1 The Effect of Black Enfranchisement On the Policy Positions of Congressmen from Florida and Louisiana, 1958-1982 Clay Halsey Santelman Honors Thesis University of Oregon Primary Advisor: Professor William Terry April 29, 2013 2 I. Introduction This paper aims to debunk the notion that Southern elected officials voted and acted as a bloc for white racial solidarity in response to the civil rights movement. I do this by comparing the policy response of politicians in Florida and Louisiana. I attempt to understand the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and previous efforts to increase black voting on southern representatives by comparing the congressional voting patterns of members from these two states. I focus primarily on U.S. House members because these have not received sufficient attention in the literature. Figure 1 demonstrates the dramatic increases in black participation for presidential elections after the VRA. Figures 2 and 3 demonstrate the rise of the GOP in the states studied. An appendix at the end of the paper provides supplemental information. Figure 1: Nationwide African American Voter Participation After the VRA 60.0 54.0 48.0 42.0 36.0 30.0 24.0 18.0 12.0 6.0 0 1964 1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 Nationwide African American Voter Participation 3 Figure 2: Rise of the GOP in Louisiana 70.00% 63.00% 56.00% 49.00% 42.00% 35.00% 28.00% 21.00% 14.00% 7.00% 0% 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1st-8th Congressional Districts (Popular Vote Percentage) 1st-8th Congressional Districts Republican Figure 3: Rise of the GOP in Florida 80.00% 72.00% 64.00% 56.00% 48.00% 40.00% 32.00% 24.00% 16.00% 8.00% 0% 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1st-15th Congressional Districts (Popular Vote Percentage) 1st-8th (1958-1962), 1st-12th (1963-1972), 1st-15th (1973-1982)Congressional Districts Republican 4 I demonstrate that, contrary to the theory that southerners voted solely to save “the southern way of life”, disproportionately urban and black regions throughout Louisiana and Florida faced a “push-pull dilemma” (Hood, Kidd, & Morris 2001). Incumbent politicians were “pulled” by newly enfranchised blacks and “pushed” by an increasingly mobile Republican party. The aim of my research is to provide evidence regarding the VRA’s tendency to pull legislators to the left, and evidence of legislators that were pushed to the right by an emerging conservative Republican party. I seek to explain the observed rightward or leftward responses in terms of the Americans for Democratic Action liberal quotient score change variance. I present the two following types of evidence in support of my claims. First I present “liberal quotients” based on Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores. I relate movements in these scores to the racial composition of the district electorate. Secondly, I conduct case studies chosen by the following three criteria: 1. the percent registered black, 2. GOP strength, and 3. the percent change of African Americans. This paper is organized as follows. Section II explains how the Voting Rights Act has effected southern legislator behavior from the view point of other authors. In particular, Andrews (1997, 2002) produces regression models and the research strategy that I will use as the basis for study in the paper. Section II discusses Hood, Kidd and Morris’s (2001) reasons for researching the Senate as opposed to the House. Highly concentrated black populations affected representatives’ voting patterns. This paper takes a look at those effects in relationship to the Voting Rights Act’s passage. The last portion of section II is designed to give supplementary and anecdotal accounts that highlight personal experiences which may have had an effect on representative decision making processes. Section III explains the theoretical effects of a 5 mobilized black electorate and the potential changes in southern representatives’ voting behavior. The section will provide important definitions for opponent-push and constituency-pull and explain their pertinence this. Section IV describes the ability of Louisianan and Floridian House representatives to institute legislation. I present analysis of aggregated data regarding voting patterns in the House and accompanying liberal quotient scores produced by the ADA. I look specifically for representative behavioral changes indicative of constituency-pull and opponent- push theories. Section V concludes the study. II. Literature Review and Historical Context The literature on the civil rights era and post-civil rights era is vast. In this section I focus on key research that is important for my study. I rely heavily on Hood, Kidd, and Morris’s (2001) work because it demonstrates Senate findings that are consistent to my House findings. Studies by Davidson and Groffman (1994), and Alt (1994) are also useful for my analysis of Florida and Louisiana. A. House versus Senate Most of the literature that explicitly links poling outcomes to black registration and voting rates has focused on the policy response in the Senate, not the House. Hood Kidd and Morris (2001) operate under the premise that “...liberalization of voting patterns in Southern Democrats in the Senate [is sufficient], the focus on the House is...unnecessary.” (2001). This presumes that analyzing the Senate is a sufficient test for the degree of liberalization in Congress. Hood Kidd and Morris (2001) further justify their Senate study over a study of the House by citing constant redistricting and reapportionment of congressional districts. 