Southern Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. By Stanley P. Berard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. 250p. $22.95

Nicol C. Rae

American Political Science Review, 2002, vol. 96, issue 4, 819-820

Abstract: The rise of partisanship in Congress has been one of the most conspicuous features of American politics during the 1990s. David Rohde's (1991) Parties and Leaders in the PostReform House demonstrated that much of this rise in partisanship could be attributed to the convergence in congressional voting between Northern and Southern Democrats. Since the New Deal, the latter had traditionally allied with Republicans on many issues in a bipartisan conservative coalition that generally dominated both Houses of Congress and constrained liberal legislative outcomes. While Rohde and Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, 1995) have emphasized how institutional rule changes in the 1970s created a much greater incentive for party loyalty among member of Congress, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which enhanced partisanship in Congress has been driven by “bottom-up” electoral imperatives. Stanley Berard's new book on Southern Democrats in the House convincingly shows that major changes in the southern electoral environment were equally important in promoting convergence in the voting records of Northern and Southern Democrats, leading to a more partisan House overall.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:96:y:2002:i:04:p:819-820_43

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().