The End of Southern Exceptionalism, revisioning federal elections from 1952 to 2000, explains how the South, once solidly Democratic, became “two-party” and increasingly Republican, exceeding Republican ascendancy nationwide. The authors doubt the evidential basis of prevailing accounts of southern politics, in which desegregation and African American empowerment impelled the partisan shift. They succeed in proving a countervailing proposition, that the engine of partisan change was economic development and the consequential “politics of social class.” This proposition is central, but much more is to be learned from subsidiary analyses and arguments, not least about the ambiguous role of race.

Their research virtues, the authors say, are rigorous theorization, assembling comprehensive empirical data, and the “attempt to take these data seriously”. The sources are the American National Election Studies (ANES; for individuals, their social backgrounds, issue preferences and voting), the censuses for congressional district demography and published election outcome statistics. Multivariate and regression analyses, in many tables and graphs, are presented without usual apparatuses of statistical tests. The meaning of tables and figures and the argument in general demand close attention to the text, whose style tends to the abstract and convoluted. Early on, following a long quotation from their revisionary starting point (V. O. Key's seminal Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949), Shafer and Johnston remark (self-referentially?) that “Modern political scientists rarely speak in such a concrete, specific, and engaged voice”.

The main variables, usually measured against percentages of whites voting Republican, are family income (a proxy for social class), racial context (proportion black of voting-district population), percent white-collar in district, welfare attitudes and racial attitudes (expressed as liberal vs. conservative), and feelings toward blacks (positive vs. negative). Attitudes and feelings are derived from questions posed to ANES respondents. An outstanding feature is the examination throughout of voting behaviour separately for House, Senate, and presidential elections, revealing differing patterns until symmetry was achieved in the 1990s. Other factors analysed include congressional seats contested or not; candidates as local or cosmopolitan, incumbents or challengers; electoral districts as in deep or peripheral South. Three-party presidential races are examined to see whether Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond's (1948) and independent George Wallace's (1968) votes were habit-breaking stimuli for subsequent movement of white voters to the Republicans. (They were not; the analysis shows the contrary.)

Students of politics will want to complement such generally reductive studies as this with, e.g., knowing Thurmond, an exceptional southerner, ten years a Democratic senator, becoming Republican in 1964 and re-elected six times, and his impact on America.