Their independence
Racial Diversity and the Dynamics of Authoritarianism
Yamil Ricardo Velez & Howard Lavine
Journal of Politics, April 2017, Pages 519-533
Abstract:
Past work on the political impact of racial diversity has focused on direct effects, demonstrating that diverse environments are associated with more negative - or in some circumstances, more positive - racial attitudes and race-targeted policy preferences. We show that diversity functions in a second way, as a variable that magnifies the political impact of individual differences in the psychological disposition of authoritarianism. Using a national sample, we find that in white areas with minimal diversity, authoritarianism had no impact on racial prejudice, political intolerance, and attitudes toward immigration. As diversity rises, however, authoritarianism plays an increasingly dominant role in political judgment. In diverse environments, authoritarians become more racially, ethnically, and politically intolerant and nonauthoritarians less so. We conceptually replicate these findings in a dorm setting with plausibly exogenous levels of local diversity and discuss the implications of our findings in terms of the various ways in which ethno-racial diversity structures political attitudes.
Who Pays for Government? Descriptive Representation and Exploitative Revenue Sources
Michael Sances & Hye Young You
Journal of Politics, July 2017, Pages 1090-1094
Abstract:
We examine US city governments' use of fines and court fees for local revenue, a policy that disproportionately affects black voters, and the connections between this policy and black representation. Using data on over 9,000 cities, we show that the use of fines as revenue is common and that it is robustly related to the share of city residents who are black. We also find that black representation on city councils diminishes the connection between black population and fines revenue. Our findings speak to the potential of descriptive representation to alleviate biases in city policy.
"I'm Principled Against Slavery, but ...": Colorblindness and the Three-Fifths Debate
Kasey Henricks
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
No longer is it acceptable to rationalize racial hierarchy in explicit terms. Today's racism substitutes these views for seemingly nonracial ones that diminish structural discrimination and "blame the victim." Though recent studies uncover the subtle, implicit, and covert discourse of colorblindness, claims of ideological progression have been offered without empirical verification. Examining debate surrounding the three-fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution, I complete a historical ethnographic content analysis that transplants colorblind ideology into historical soil where some presume it does not belong. The data derive from A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, which is an archival collection held by the Library of Congress. The data set consists of 1,493 pages of congressional record. My findings reveal how colorblindness captured in phrases like "I'm not racist, but ..." have historical parallels in "I'm principled against slavery, but ..." This observation merits more theoretical attention because it shows how the very ideology some describe as novel today persisted in a previous era. In other words, colorblindness was not created out of whole cloth in post-1960s America.
Location matters: Historical racial segregation and intergenerational mobility
Rodney Andrews et al.
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper explores historical patterns of racial segregation and its relationship with the observed spatial variation in contemporaneous economic mobility established in Chetty et al. (2014). We combined data from the Equality of Opportunity Project with a novel measure of racial segregation developed in Logan and Parman (2017) and find that past racial segregation explains a significant portion of the spatial variation in intergenerational mobility. These findings are consistent with models showing that persistent institutional factors may drive long-term outcomes across areas. Racial segregation and the environment that fosters it may diminish upward economic mobility by reducing access to networks, labor and capital markets, and political institutions. If so, then reducing the impact of these persistent processes may be key to mitigating current-day gaps in wealth, income, and overall well-being.
School Segregation and the Foreclosure Crisis
Keith Ihlanfeldt & Tom Mayock
Florida State University Working Paper, May 2017
Abstract:
One overlooked consequence of America's foreclosure crisis is the impact it had on school segregation. Using data on Florida schools, we find that the crisis reduced the racial segregation of elementary schools by opening up affordable housing opportunities to black families in predominantly white neighborhoods. Our analysis has the added importance of providing a natural experiment testing whether more affordable housing in predominantly white school attendance zones will decrease segregation.
Fertility Decline in the Civil Rights Era
Owen Thompson
University of Wisconsin Working Paper, May 2017
Abstract:
The Civil Rights Movement, and in particular passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, initiated a period of rapid improvements in the socioeconomic opportunities and civil inclusion of Southern African Americans, including advancements in labor market opportunities, educational access, and infant health outcomes, among other measures. Many of these factors have been shown to influence fertility behavior, but fertility responses to the broad changes associated with the Civil Rights Movement have not been widely studied. This note documents large post-1964 declines in the fertility of Southern African American women relative to Southern whites and to African Americans outside the South. I find that between 1964 and 1970, the difference in the general fertility rates of Southern African Americans and Southern whites fell by 40%, and that the difference in the general fertility rates of Southern African Americans and non-Southern African Americans fell by 71%. Similar relative declines in the completed childbearing of Southern African Americans from impacted cohorts are also observed. Future research investigating the specific mechanisms underlying these trends is warranted.
Tenancy, Marriage, and the Boll Weevil Infestation, 1892-1930
Deirdre Bloome, James Feigenbaum & Christopher Muller
Demography, June 2017, Pages 1029-1049
Abstract:
In the early twentieth century, the cotton-growing regions of the U.S. South were dominated by families of tenant farmers. Tenant farming created opportunities and incentives for prospective tenants to marry at young ages. These opportunities and incentives especially affected African Americans, who had few alternatives to working as tenants. Using complete-count Census of Population data from 1900-1930 and Census of Agriculture data from 1889-1929, we find that increases in tenancy over time increased the prevalence of marriage among young African Americans. We then study how marriage was affected by one of the most notorious disruptions to southern agriculture at the turn of the century: the boll weevil infestation of 1892-1922. Using historical Department of Agriculture maps, we show that the boll weevil's arrival reduced the share of farms worked by tenants as well as the share of African Americans who married at young ages. When the boll weevil infestation altered African Americans' opportunities and incentives to marry, the share of African Americans who married young fell accordingly. Our results provide new evidence about the effect of economic and political institutions on demographic transformations.
Terminal Identities: The Racial Classification of Immigrants in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Death Records
Monica McDermott
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Death certificates are a means of assessing the racial classification of foreign-born Americans that is based neither on a set of formal racial identification criteria nor self-identification. Instead, local informants typically report the race of decedents. According to a sample of 1,884 records filed between 1859 and 1960, individuals born in China were progressively less likely to be identified by racial terms (e.g., white or yellow) and more likely to be identified by their country of origin (e.g., Chinese). The opposite is true for those born in Mexico or Puerto Rico, who are less likely over time to be identified as Mexican or Puerto Rican and more likely to be identified with a racial term - typically white. Most of the records analyzed are from southern states (n = 1,335), although an additional 548 records, primarily from Illinois and Ohio, are compared to the southern records. In some cases, white identity can serve as a mark of racial confusion, acting as a default or neutral identity rather than a mark of privilege. Conversely, it can represent a status that is actively striven for to provide freedom from discriminatory treatment. It serves primarily as the former for those born in China and the latter for those born in Mexico and Puerto Rico.