Abstract

This paper revisits the historical processes that disenfranchised African Americans in the post-Reconstruction US south. We assemble county-level voting data and estimate triple-difference models to explore how voter turn-out responded to political manipulation of the ballot box, and various legal changes. The results suggest disenfranchisement was a two-stage process. White southerners first employed political manipulation and various extra-legal means. It was only later, once the process of disenfranchisement was largely underway, that they turned to formal legal mechanisms such as poll taxes and literacy requirements. The first stage was associated with larger reductions in African American turnout than the second stage. We then document how state-level disenfranchisement impacted national politics, assessing changes in roll-call voting in the US House of Representatives.