Black Voters Research Articles

Gone For Good: Deindustrialization, White Voter Backlash, and US Presidential Voting

Globalization and automation have contributed to deindustrialization and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, yielding important electoral implications across advanced democracies. Coupling insights from economic voting and social identity theory, we consider how different groups in society may construe manufacturing job losses in contrasting ways. We argue that deindustrialization threatens dominant group status, leading some white voters in affected localities to favor candidates they believe will address economic distress and defend racial hierarchy. Examining three US presidential elections, we find white voters were more likely to vote for Republican challengers where manufacturing layoffs were high, whereas Black voters in hard-hit localities were more likely to vote for Democrats. In survey data, white respondents, in contrast to people of color, associated local manufacturing job losses with obstacles to individual upward mobility and with broader American economic decline. Group-based identities help explain divergent political reactions to common economic shocks.

Suppressing Black Votes: A Historical Case Study of Voting Restrictions in Louisiana

Southern states have used a variety of methods to disenfranchise African American voters. Empirical data on the effectiveness of these measures is rare. We present a unique data source from Louisiana that allows us to empirically document voter registration rates from the end of Reconstruction to the present. Using basic time series data, we document how voter registration rates changed over time in response to state restrictions. We then conduct a second analysis, which focuses on Louisiana’s use of the Understanding Clause to reduce voter registration among Blacks. We show that in parishes that used the Understanding Clause, Black registration rates dropped by nearly 30 percentage points, with little effect on white registration. The findings of this paper have important implications for understanding the potential for discrimination in the enforcement of modern, ostensibly nonracial, voter eligibility requirements, such as voter ID laws, which grant substantial discretion to local officials in determining voter eligibility.

A Discussion of Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird’s Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior

Charge: As Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird note, collectively more than 80% of African Americans self-identify as Democrats according to surveys, and no Republican presidential candidate has won more than 13% of the Black vote since 1968. This is true despite the fact that at the individual level many African Americans are increasingly politically moderate and even conservative. Against this backdrop, what explains the enduring nature of African American support for the Democratic Party? In Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, White and Laird answer this question by developing the concept of “racialized social constraint,” a unifying behavioral norm meant to empower African Americans as a group and developed through a shared history of struggle against oppression and for freedom and equality. White and Laird consider the historical development of this norm, how it is enforced, and its efficacy both in creating party loyalty and as a path to Black political power in the United States. On the cusp of perhaps the most consequential presidential election in American history, one for which African American turnout was crucial, we asked a range of leading political scientists to assess the relative strengths, weaknesses, and ramifications of this argument.

Testing the Participation Hypothesis: Evidence from Participatory Budgeting

This paper examines the impact of local participatory democracy initiatives on individual voter turnout in ordinary elections, using the example of participatory budgeting (PB). Such initiatives often aspire to create more activated citizens, but there is still limited empirical research validating these claims. We link participants in New York City’s participatory budgeting process to their state voter file records to test whether PB increases participants’ likelihood of voting in regular elections. We use coarsened exact matching to identify similar voters from council districts where PB was not implemented. Comparing PB voters to similar individuals who were not exposed to PB, we find that engaging with participatory budgeting increased individuals’ probability of voting by an average of 8.4 percentage points. In addition, we find that these effects are greater for those who often have lower probabilities of voting—young people, lower educated and lower income voters, black voters, and people who are the minority race of their neighborhood.

Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weapon-ization of breaking news

In this essay, we conduct a descriptive content analysis from a sample of a dataset made up of 534 thousand scraped tweets, supplemented with access to 1.36 million tweets from the Twitter fire-hose, from accounts that used the #ADOS hashtag between November 2019 and September 2020. ADOS is an acronym for American Descendants of Slavery, a largely online group that operates within Black online communities. We find that the ADOS network strategically uses breaking news events to encourage discourage Black voters from voting for the Democratic party, a phenomenon we call disinformation creep. Conversely, the ADOS network has remained largely silent about the impact of the novel coronavirus on Black communities, undermining its claims that it works in the interests of Black Americans.

Party Politics and American Racial Orders

Previous article No AccessReview EssayParty Politics and American Racial Orders The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century. By Keneisha Grant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020. Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968. By Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War. By Nathan P. Kalmoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.David A. BatemanDavid A. BatemanCornell University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 83, Number 2April 2021 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/713304 Views: 249Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 17, 2021 © 2021 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Review: The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, by Keneshia N. Grant

Review: <i>The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century</i>, by Keneshia N. Grant

Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights

Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized racial discrimination. This paper shows that the Great Migration and support for civil rights are causally linked. Predicting Black inflows with a shift-share instrument, we find that the Great Migration increased support for the Democratic Party and encouraged pro-civil rights activism in northern and western counties. These effects were not only driven by Black voters, but also by progressive and working class segments of the white population. We identify the salience of conditions prevailing in the South, measured through increased reporting of southern lynchings in northern newspapers, as a possible channel through which the Great Migration increased whites' support for civil rights. Mirroring the changes in the electorate, non-southern Congress members became more likely to promote civil rights legislation, but also grew increasingly polarized along party lines on racial issues.

Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights

Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized racial discrimination. This paper shows that the Great Migration and support for civil rights are causally linked. Predicting Black inflows with a shift-share instrument, we find that the Great Migration increased support for the Democratic Party and encouraged pro-civil rights activism in northern and western counties. These effects were not only driven by Black voters, but also by progressive and working class segments of the white population. We identify the salience of conditions prevailing in the South, measured through increased reporting of southern lynchings in northern newspapers, as a possible channel through which the Great Migration increased whites' support for civil rights. Mirroring the changes in the electorate, non-southern Congress members became more likely to promote civil rights legislation, but also grew increasingly polarized along party lines on racial issues.

The White Supremacist Constitution

The United States Constitution has been a document that, during every era, has helped further white supremacy. White supremacy constitutes a “political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”** Rather than understand the Constitution as a force for progressive structural change, we should understand it as a barrier to change. From its inception, the Constitution enshrined slavery and the degradation of Black people by considering them to be property rather than equal members of the community. The Civil War Amendments did not truly abolish slavery and only prohibited a limited band of state action. Radical Reconstruction was short-lived as white supremacy quickly eviscerated any political gains that Black voters had achieved. The Supreme Court has interpreted the Civil War Amendments consistently with their white supremacy roots. Rather than serve as an effective instrument to help eradicate the badges, incidents and vestiges of slavery, the Constitution has become a tool both to ban voluntary race-affirmative measures at the federal, state and local government level while also precluding Congress from enacting strong abolitionist measures. The Court has enshrined the views of Andrew Johnson, a fierce proponent of white supremacy, into its basic structure. This Article challenges us to imagine how resistance lawyers might seek to use the Constitution to help eliminate white supremacy while also generally recognizing the limitations of the use of the judicial system, including the specific limitations of the U.S. Constitution, for that purpose. Only then might we achieve a truly radical reconstruction.

Black voters matter: President Donald Trump&amp;apos;s relationship with the African-American community (2016-2020)

Black voters matter: President Donald Trump&amp;apos;s relationship with the African-American community (2016-2020)

Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975 ed. by Kimberley Mangun

Reviewed by: Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975 ed. by Kimberley Mangun James L. Baggett Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975. By Kimberley Mangun. New York: Peter Lang, 2019. xviii, 268 pp. $47.95. ISBN 978-1-4331-4802-6. Not long after attending the 1968 funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Atlanta, Birmingham World newspaper editor Emory O. Jackson drove to Selma. Jackson confided to a friend that he walked back and forth across the Edmund Pettus Bridge four times, pondering the march that had happened there only three years prior. And for the next six weeks Jackson was unusually silent, not writing his twice-weekly newspaper column. It was a rare time of quiet in his otherwise long and exhausting career. Jackson was a critical, if not well remembered, figure in Alabama's Civil Rights struggle. In a welcome addition to Civil Rights historiography, Kimberley Mangun, an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, has written the first full-length study of Jackson's work as a journalist and Civil Rights activist. Born in Buena Vista, Georgia, in 1908, Jackson grew up a child of middle class parents in Birmingham. He attended Industrial High School, then the only high school for African Americans in the city, and Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he edited the student newspaper. After teaching high school for two years, Jackson joined the staff of the Birmingham World in 1934. He was a feature writer who covered sports and wrote book reviews before being named managing editor. In the 1940s Jackson joined the Birmingham branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and [End Page 194] served for decades as an active member and officer in the NAACP. Jackson believed that the road to equal rights for African Americans ran through the ballot box. Blacks, Jackson argued, needed to secure equal voting rights and use the franchise to build political power. In letters to government officials and through the pages of the World, Jackson exposed discriminatory practices that local registrars used to keep African Americans from registering to vote and helped educate potential Black voters about their legal rights and strategies to use when confronted with recalcitrant white voting officials. Jackson also wrote extensively about police brutality and the frequent killings of African Americans by white police officers. His efforts attracted the notice of Birmingham's white city commission, who labeled him a "Communist," and brought harassment from the police. But the rise to prominence of Civil Rights leaders who practiced a different style of activism pushed Jackson further into the background. He did not support direct action protests such as those led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred L. Shuttlesworth in Birmingham in 1963. Calling such street protests "mass action stunts," (143) Jackson believed they secured only short-term gains and were counterproductive because they disturbed the peace and sometimes incited violence. And Jackson, a Birmingham booster despite all the city's racial problems, "constantly worried about the impressions of his city," (147) Mangun writes. Jackson believed the 1963 protests, where authorities used police dogs and fire hoses to disperse demonstrators, harmed Birmingham's image. By the early 1960s, Jackson, a generation older than the Civil Rights leaders who came after him, felt "the movement was beginning to pass him by." Where he had once drawn "inspiration" from his Civil Rights activism, he now confessed to a friend that he "didn't feel part of anything" (143). Jackson was not wrong in his belief that racial equality required working within the legal system, the courts, and the ballot box. And while he supported King and Shuttlesworth, Jackson found it difficult to embrace the need to demand white America's attention with large-scale protests. [End Page 195] As a crusading journalist, Jackson was sometimes at the center of historic events, other times a sideline observer. Despite a meager salary, insufficient staff, and deep frustration with the mismanagement of his newspaper by the parent company in Atlanta, Jackson never left the World and served as...

Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postempancipation Virginia by Nicole Myers Turner

Reviewed by: Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postempancipation Virginia by Nicole Myers Turner Emily Suzanne Clark (bio) Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postempancipation Virginia. By Nicole Myers Turner. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 232. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $29.95.) Nicole Myers Turner’s Soul Liberty is impressive scholarship that reveals how black churches mediated political engagement and enabled [End Page 137] community organizing. While the book’s subtitle reflects Turner’s focus on Virginia, her deep look at the dynamics between the religious and the political demonstrates larger trends and answers some long-standing questions about black religious history at the pivotal moment of postemancipation. Rather than “presuppose political power” of black churches (147), Turner narrates this period in fresh ways to emphasize how black churches built on their existing political acumen. This approach puts the focus on the process by which churches became “vehicles for participation and self-determination” (143). Turner reveals a fascinating negotiation between the religious and the political; black church structures and networks shaped black political participation. Her use of the term “soul liberty” reflects this dynamic, as black Christians saw the intersections of “religious freedom, righteousness, equity, and justice” (2). The first chapter sets up the reader to see how some elements of life changed and others did not with the end of the Civil War. Black religious life had long been a space of communal gathering and resistance to white supremacy, as churches were “powerful bases for independence” (30). One thread begun in chapter 1 and continued throughout the book is an understanding of how black social community building transitioned into black political community organizing. In this chapter and in chapter 2, which specifically examines the creation of independent black church conventions, Turner vividly shows readers how the religious was inherently political. The church networks created and sustained by the conventions fostered powerful connections to propel black political interests. Additionally, by demonstrating their autonomy and ability to work with white church communities, black religious organizations made powerful arguments for their self-determination in matters both religious and political. As Turner explains, “The formation of independent black Baptist associations shows how black people organized themselves, developed their identities, and articulated their place within the new American freedom” (34). This dynamic is further developed in chapter 3, where Turner attends to the ways in which “a minister-centered leadership framework” developed in process and collaboration with community engagement (76). Education becomes a significant part of this conversation in chapter 4 in ways that reflect black political savvy. “Debates within the African American community about inspired versus educated ministerial leadership,” Turner explains, “often came out of concerns about how black people were perceived” (86). Access to seminary education often required interaction with white churchmen, but black political power allowed black churches to guard their autonomy even in collaboration. [End Page 138] Chapter 5, entitled “Politics of Engagement,” is where Turner’s analysis is at its strongest, in part owing to the developing themes and trends she expertly unpacks in earlier chapters. Because readers have followed the ongoing negotiation between black church networks and larger political movements, it comes as no surprise that even when they were a county minority, black church networks empowered black communities beyond their numbers. These church networks also strengthened “a race consciousness and a sense of communal power” that shaped black engagement with the patronage process (117). In exchange for their political support, black church networks negotiated for political positions for church members and leaders through the patronage system. Not only does this interaction help explain black voting trends, but it also shows the forward-thinking ways in which black churches advocated for their communities and goals. It is in chapter 5 that Turner’s use of ArcGIS and maps persuasively supports her interpretation of the historical data. Politicians could access these long-standing church networks to their advantage or ignore them to their deficit. The Pennsylvania State University recently created the Center for Black Digital Research, co-led by Gabrielle Foreman, one of the founders of the Colored Conventions Project. The center reflects increasing interest in digital humanities and...

