THE TWO-FRONT WAR:
Democratization and its Consequences in the
Post-Voting Rights Act South
William C. Terry
[email protected]
University of Oregon
Contents
_______________________________________________
List of tables and figures
Preface
PART I
PRELUDE
1. Why Didn’t the VRA Unleash the South’s Latent Liberalism?
2. Southern Reconnaissance
3. The Two-Front War
PART II
BATTLE LINES
4. On the Left
5. On the Right
6. On “Southern Revisionism”
PART III
THE CONGRESSIONAL THEATER
7. Metrics and Mechanisms of Policy Change
8. Policy Adaptation Among Incumbents
9. Incumbent Turnover
PART IV
THE STATE THEATERS
10. State Level Policy Outputs
11. “Forgotten Alternatives”: The Biracial Politics of State Appropriations
PART V
CONCLUSION
12. Distal Consequences of Two-Front Electorate Warfare in the Democratized South
13. The VRA and the Arc of Southern History
1
APPENDICES
A. Formal Modeling Notes
B. Notes on Data
C. Supplemental Analyses
D. Supplemental Online Appendix (To be placed on the author’s website.)
References
2
Preface
_______________________________________________
This book examines the policy implications of democratization in the American South in
the latter half of the twentieth-century from an historical and a comparative perspective. Its
central objectives are two: First, to document and ultimately to explain the South’s puzzling antiliberal policy outputs – i.e., the official actions of southern governments and elective office
holders – and to explain the South’s paradoxical policy outcomes – e.g., the distribution of
wealth, poverty and other material conditions relevant for assessing democracy’s ultimate effect
on the welfare of the governed. Second, this study seeks to inform a broader debate in the
political science literature regarding the vital question of whether the enfranchisement of the
lower classes substantively “matters” (cf., Lijphart 1997).
A point of clarification is required at the outset. As shorthand, when the risk of ambiguity
is low, we will equate the commencement of southern democracy with the passage of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Not without reason did President Lyndon B. Johnson refer to the
VRA as “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.” The
VRA gave teeth to the Fifteenth-Amendment’s (1870) de jure prohibition of the abridgement of
citizens’ right to vote on the basis of their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In so
doing, the Act played a decisive role in eradicating the South’s officially sanctioned racial caste
system; it precipitated the mass mobilization of blacks and whites of the lower social orders; it
facilitated the demise of the one-party Democratic South; and it engendered a revolution in
regional and national governance.
1
While the VRA’s impact in the former Confederacy is difficult to overstate, it should be
kept in mind that its effect, strictly speaking, was to solidify and galvanize pre-existing trends. It
should also be noted that the VRA did not engender immediate universal compliance among
Southern registrars or instantaneous two-party elections, nor did it end the use of
gerrymandering, at-large districting and numerous other vote dilutive practices (to say nothing of
race-baiting in political discourse).
Despite these important qualifications, the “VRA” is an apt, if slightly imprecise
rhetorical placeholder for the suite of electoral laws of the 1960s and the concomitant southern
democratization with which this book is concerned.
By a comparative perspective, I mean this book considers the VRA as a particular
instance of a large structural increase in turnout – i.e., an increase due to legal changes that
increase the incentives, or decrease the disincentives for citizens to participate in elections.
As such, the VRA is one of many large historical changes in the structural turnout regime
– others include, for example, the extension of the franchise to women and the working classes,
the implementation of compulsory voting in various countries around the world, and the adoption
of Motor Voter laws across the U.S. states (to take a less extreme example). As this study
demonstrates, the policy responses precipitated by the VRA are unlike those of comparable
structural changes in voter turnout. The question this book takes up is “why”?
By an historical perspective, I mean that I consider the social, economic and political
context surrounding the VRA’s passage and the South’s subsequent political development. As I
argue in the Introduction, contextualizing the VRA in this way is crucial for providing a
comprehensive explanation for the “why” puzzle that motivates this study.
2
The explanation that I develop employs a formal equilibrium model of southern elections
that inverts, in a sense, Clausewitz’s adage that “war is politics by other means.” I liken postVRA elections to a “two-front war” whose exigencies forced each political hopeful to strike a
balance between the competing pulls afforded by her electoral opponents and those of her
various constituencies – her district’s, her party’s and her own personal preferences – bearing in
mind that each constituency had more or less control over the office seeker’s political future. The
book argues theoretically and shows empirically that that the political pull of the lower class,
often ironically, proved substantially less than many on the pre-VRA Left anticipated.
Beyond a rudimentary understanding of the formal notion of a political equilibrium, the
book assumes little about the reader’s background. That being said, one who is familiar with the
political history of the South may find some elements of the study more lucent than one who is
not. Similarly, a reader with no training in game theory might find a few technical details in the
appendix and footnotes indistinguishable from the Greek they contain. The formal theory,
however, is largely cordoned off in Chapters 2 and 3. In those chapters and the rest of the book,
the main text was written with diligent effort to make the logic of the arguments intelligible to
those with little interest in the formal details.
Some of the research reported in this study was conducted under the aegis of a National
Science Foundation dissertation grant. The NSF’s support is gratefully acknowledged.
3