6 House members in both Louisiana and in Florida were either reappointed to another district or given a newly created district to preside over; southern House representatives were constantly reelected, albeit in varying districts as Hood Kidd and Morris (2001) have pointed out. House representative continuity becomes apparent which belies their stance concerning redistricting1 . Hood, Kidd and Morris’ (1999) study of Senators is important as is their methodology which yields perspective of change over time. I follow this research design. Finally, Hood Kidd and Morris (1999) point out that work on the House that attempts to represent change of “...black mobilization and an increase in Republican Party strength...” is lacking (1999). My data regarding Congressional representatives, liberal quotient scores, statewide black registration rates collected from Florida’s and Louisiana’s Secretary of States, GOP presidential vote shares, and precent house delegates Republican yield a perspective on the degree to which the VRA affected Floridian and Louisianan House members. These sources, accompanying graphs, and tables may be found at the end of the text. Hood, Kidd, and Morris (1999), using many of these same data sets find that “…liberalization of Democratic Senators from the South was a result of the interaction between the rise of the Republican Party and the mobilization of the black electorate” (1999). I wish to find similar results in this study of the House representatives. B. Post-VRA Registration Louisiana’s history is associated with measures to limit black voter registration and candidacy 2. Litigation intended to eliminate these rules began to deconstruct barriers to 1 See appendix A. 2 White primaries in which only white candidates for office were allowed to partake, racially segregated schools, publications of black candidates’ names resulting in home evictions as well as firings, and literacy tests are only a few examples of such measures. 7 participation in the franchise, however as Davidson and Groffman (1994) indicate, the struggle continued; the potential for black Americans in the state of Louisiana to vote after the Voting Rights Act was severely weakened by violent and non-violent measures. An “NAACP secretary in Concordia Parish was shot and wounded in her home a few months after she began coordinating a voter registration drive.” (2013). Most sources indicate that the VRA “...advanced...toward the ideal expressed in the Fifteenth amendment that ‘the right of citizens...to vote shall not be denied or abridged...on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (1994). The assertion that the VRA liberalized representatives is one that I am attempting to prove worked equally well for elected candidates of Florida and Louisiana in the House of Representatives. James E. Alt (1994) provides support for this assertion. He shows the effect of the presence of registered black and white voters, but he also supplies a paradigm for statistical analysis that I will follow in my study of the House. His work focuses on the percent of the amount of black and white voters registered in a given county and proves this to be a significant indicator of how a legislator will vote on a bill regarding the civil rights of the electorate at the local level. Findings that highlight “...change...cutting the white disproportionate advantage [legislatively speaking] by more than half.” in towns and local county level positions is encouraging (1994). C. Case Studies Southern representatives in office before the Voting Rights Act maintained white racial solidarity bloc voting to demonstrate uniformity. There were, however, exceptions. Badger’s work highlights early influences on figures such as Dante Fascell of Florida’s 4th congressional 8 district3, who sought “...black support in daylight...actively canvassing the black community.” (Badger 1999). Factors that played a role in their decision making processes include circumstantial, moral, and electoral. This section is designed to account for outliers and unique representatives while also providing for an ideologically wide spectrum of characters. Consequently, providing case studies for individual house members is significant because it provides an explanation for the discord post and pre VRA between them. It is well known that southern House representatives were the front to the passage of civil rights. The objective here is to account for those who were removed from office, presided over districts with many African Americans or influxes of African Americans, and had inordinate liberal quotient scores but whom also remained in office4.