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The modern South is a thriving region that is increasingly like the rest of the United States; however, that has not always been the case. Indeed, the political history of the American South is one that has been focused on the integration of this historically underdeveloped region into the remainder of American society, economically (especially in terms of labor markets), politically, judicially, and socially. And, even as the South has become increasingly similar to the rest of the country, it remains an especially important region for the balance of national political power. In this essay, I describe a class I teach on Southern Politics, explaining how I have organized it around topics critical to an understanding of American political development, and I describe the innovative pedagogical perspective I bring to the class (rooting the course in the labor economics of slavery and the "peculiar institution's" long-term consequences). I also discuss in some detail the importance of this class for American students as they try to understand America's development as a nation and the lessons that can be learned by international students from the South's experiences, providing some qualitative evidence of the course's impact. (Contains 55 notes.)

One of the environments in which political science faculty most directly face issues of community, communities, and politics is when they find themselves teaching in programs abroad. The rigors of international teaching force faculty to confront issues of community identity, assumptions about political orientation, and presumptions about how communities interact that often remain unstated or unexplored at home institutions in the United States. In this paper, we will explore these matters based on our experiences teaching in the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies during the late 1990s. The Hopkins-Nanjing Center brings together Chinese and international (mainly American) graduate students in a unique living-learning environment. Chinese students take graduate-level course work in political science, American history, economics, and ESL in English from visiting American faculty members, while international students take analogous classes in Chinese from faculty at Nanjing University. Faculty and students are housed in the Center's residential wing, where Chinese and international students are paired together as roommates. We discuss the unusual pedagogy involved in teaching Chinese students in the program (who are extremely bright and motivated, but usually lack substantive and methodological backgrounds in political science); the opportunities for extracurricular education afforded by the Center's living-learning facility; and describe our experiences interacting with our Chinese faculty counterparts. (Contains 24 notes.)

This research examines two referenda in the Deep South, both of which can be categorized as antiblack. Specifically, we analyze a 2001 Mississippi flag referendum (in which the electorate rejected a new flag and retained the old state flag containing a Confederate insignia) and a 2004 referendum in Alabama (in which citizens voted to retain unenforceable constitutional language requiring separate educational facilities for black and white students, and a poll tax on voting). Using state election returns and census data, we employ weighted least squares regression to analyze voting patterns. The results reveal that across both states, white voters displayed significantly greater 'antiblack' voting behavior in those areas with larger black populations and more urbanized environments. Our findings pose a direct challenge to both those who insist that the 'racial threat' perceived by whites is diminishing and those who hold that urbanization will ultimately be corrosive of racist attitudes and behavior. Keywords: Parties, Elections, Voting, Race, Ethnicity. Esta investigacion examina dos referendos en el sur de Estados Unidos, cada uno de ellos puede ser categorizado como anti afroamericano. Especificamente, se analizo el referendo en 2001 a la bandera de Mississippi (en el que el electorado rechazo una nueva bandera y decidieron conservar la bandera anterior que contenia una insignia del ejercito confederado) y un referendo en 2004 en Alabama (en el que los ciudadanos votaron para conservar un lenguaje constitucional imposible de aplicar que requeria separar las instalaciones educativas para blancos y afroamericanos, y un impuesto al voto). Usando los resultados de las elecciones estatales e informacion estadistica, empleamos un modelo de regresion de cuadrados minimos comunes para analizar patrones electorales. Los resultados revelan que a traves de ambos estados los votantes blancos mostraron un comportamiento electoral 'anti afroamericano' significativamente mayor en areas con una gran poblacion afroamericana y entornos mas urbanizados. Nuestros hallazgos plantean un desafio directo a quienes insisten que la 'amenaza racial' percibida por la poblacion blanca esta disminuyendo, y aquellos que afirman que la urbanizacion eliminara actitudes y comportamiento racista., In recent years, the results of a number of referenda and initiatives have suggested the continued presence of significant levels of racism in the American public, especially in the South. [...]

Using data from an unusual survey, we gauge factors influencing support for a state anti-gay rights referendum. After controlling for other powerful predictors of attitudes, we find personal contact (especially relevant and voluntary contact) has an important impact on public support, although community context does not. These findings support an integrated notion of interactions with 'out' groups, grounded in social categorization theory, that sees community context and interpersonal contact as concentric circles, moving from abstract, detached forms of contact to more pronounced, personal forms. However, even among those with substantial interpersonal contact, support for the referendum was still widespread. Keywords: gay rights; contact hypothesis; same-sex marriages

