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A conference paper about the role of uncertainty in federalism's bailout game and its application to the Jacksonian era state debt crisis prepared for the presentation at the Southern Political Science Association Meetings in January 2013, is presented. Topics discussed include role of a political party during a fiscal crisis, bailouts and its implications for fiscal federalism and the Movement for Assumption in 1842-1843.

An issue public refers to a group of individuals who are greatly concerned about an issue or cluster of issues and whose political activities are guided by this concern. In the good old days of public opinion scholarship, Converse, Key, and others used their trusty IBM punch sorters to identify issue publics through simple counts of the number of people with certain characteristics. They might know, for example, the number of Democrats who voted for Eisenhower in 1952 and within that group who opposed Truman’s foreign policy and who thought Stevenson was too cerebral to be president. The Democratic defectors might, therefore, be classed into two issue publics-one concerned with foreign policy, the other keeping geeks out of elected office. As computers advanced, multiple regression become a tractable alternative used to study the role of issues in politics. Opinions about foreign policy and those about geeks were plugged into the same regression model. As a general rule, the results were more attenuated than early researchers may have expected. One explanation, of course, is that the simple cross-tabs indicated a spurious relationship that disappeared with appropriate controls. However, an alternative explanation is that issue publics do exist, which means that the assumption of identically distributed observations is violated because there is heterogeneity in the “true” regression coefficients for the different sub-populations. The resulting bias may be severe and while a number of models have been proposed for dealing with this heterogeneity, none of these approaches is entirely satisfactory given the typical limitations of our public opinion data. My paper examines the possibility of using mixture models as a solution to the problem of heterogeneity in the regression coefficients. The basic idea is that I would estimate a family of regression models rather than a single regression, each model in the family essentially representing a different issue public (so the coefficients are different across regressions). The mixture distribution then assigns respondents a probability of being in each of the different families in the model. The value of this approach is that it 1) allows for heterogeneity in the influence of opinions on the objects of opinion and 2) can identify the number of issue publics. The technique obviously has broader applications with the crucial advantage that, at least in theory, you should be able to estimate models for sub-populations using exactly the same data and statistical technique used to model the entire population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than fifty years have passed since V. O. Key wrote the closing chapter of his masterpiece, Southern Politics in State and Nation, in which he lists urbanization of the region as one of the factors that could cure the South of the politics of racial demagoguery which has plagued post-Reconstruction political debate in the former Confederacy. Although considerable urbanization has occurred in the South since 1950, the divisive politics of race have not disappeared. Much of the existing urban politics literature paints a pessimistic picture of growing distrust between groups of ethnic and racial minorities as they compete for scare jobs, housing, and government services is American cities. The weakness of this literature is that it looks at competition between well-established groups and blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities instead of the tripartite relationship between whites, blacks, and other minorities that now characterizes much of the South. The population makeup of Southern cities has changed dramatically since 1990 as a result of Latino immigration–the percentage of Latino inhabitants in North Carolina has increased by nearly 500 percent since that date. Using a carefully crafted pilot study of whites, African Americans, and Latinos in Durham, NC, we inquire as to the nature of inter-group relations in the South amid this massive demographic change. Using data from a survey of Durham, NC residents, we address several questions about the changing nature of Southern politics as a result of Latino immigration. NB: There are five more co-authors on this paper: Shayla D. Nunnally, Duke University Victoria M. DeFrancesco, Duke University Jason Johnson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Gerald Lackey, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Jeffrey D. Grynaviski, University of Chicaco [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even before the collection of the 2000 Census, it was clear that a demographic change was underway in the United States in general. Most of the demographic changes were attributed to increasing Latino immigration into the United States, and much of that change is occurring in the South. What effect is this demographic shift going to have on the structure of inter-group relations in the South, rooted in slavery and solidified during Jim Crow, which has historically been entirely black and white? This but one of the questions that need to be addressed. This paper is based on preliminary results from a 2003 survey of Durham, North Carolina residents, which are part of a larger project aimed at identifying the evolving nature of inter-group relations among blacks, whites and Latinos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even before the collection of the 2000 Census, it was clear that a demographic change was underway in the United States in general. Much of the media and scholarly attention focused on the changes occurring in Western states. Far less attention was paid to the changing demographics in the South. This paper is based on very preliminary results from one part of a larger project, The Durham Area Pilot Project: St. Benedict the Black meets the Virgin of Guadalupe. The project is aimed at identifying the evolving nature of inter-group relations among blacks, whites and Latinos, sources of the conflict or coalition among the groups, and the effect Latinos are having on the politics and socioeconomic status of blacks and whites in a Southern context, using Durham, North Carolina as the pilot city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]