The “Southern Cage” in Congress across Issue Areas, 1933-1952

• In Event: Southern Politics and American Political Development

Abstract

This paper explores a set of inquiries into the influence of the southern Democratic bloc on national policy-making during the New Deal and the Fair Deal, aptly referred to as the “southern cage” in Ira Katznelson’s field-defining work, Fear Itself (2013). The paper addresses questions about measuring the pivotal role played by southern members of Congress across issue areas, tracing changes in their preferences over time, understanding the sources of southern voting behavior, and revealing insights into the contested relationship between southern political elites and the expanding federal state. The first half of the paper analyzes issue-specific voting behavior among members of Congress from the 73rd to the 82nd Congresses. For that purpose, we use the following two devices: (1) issue labels assigned to roll-calls as developed by Katznelson & Lapinski (2006) and (2) a hierarchical Item Response Theory model, IssueIRT, designed for estimating issue-specific ideal points (Shin 2024+). Specifically, we generate alignment axes for each issue areas and identify the issue areas in which the Southern Democrats positioned themselves as a pivotal bloc during a given session. In the second half of the paper, we overlay our analysis of issue-specific voting behavior of Southern congressional members with pertinent human geographic data from their respective districts, such as per capita income level, land utilization patterns and racial demographics. The overarching objective here is twofold: firstly, to examine the sources of issue-specific voting behavior and secondly to gain a deeper understanding of the strategic implications of federal policies aimed at reshaping the human geography of the South.

Authors

• Seokju Oh, Columbia University

• Sooahn Shin, Harvard University