Hardly a day goes by where you don’t read about some Southern politician from either party (Joe Wilson, R-SC; Alan Grayson, D-FL; Virginia Foxx, R-NC) shooting his or her extremist mouth off to get television time and campaign cash. It might lead one to conclude that the region is the most ideologically polarized when it comes to politicians.

That’s what my undergraduate students from my American government class and I thought. But rather than let CNN, Fox or newspaper headlines drive the analysis, we decided to collect some data and run the numbers. Sit down in a comfortable chair, because some of the results will shock you.

We looked at congressional voting scores from the ACU (American Conservative Union) from 13 Southern states, from 1978, 1988, 1998 and 2008. Scores from 0-20 were considered liberal. One with a score between 21 and 80 was a moderate. Conservatives had voting records from 81 to 100. And in case you don’t think the issues of yesteryear apply today, just consider what they were voting on 30 years ago: oil drilling in Alaska, government bailouts of companies - you get the picture.

But it wouldn’t mean a whole lot if we limited ourselves to a study of the South. Therefore, we also looked at 17 non-Southern states from all other regions of the USA: the West, Prairie states, Midwest and the Northeast.

Looking at the South (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia), we did indeed find a decline in the number of congressional moderates over the last 30 years. Whereas a majority of the South had a moderate representative and/or Senator, that’s not the case today. Only a little over 20 percent of all Southern politicians fit that description.

But in our study of non-Southern states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and North Dakota), we find a far more polarized bunch. Only of every three members of the House of Representatives and Senate were moderate 30 years ago. And that number has declined to almost 10 percent. There are roughly half as many moderates in non-Southern states as there are in the South.

So while the South is likely to remain the poster child region for congressional extremism, the data tells a completely different tale. In fact, being from the South makes you more likely to be a moderate voter in Washington, D.C., whether you’re a Blue Dog Democrat or a Republican who recently knocked off a Democratic Party incumbent. The Wilsons and Graysons may get all of the press, but their bombast overshadows a lot of folks willing to work across party lines.

Thanks go out to Curt Ellison, Carmilla Harris, Riley Hill, Jatara King, Elissa Marks, Taylor Ours, Andy Page, Janette Pencle, Linwood Roberds, Knox Robinson, Catherine Rodriguez, Taylor Smith, Stephen Spivey, Clay Wages and Madison Wilson, They are LaGrange College undergraduates who contributed to the research for this column.

— John A. Tures is associate professor of political science at LaGrange College