Robert Mickey has written an ambitious, dense, and original text that makes striking contributions in several distinct areas of scholarship. Paths Out of Dixie documents and reinterprets the recent history of the U.S. South; it weaves that narrative into a broader view of “American political development” (APD); and it also engages with wider debates in comparative politics concerning “subnational” variations and democratization processes. Others are better qualified than we to evaluate the first two contributions. This note addresses the third aspect of Mickey’s work, where it most overlaps with our own.

This contribution to comparative politics can be divided into three main topics. First, Mickey takes an analytical and conceptual stand that reflects good knowledge of the wider debates, and helps to position the distinctive trajectory of the U.S. South in its broader setting. Second, he provides a rich and detailed portrayal of the complexities and variations that shaped both the entrenchment and the eventual dismantling of the “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation in three key states of the Deep South in the course of the mid-twentieth century. This serves as a reality check and a corrective to overschematic generalizations about such processes. Third, he offers a “model” for tracking the pathways away from white supremacy and toward a more inclusively democratic system of politics, alternative democratization routes within what he classifies as a region-wide “long transition.”

Let us begin with the analytical and conceptual apparatus of this study. The key concepts are “authoritarian enclaves,” “subnational” variations, and “democratization pathways.” These are all comparative categories that facilitate analysis of the political history of the U.S. Deep South as one manifestation of the broader phenomenon of transitions to democracy. This runs counter to an alternative approach (sometimes simply an unspoken assumption) that the U.S. case is somehow unique, and indeed incomparable. Mickey’s work displays a strong familiarity with the relevant comparative literature. It aims to demonstrate by example (rather than to directly argue) that it can be applied to the politics of Dixie as readily as to elsewhere. The value of this contribution is much enhanced by the fact that it comes not from a generalist but from someone so thoroughly steeped in the specifics of southern political history.

Mickey provides well-informed justifications for his choice of key terms, but they are not beyond dispute. He makes a plausible case for viewing his three “Deep South” states as “authoritarian enclaves under assault” (p. 13), but that is not the only possible option. Doubts arise both from the comparative and from the U.S.-specific angle. In comparative work, the term “enclave” has been used to refer to specific institutions or sectors within a broadly democratic national regime that have proved slow or resistant to overall democratization (e.g., the military, the judiciary) and to territorial units that display these characteristics. Like Edward Gibson, Mickey uses the term in the second sense. The Jim Crow system seems to have been more actively constructed than this term would normally imply. It was capable of expansion, of building alliances, and of penetrating adjoining structures. For example, when the Democrats captured the presidency under Woodrow Wilson, he proceeded to segregate the federal capital. That also raises the question of the “authoritarian” label. If the Southern Democrats were authoritarian, what does that tell us about the national party, given their great share of the Democratic House Caucus (p. 50)? Given the compliance of the Republican Party as well, what does it imply about the whole U.S. political system? Was the New Deal authoritarian?

In response to such doubts, Mickey recognizes that other U.S. analysts (notably Robert Dahl) preferred to term the American South a “dual system,” a “kind of polyarchy for whites and hegemony for blacks” (p. 374, n. 7). He also acknowledges Kenneth P. Vickery’s proposal that the old South was a “herrenvolk democracy,” implying that for whites it was not authoritarian. Vickery’s formula has the merit of encouraging comparison with other countries; in South Africa the apartheid regime served a much smaller white minority and covered a complete sovereign nation, but there, too, whites had many of the benefits of polyarchy. Israel is often rated the sole genuine democracy in the Middle East, but a “dual system” may be detected there too, and other examples may be emerging.

Returning to the U.S. South, Mickey argues against Vickery’s alternative formulation on the sound argument that in order to maintain racial supremacy, extralegal violence and intimidation was deployed against dissident whites as well as against blacks. And many poor whites were also disfranchised. The conclusion that “until recently southern politics has been simply undemocratic” (p. 35) is well supported. By such means, between 1952 and 1955 the minimal black electorate in Mississippi was cut from 20,000 to 8,000 (p. 198). But does that suffice to authorize the alternative adjective “authoritarian”? In our comparative volume, we argued that this designation was too restrictive. We identified a range of durable “illiberal practices” that could sustain subnational undemocratic politics over long periods without necessarily fulfilling the requirements of outright authoritarian rule.

