Southern Political Party Activists: Patterns of Conflict and Change, 1991–2001. Edited by John A. Clark and Charles L. Prysby. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004. 254p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

John Clark and Charles Prysby have written an outstanding book on southern politics and political parties. The edited volume is not unusual in this field, and this particular edition is one of the strongest I have read. Clark and Prysby and their contributors chart the rising polarization of party activists within the Democratic and Republican Parties in the U.S. South. They empirically demonstrate, with an impressive 11-state survey of more than 7,000 local party activists, that the distinctive South in partisan activist politics is falling to the wayside.