Although much research has been done on advertising in American political campaigns, virtually all has focused on the use of television. The dearth of work on radio advertising limits our ability to fully understand American electoral dynamics. More campaigns use radio than television, and there is reason to suspect that the narrowcasting that is possible with highly targeted radio ads may be substantively different from the campaign messages that are broadcast over the television airwaves. In this article, we use data from a survey of registered voters in Arkansas and Missouri during the 2002 election season to explore the dynamics of political advertising on the radio. We focus in particular on factors that influence exposure to radio ads, the public's perceptions of the importance of these ads, and the impacts of exposure on the public's perceptions of the quality of the democratic process in the United States. Keywords: campaign advertising; radio; narrowcasting; political media; political campaigns

This paper contributes to the growing empirical literature on filibusters by examining the factors that are associated with individual-level filibustering behavior. We focus particularly on the behavior of senators in the latter part of their careers, using impending retirement as analytical leverage to determine whether decisions to engage or not in dilatory parliamentary practices are driven more by narrowly drawn considerations of instrumental utility or by compliance with institutional norms of deference and cooperation. Using data from 1975 to 1993 and employing multivariate models that allow us to control for other relevant factors, we find only limited support for a narrowly rational model of Senate 'followership.' In the course of our enquiry, we clarify the notion of legislative norms, integrate our study with recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the evolution of cooperative behavior and consider how leadership can be exercised in environments largely bereft of formal leadership resources.

Informational and partisan theories of legislative organization predict that most committees will be representative of their parent chamber and most committee delegations representative of their parent caucus. Unfortunately, despite the universalistic claims of these theories, the preponderance of evidence comes from only one chamber of one legislature: the U. S. House of Representatives. If informational and partisan theories are generalizable beyond the Congress, outlying committees should be rare in state legislatures as well as in the House of Representatives. We use a variety of measures of member preferences (e.g., roll call measures, surveys, constituency characteristics) and simple difference of means tests to explore the generalizability of these theories by examining the prevalence of committee outliers in the lower houses of a sample of 12 states. Consistent with expectations, outlying committees are rare in the state legislatures we sample, especially among important control committees. This provides evidence that informational and partisan models of legislative organization are applicable beyond the U. S. Congress.

One argument propounded by critics of 'majority-minority' districts is that 'packing' minority constituents into such districts leaves fewer members of Congress with electoral incentives to be sensitive to minority concerns. We test this effect empirically with data concerning the voting behavior of white incumbent representatives returned to the House following the 1992 redistricting cycle. Our findings, which indicate that at least some incumbents who lost black constituents during redistricting became less sensitive to the concerns of the black community, further complicate the societal calculus concerning the desirability of 'majority-minority' districts.

In this study we extend previous research on the impact of constituency preferences on the roll-call behavior of senators during Supreme Court confirmations by examining the 1967 vote on Thurgood Marshall. In contrast to the later case of Clarence Thomas, we find that constituent racial characteristics (as measured by African-American percentage of state population) had a significant negative impact in the Marshall case We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings, and what they illuminate about the changing nature of the Southern Democratic coalition.

This article tests the hypothesis that members of Congress are socialized into certain attitudes concerning interbranch comity or rivalry early during their tenures in office. Specifically, utilizing a multivariate regression model, we test the claim made by several scholars and former presidents that members who initially serve in Congress under a president of the other party will be less likely than their colleagues to support subsequent presidents of their own party. Our findings provide little support for a 'socialized to opposition' mentality and, in fact, indicate that members socialized under an opposition president are modestly more amenable to leadership from presidents of their own party.

The increasing public attention paid to Supreme Court nominations has elevated the salience of Senate confirmation battles, raising interesting questions about the impact of constituency preferences on senators' voting behavior. In this article, we explore this relationship using a logistical regression model to examine the impacts of African American constituency size and the proximity of refection on the roll call behavior of senators on the Clarence Thomas confirmation vote. Our analyses indicate that these factors were both statistically and substantively significant in the Thomas case. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of such findings.

We extend Fiorina's balancing theory by developing and testing inferences from a simple and general spatial model of partisan preference in two institutional dimensions. This model contains a number of theoretical and methodological insights that have not yet been articulated in the growing literature on the origins of divided government. We focus here on the model's most basic implications, emphasizing first that the act of party balancing requires that voters have nonseparable partisan preferences across the electoral arenas of U.S. government. We show how it follows that the institution-specific partisan preferences of balancers are not defined on the metric that contains the partisan preferences of nonbalancers. We examine the empirical relevance of this result by estimating a variety of statistical models of congressional voting preference. Analysis proceeds in two directions, first with illustrations of a changepoint (and a resultant heteroskedastic error variance) problem in simple models of voter choice and then with results from more elaborate model specifications. The evidence weighs heavily in favor of the empirical relevance of party balancing in the 1996 congressional election. We conclude by pointing to a number of theoretical and methodological issues that merit further attention in future research on balancing.