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Two-Party Voting in the South: Class vs. Party Identification*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

James W. Prothro ,
Ernest Q. Campbell  and
Charles M. Grigg
James W. Prothro
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Ernest Q. Campbell
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Charles M. Grigg
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Extract

This study was undertaken to test the relations between two basic observations which have appeared in the literature of political behavior. First, party identification has been found to be a major factor not only in determining votes but also in shaping ideology. Party appears to serve a “standard-setting” function for its adherents, especially on questions that are most clearly “party-related,” and resultant ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans have been found independently of such demographic factors as socioeconomic status. The second observation stems from studies in the field of stratification that have yielded an explanatory proposition in political analysis: a shift in party affiliation tends to follow a shift in class identification, as indicated by the tendency of suburban America to vote Republican.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 131 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1958

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References

1 See Campbell, Angus and Cooper, Homer C., Group Differences in Attitudes and Votes (University of Michigan: Survey Research Center, 1956), p. 81Google Scholar.

2 To avoid cumbersome phraseology and to make for more facility in understanding, these terms will be used to refer to Democrats for Eisenhower and Democrats for Stevenson, respectively.

3 An independent study is being made of registered Republicans from the county as a whole and of Negroes in a predominantly Negro precinct. This will be separately reported, but it may be stated here that the Negro vote for Eisenhower cannot be ascribed to class factors. Hence the votes of neither the registered Republicans nor the Negroes are of direct concern in studying the resolution of conflicts between class and party pressures in the south.

4 The one-digit code of the United States Bureau of the Census. See 1950 Census of Population: Alphabetical Index of Occupations and Industries (revised edition).

5 This is by no means true of Negro voters, as our interviews with a Negro sample indicate. This portion of the study will, however, be separately reported.

6 A majority (60.3%) of the Stevencrats reported there was “nothing” they disliked about Eisenhower, and only 12.9 per cent offered criticisms that could be construed as reflecting upon him as a personality, with his “military background” ranking first and his “failure to take a strong stand” or “do-nothingness” second.

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