Southern Politics In State and Nation Quotes

“Florida is not only unbossed, it is unled. Anything can happen in elections, and does.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“In the governing of peoples, a few always hold power; it is exercised, however, subject to the influence of the governed which may be almost imperceptible or it may be irresistible.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“If a democratic regime is to work successfully it must be generally agreed that contestants for power will not shoot each other and that ballots will be counted as cast. Consensus on these propositions has been reached pretty well over the entire South except in some counties in East Tennessee, which have a high incidence of electoral irregularity and a high mortality from gunshot during political campaigns.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“In all probability the rock-bottom basis for the authority of Democratic primary decisions has been southern attachment to Democratic presidential nominees. That attachment insulated southern politics from the divisive issues of national campaigns. If those issues had been raised more effectively and more consistently in the South, they would have spread by infection to state politics and would have provided powerful coat-tail support for Republican state and local candidates.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“The runner-up in the first primary often wins the nomination in the second primary, a fact often advanced to support the contention that the popular will would be defeated by awarding the nomination to the winner of a plurality in a single primary.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“The bald fact is that in most of the South most of the time party machinery is an impotent mechanism dedicated largely to the performance of routine duties.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“City dwellers, except under machine rule, tend more than rural people to divide their vote.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“When there emerges a factional system of competing politicians whose differences provide opportunity for the expression of cleavages of sentiment latent in the electorate, localism is apt to decline in significance in the face of the divisive effects of a politics of substance.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“The colorful demagogue possessed of an intensely personal following can introduce into the disorganized politics of one-party states elements of stability and form that are of the utmost importance.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“Reliance on personality (however it may be associated with policy) as an organizing point for voters inevitably produces impermanence in factional systems.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“Social mechanisms for the transmission and perpetuation of partisan faiths have an effectiveness far more potent than the political issue of the day.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“Friends and favors, perquisites which are everywhere the usual practices of politics, take on a special significance in one-party states.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“A more or less totally irrelevant appeal - back the hometown boy - can exert no little influence over an electorate not habituated to the types of voting behavior characteristic of a two-party situation.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“For a two-party system to operate effectively each party must, almost of necessity, have a territorial stronghold in which it can win legislative elections and control local governments.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“As institutions, parties enjoy a general disrepute, yet most of the democratic world finds them indispensable as instruments of self-government, as means for the organization and expression of competing viewpoints on public policy.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation

“That the South's spectacular political leaders have been indiscriminately grouped as demagogues of a common stripe, when wide differences have actually separated them, may likewise be regarded as an excusable failing of the Yankee journalist insensitive to the realities of southern politics.”
― V.O. Key, Southern Politics In State and Nation