The question is: When does an undemocratic subnational polity become an authoritarian regime? The authoritarian regimes analyzed in the comparative democratization literature were usually authoritarian for everyone living under their jurisdiction. It is possible to read much of the rich detail that Mickey provides as further illustrations of our view. For example, officeholders alternated and sought to construct alternative alliance systems with divergent bases of representation and support. Governors were often political brokers, rather than sources of authoritative leadership. The instruments of control at their command were frequently weak (e.g., pp. 206–13 on decentralized policing, resistance to constitutional reform, and factional politics in Mississippi). In comparative perspective, the U.S. South is clearly the most extreme case of durable illiberal practices and undemocratic rule of the six federations included in our volume.

The “subnational” aspect also raises some queries. State governments sheltered behind a doctrine of states’ rights that served all of the 11 ex-Confederate states as a region, rather than as isolated enclaves. It depended on a set of constitutional interpretations that were broadly accepted—outside the region as well as within the South—because they came from the Supreme Court. It was this national institution that legitimized segregation in 1898 and then overturned Jim Crow in 1954. The white primary was condoned despite the federal “right to vote” clause, but this required complex contortions because on the face of it, the South’s congressional representation should therefore have been reduced (p. 49). In short, undemocratic state-level politics cannot be viewed as fully subnational—they were an integral component of the national political order. (But if so where does that place the United States on the Polity IV scores?)

The foregoing discussion does not invalidate Mickey’s choice of analytical framework, but does problematize it. His historical narratives and political reinterpretations are so rich and detailed that they inevitably overflow the constraints of his model. That is an issue that we also kept encountering when we applied our somewhat looser model to a much larger range of cases. Our inference is not that inconvenient complexities should be brushed aside in pursuit of a decontextualized and ahistorical clarity, but rather that the dialogue between conceptualization and verification needs diligence at both ends. Mickey’s empirical contributions go beyond the standard limits of comparative politics by bringing in the political economy forces that also shaped the peculiar trajectory of these Deep South states. Like us, he also invokes some very longue durée historical causes (e.g., “It is difficult to imagine authoritarian enclaves in the absence of the decision at the country’s founding to allow states whether to grant property rights in humans”; p 49). These are long, loose, causal chains, not highly predictive mechanical linkages.

Where this book comes closest to overlapping with our parallel contribution is with regard to the possible “pathways” toward fuller democratization. Mickey identifies three modes of democratization that correspond to the ways in which southern states responded to the challenges posed by national directives: acquiescent, harnessed, and protracted. Some states, like Georgia, were regionally split and evidenced two modes of democratization. Mickey’s pathways refer to states’ responses to what Edward Gibson (Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies, 2012) terms a center-led subnational democratization. Our framework of “control/conditionality,” “contagion,” and “activation” focuses instead on how both local and national initiatives might dismantle subnational illiberal practices. This approach is also applicable to Mickey’s cases and can help illustrate how his modes of democratization came about. For example, the federal government used control in the U.S. South when it intervened directly to force the desegregation of universities, and it used conditionality when it provided defense contracts to states that complied. Contagion effects are also visible in Mickey’s account of southern democratization, in particular, as political elites faced up to the inevitability of enclave democratization. Activation is the pathway that is perhaps most well documented in the democratization of the Deep South. Lawsuits filed by the NAACP and private individuals helped activate existing democratic institutions, most notably the judiciary, but also laws regulating participation in electoral politics, among other institutions.

So there are striking parallels between Mickey’s thorough historical reconstructions and our broader comparative generalizations. Beyond question, the U.S. case is in many respects “extreme” and indeed “exceptional,” and yet there is added explanatory leverage to be gained by placing it in a wider universe of broadly comparable experiences. This payoff works in both directions—highlighting what is both distinctive and recurrent about the authoritarian Jim Crow system of the Deep South, while also reconfirming that deeply entrenched illiberal practices at the subnational level can be very durable and highly consequential for overall national performance. This applies even to the most long-standing and well respected of Western liberal democratic regimes. So this is a topic that should be placed at the heart of comparative democratization studies, not relegated to a marginal or peripheral status.