Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-72

Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–72. By Mickey Robert. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 584p. $85.00 cloth, $37.50 paper.

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...