Measuring Friends-and-Neighbors Voting

Abstract

Although the friends-and-neighbors factor helps explain the results of Democratic primaries in several Southern states, an adequate measure of the phenomenon is conspicu ously missing. A procedure for measuring the hometown support, the concentration of that support, and the importance of friends-and-neighbors is developed herein. The 1947 special general election and the 1978 Democratic primaries for the Mississippi U.S. Senate seat are analyzed to show how the measure is better than a previous one, how the im portance of friends-and-neighbors in determining election outcomes can be calculated, and how one can detect if the importance is spurious. The analysis demonstrates that friends-and-neighbors was as important in the 1978 first primary as it was in the 1947 special general election. The high importance in the 1978 runoff is partially explained, however, by the emerging North-South cleavage in Mississippi politics.