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century. By Keneshia N. Grant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020. 214p. $74.50 cloth, $27.95 paper.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century. By Keneshia N. Grant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020. 214p. $74.50 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Voting in a Pandemic: COVID-19 and Primary Turnout in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

We report the first study of the effect of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) on polling place consolidation and voting behavior. We draw upon individual-level observations from Milwaukee matched to similar observations in the surrounding municipalities to assess whether fewer polling places in the April 2020 presidential primary election decreased turnout in the city. We find polling place consolidation reduced overall turnout by about 8.7 points and reduced turnout among the Black population in the city by about 10 points. We conclude, based on these data, that polling place consolidation even accompanied by widespread absentee voting in the face of an emergency may result in disenfranchisement, particularly among Black voters.

Fryer Award Winner Speaks on What It Means to Be Gay and Black

Fryer Award Winner Speaks on What It Means to Be Gay and Black

Black Disenfranchisement in the Cape Colony, c.1887–1909: Challenging the Numbers

It is generally agreed that the Cape Colony’s disenfranchisement legislation did what it set out to do: it drastically reduced the number of blacks who were eligible to vote. However, we find that empirical support for this view is weak. We argue that disenfranchisement was not as effective as is claimed. We question the literature on black disenfranchisement in the late 19th-century Cape Colony. Using a surname-matching formula in combination with manual methods, we counted voters in the Cape Colony voters’ rolls between 1887 and 1909 and found that the number of blacks who lost the right to vote in 1887 is much smaller than the 30,000 that has been claimed. Our empirical evidence shows it to be around a tenth of that number. Conversely, the number of disenfranchised white and coloured voters is larger than expected. Ours is an important contribution, as no researcher to date has systematically gone through these voters’ rolls to provide empirical evidence to support or refute the claims about disenfranchisement. The lower than expected number of disenfranchised black voters may be due to their resistance to being stripped of the franchise. The larger than expected number of disenfranchised white and coloured voters may have been due to recession and white poverty.

The Effect of Associative Racial Cues in Elections

ABSTRACT How do racial signals associating a candidate with minority supporters change voters’ perceptions about a candidate and their support for a candidate? Given the presence of competing information in any campaign or the absence of information in low-salience campaigns, voters may rely on heuristics – such as race – to make the process of voting easier. The information communicated by these signals may be so strong that they cause voters to ignore other, perhaps more politically relevant, information. In this paper, we test how associative racial cues sway voters’ perceptions of and support for candidates using two experiments that harness real-world print and audio campaign advertisements. We find that the signals in these ads can sometimes overwhelm cues about policy positions when the two are present together. Moreover, we find that such signals have limited effects on candidate support among Black voters but that they risk substantial backlash of up to eight percentage points in reported vote intention among White voters. Our results highlight how voters gather and use information in low-information elections and demonstrate the power of campaign communication strategies that use racial associations.

Driving a Wedge? Republicans, Immigration, and the Impact of Substantive Appeals on African American Vote Choice

Recently, a number of prominent Republican elites have argued that the economic plight of African Americans is attributable to undocumented immigration to the United States. Have these arguments concerning the link between black economic well-being and undocumented immigration become commonplace in the rhetoric of Republican elites, and if so, does exposure to these appeals impact black vote choice? Employing data from over forty years of congressional speeches, the campaign speeches and public addresses of President Donald Trump, televised campaign advertisements from the Wisconsin/Wesleyan Advertising Projects, and a survey experiment embedded in the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find that Republican elected officials have increasingly made substantive appeals to blacks on the issue of immigration reform, that exposure to this type of substantive appeal leads blacks to more strongly support a fictional Republican candidate, and that this support is moderated by a respondent’s level of linked fate. These findings challenge existing scholarship that Republican elites ignore the concerns of the black community and suggest that Republicans may be using the issue of immigration to drive a wedge in the Democratic electoral coalition by targeting the Democratic Party’s strongest constituency.

Black Votes Count, But Do They Matter? Symbolic Empowerment and the Jackson-Obama Mobilizing Effect on Gender and Age Cohorts

Using data from the 1984–1988 National Black Election Studies as well as the 2008 and 2012 American National Election Studies, we provide a comprehensive study of African American political behavior with support for Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson serving as explanatory variables alongside other sources of variation—gender and age cohorts. Results show that African American voters who preferred Jackson and Obama in the 1984 and 2008 Democratic nominating contests were more likely to proselytize, attend a campaign rally or political meeting, donate money, and wear a campaign button. While opposition to Ronald Reagan and George Bush, church membership, involvement in Black political organizations were also linked to behavior, racial group identification (linked fate) had a less consistent effect. Both Obama’s candidacy like that of Jackson’s had an empowering effect on African American women—particularly, those of the civil rights generation—as was the case for Obama supporters of a younger cohort.