Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in the American South

Abstract

Conventional political economy models predict taxation will increase when the franchise is expanded to include more low-income voters. We argue that in societies where social status is a cleavage, extensions of the franchise to low-status groups may lead to not only greater redistribution but also policies encouraging social integration. Therefore, elites can use the threat of desegregation to unite both wealthy and poor members of high-status groups against taxes, and weaken the bureaucratic capacity essential for tax collection. We demonstrate this argument by studying the effects of the extension of voting rights to African Americans in the United States at the end of the Civil War. We show that during Reconstruction, under an occupying North, per capita taxation was higher in counties with more former slaves and slaveholdings. After Reconstruction, per capita taxes fell and bureaucratic capacity was weaker where the legacy of slavery was stronger. We find that higher intrawhite economic inequality was associated with lower taxes and lower bureaucratic quality in the post-Reconstruction era in counties with more enslaved people and slaveholdings. These results suggest that Southern elites could successfully build cross-class coalitions against taxation in places where whites were more threatened by desegregation and sought to protect their racial status.