Stateways Versus Folkways Revisited: An Error in Prediction

This paper examines varying rates of school desegregation in southern counties in relation to a number of social and political characteristics of those counties. The hope is to see how the latter elucidate the former, that is, how far we can go with social and political factors in statistically “explaining” school desegregation in the South. A broader objective is to throw some light on the hoary question of the relative importance of “stateways” versus “folkways” in governing human behavior.