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This paper examines how Georgia politics have changed over the last 50 years as Republicans emerged in the south and eventually became the majority party within the region and the state of Georgia. How did the development of a competitive two party system change legislative majorities within the State House? This paper begins to answer that question by measuring the frequency of conflict in Georgia House roll call votes along partisan, racial and urban/rural cleavage lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1981 Wattenberg argued the decline in party strength was caused by the movement of voters towards a neutral independent position. We reevaluate his hypothesis in light of the twenty years of additional survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competition in U.S. House elections has been declining for more than 50 years and the 2002 and 2004 House elections were the least competitive of the postwar era. This paper tests three hypotheses that attempt to explain the decline in competition in House elections: the redistricting hypothesis, the partisan polarization hypothesis, and the incumbency hypothesis. We find strong support for both the partisan polarization hypothesis and the incumbency hypothesis but no support for the redistricting hypothesis. Since the 1970s there has been a substantial increase in the number of House districts that are relatively safe for one party and a substantial decrease in the number of marginal districts. However, this shift has not been caused by redistricting but by demographic change and ideological realignment within the electorate. Moreover, even in the remaining marginal districts only a small minority of House races are competitive. The main explanation for the lack of competition even in marginal districts appears to be the inability of challengers to compete financially with incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Note: This paper is intended to be part of panel on Roll Call Voting at the State Level organized by Seth Masket. Southern state legislatures in the U.S. South were subjected to three major exogenous shocks over the last few decades. First, the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act transformed the southern electorate and reenfranchised African-American voters. Second, the Supreme Court overturned electoral districts lines that overrepresented rural areas and underrepresented urban areas. Third, general elections became meaningful events as two-party competition began to emerge in the region at the state legislative level. Recent analysis of roll call voting in Congress by Poole and Rosenthal (1999) strongly suggests that most Members of Congress do not change their mind very much. That is to say, that they have a particular ideological position (measured as an ideal point) and they tend to stay fixed in that position within the policy space. This paper will examine what happens to the ideal points of members in a legislature while tremendous changes are transforming politics in the state. Do stable ideal points reflect a stable electoral system, or is that politician’s beliefs are firmly fixed and unlikely to change regardless of change in the political system? This paper will examine the impact of these three major changes on roll call voting behavior inside the Georgia State House of Representatives. Using contested roll call votes gathered between 1961-2000. Of particular interest are the dynamics within the Democratic Party members as between the conservative rural members and urban African-American legislators become an important voting bloc in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]