Over a half-century after V.O. Key’s death, his ideas continue to loom large in the study of American politics, particularly among works on political parties and the South. The influence of Key is readily apparent in John H. Aldrich and John D. Griffin’s impressive new book, a comprehensive effort to marshal evidence from across American history in support of Key’s contention that a competitive multiparty politics is essential for effective democratic government to take root. The South’s historic lack of multiparty politics was Key’s main source of evidence for this claim, and Aldrich and Griffin likewise focus on America’s most distinctive region, deepening Key’s argument with greater causal specificity and extending it to examine how the arrival of competitive, two-party politics in the modern South has yielded significant social and political benefits.

The book is divided into three parts. In Part 1, Aldrich and Griffin flesh out the book’s most important theoretical concepts and clarify its central argument, viz that “in-equilibrium” party systems (i.e., those in which at least two major parties remain fully developed over an extended period of time) will yield competitive elections, thereby allowing voters to hold politicians accountable and thus inducing effective democratic governance. In Part 2, the authors engage in a careful comparison of the party systems of the South and non-South from the Jacksonian Era until today. In doing so, they rely on Key’s famous tripartite conceptualization of political parties (the Party in Government, Party in The Electorate, and Party Organization) as a framework for examining differences between the southern and non-southern political parties. Using a diverse array of sources they show that, across the long stretch of time between the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, the southern party system was consistently less developed across all three of Key’s dimensions. However, they also point to significant variation in party development within the South over this stretch, especially during the 1830s–1850s and the 1890s, when the formation of a competitive multiparty system in the South seemed possible. Regarding the former, the authors argue that the South was moving toward a fully developed, Democrat-Whig party system up until the early 1850s, when the growing salience of the slavery issue led to the collapse of the Whigs and their replacement by the Republicans (a party that posed an existential threat to the South’s slaveholding elites). The possibility of multiparty politics in the South at the end of the nineteenth century, based in a nascent alliance between state Republican parties and the burgeoning Populist movement, was far more circumscribed. After the national Democratic Party absorbed the Populist movement in 1896, the South’s “Populist Moment” ended, paving the way for the return to rule of the region’s white aristocracy and the consolidation of the Jim Crow, one-party South. The final chapter of Part 2 is dedicated to examining a development that V.O. Key didn’t get a chance to witness: the rise of southern Republicans in the late twentieth century and the resulting arrival of an “in-equilibrium,” two-party system in the South for the first time in its history.

In contrast to the analytic narratives of Part 2, Part 3 features a series of tests of the book’s central thesis that two-party competition begets effective democratic government. The focus here is less on comparing the South and non-South during individual historical eras, and more on examining differences across these eras. Chapter 7 considers differences in the “opportunity structure” facing ambitious politicians in the one-party and two-party South. Chapters 8 and 9 evaluate whether two-party competition has led to a variety of goods associated with democratic politics, including greater popular responsiveness, more democratic attitudes among the public, and improved social conditions. The authors are to be commended for finding innovative ways to test nearly every facet of their core argument.

One of the book’s most intriguing claims is found in Chapter 7, when Aldrich and Griffin challenge the well-known “top-down realignment” thesis of southern partisan change in the late twentieth century. According to this thesis, Republican advancement in the South occurred from the top of the ballot to the bottom, with initial GOP successes in presidential races facilitating Republican candidate emergence (and eventual victory) in U.S. Senate races, followed by gubernatorial, U.S. House, and ultimately state legislative races. While the authors acknowledge the pivotal role played by Republican success in high- profile races in triggering initial shifts in voting patterns among white Southerners, they suggest that the ultimate transition of the GOP to the status of “fully-developed party” occurred from the bottom up, through the development of an “opportunity structure” moving Republican politicians from lower-level to higher-level races over time. The authors’ evidence in support of this claim leaves something to be desired, however. While they do show that a bottom-up opportunity structure eventually developed for southern Republican politicians, it is not clear (based on their analyses) that increases in Republican candidate emergence and success in the South ever occurred from the bottom-up, even as late as the 1990s and 2000s. More work needs to be done to flesh out precisely when and how top-down advancement gave way to the bottom-up dynamic.

Toward the end of the book, Aldrich and Griffin wade into one of the most controversial debates among scholars of southern politics: whether the South remains a distinctive region in modern American politics. The authors are quite explicit in their views on this matter: as they state, “The South is no longer exceptional.” (p. 249). To back up this claim, they present a great deal of evidence showing that the region’s transition to two-party competition has facilitated its integration with the national party system, causing its distinctiveness to fade. Still, one might argue that the authors have missed additional evidence suggesting that the South remains unusual, particularly in regards to party competition. Much of Aldrich and Griffin’s case that the southern two-party system has reached equilibrium is based on state-level measures of party strength. Examining the strength of southern political parties at the local or legislative district levels, however, leads to substantially different conclusions. For example, as of 2016, the South continued to exhibit far higher rates of uncontested state legislative races than the non-South. Thus, even today, two-party competition simply does not exist in a great many southern legislative contests. This reality is, of course, a reflection of the region’s enduring racial divide: numerous majority-white legislative districts feature an unopposed Republican candidate while numerous majority-minority districts feature an unopposed Democrat. The continued prevalence of these sorts of districts suggests that party politics in the South remains distinctive, at least in some respects.

These criticisms notwithstanding, Why Parties Matter is a very valuable book. It skillfully links the far-sighted observations of a major political scientist from an earlier era to political developments that occurred long after his passing. In doing so, it provides a full-fledged and persuasive defense of parties as indispensable ingredients of an effective democratic political system. Scholars interested in political parties, electoral competition, and democratic quality (in both the American and comparative contexts) will find much to mull over in this work.