The Mass Basis of the Southern Imposition': Labor Unions, Public Opinion, and Representation, 1930s-1940s

This paper examines the relationship between Southern members of Congress and the state publics they represented in the 1930s and 1940s, using the issue of labor unions as a lens for doing so. I use multilevel modeling and calibration weighting to estimate state-level opinion towards labor unions while correcting for the unrepresentativeness of quota-sampled polls from this period. These public opinion estimates are compared with the congress-specific ideological ideal points of members of Congress estimated using item-response theory (IRT) model. I show that between 1937 and 1943, which span the origin of the conservative coalition in Congress, Southern representatives' swing to the right was mirrored at the mass level by the opinions of their constituents. I also find that Southerners' estimated ideal points on left-right economic issues become increasingly predictive of their votes on roll calls related to unions, relative to similar non-labor roll calls. These results provide suggestive evidence that despite the exclusionary and undemocratic attributes of the one-party South, intra-party competition in Democratic primaries was sufficient to induce an electoral connection between Southern MCs and their (white) constituents. They also suggest that by the early 1940s, fear of an expanding and increasingly egalitarian national state had begun to color not only Southern MCs' positions on labor unions, but on all New Deal issues.