" occurred in the partisan balance among white Southerners in 1984.; The focus of this dissertation has been to determine what issue or issues could be said to have been most responsible for this turn of events. Traditional assumptions about the South would lead us to expect that the issue of racial policy was a major factor. However, many scholars, claiming that the realigning power of racial issues in the South has declined in recent years, have tended to downplay the importance of racial issues in drawing southern whites into the Republican party in the 1980s. Instead, scholars have tended to attribute Republican gains in party identification among southern whites to a broad array of issues popularized primarily by Ronald Reagan.; Working within the framework of the issue evolution model developed by Carmines and Stimson, this dissertation uses their methodology to examine the evolution of various issues from their origins in the position-taking of political elites to their ultimate effect on partisanship at the mass level. The conclusion is that, while Republican elites at the national level were clearly attempting to convey a multifaceted issue message in the early 1980s, the part of that message which seems to have effected the greatest shift in mass perceptions about the party's issue positions, was the party's increased conservatism on the issue of racial policy. Multiple regression analysis is then used to show that, in the years in which Republican identification was highest among southern whites (1984, 1988 and 1992) the issue which had the greatest influence (after the general issue of ideology) on the partisanship of southern whites under the age of 40, was, after all, the issue of racial policy.