Elites often employ anti-democratic tactics to preserve their power. In the 20th-century South, for instance, legal discrimination and vigilante violence were the cornerstones of the White supremacist order. The threat of violence discouraged Black political participation, economic advancement, and social integration; discriminatory laws enshrined the racial hierarchy that such violence promoted. This research agenda investigates the legal and extralegal tactics used to uphold regimes like Jim Crow.
Why do White supremacists mobilize in some places and not others? I answer this question within the case of the Civil-Rights era South, where the Ku Klux Klan resurged after decades of dormancy. Curiously, however, the KKK did not re-emerge everywhere in the South, but chiefly in North Carolina. In order to elucidate this particular puzzle and the broader forces driving White supremacist terrorism in the U.S., I analyze data on North Carolina Klan rallies from 1963-1967 and the number of klaverns per county in the 1960s. I implement a finite mixture model to evaluate three possible explanations of KKK activity: racial threat, school desegregation, and generational Klan legacies. Previous research has focused primarily on racial threat as the explanation for Klan activity, but I find that the desegregation and Klan legacies outperform racial threat in explaining a majority of county-year observations. The results encourage scholars to reassess the historical and political correlates of White supremacist activity.
Why do parties resist enfranchising new voter groups? Parties that obstruct enfranchisement often accumulate negative sentiment among the affected group, and this resentment manifests as an electoral penalty for the obstructing party if enfranchisement eventually occurs. We formalize the concept of voter resentment, and we develop a dynamic formal model to analyze when and why parties resist enfranchising new voter groups. We show that resisting enfranchisement can offer short-term protection against electoral loss, but it risks the party's long-run electoral viability. Three key findings inform how parties navigate this dilemma. (1) Increased voter sensitivity to past disenfranchisement generally incentivizes incumbent parties to enfranchise sooner. However, (2) this effect is moderated by the party's existing partisan advantage. Parties with a strong initial partisan base may become less likely to enfranchise as voter sensitivity to past obstruction rises, opting to rely on their core supporters rather than appeal to a resentful new group. (3) The precision of information regarding the new group's latent support also interacts with partisan strength; higher precision can encourage enfranchisement for electorally strong parties but deter it for weaker ones. The results offer implications for voting rights activists, whose pro-democracy movements may increase voters' sensitivity to disenfranchisement.Â
[working paper]