7 research outputs found
When coercive economies fail: the political economy of the US South after the boll weevil
How do coercive societies respond to negative economic shocks? We explore this question in the
early 20th-Century United States South. Since before the nation's founding, cotton cultivation
formed the politics and institutions in the South, including the development of slavery, the lack of
democratic institutions, and intergroup relations between whites and blacks. We leverage the
natural experiment generated by the boll weevil infestation from 1892-1922, which disrupted
cotton production in the region. Panel difference-in-differences results provide evidence that
Southern society became less violent and repressive in response to this shock with fewer
lynchings and less Confederate monument construction. Cross-sectional results leveraging spatial
variation in the infestation and historical cotton specialization show that affected counties had
less KKK activity, higher non-white voter registration, and were less likely to experience
contentious politics in the form of protests during the 1960s. To assess mechanisms, we show that
the reductions in coercion were responses to African American out-migration. Even in a context
of antidemocratic institutions, ordinary people can retain political power through the ability to
"vote with their feet."First author draf
Childhood cross-ethnic exposure predicts political behavior seven decades later: evidence from linked administrative data
Does contact across social groups influence sociopolitical behavior? This question is among the most studied in the social sciences with deep implications for the harmony of diverse societies. Yet, despite a voluminous body of scholarship, evidence around this question is limited to cross-sectional surveys that only measure short-term consequences of contact or to panel surveys with small samples covering short time periods. Using advances in machine learning that enable large-scale linkages across datasets, we examine the long-term determinants of sociopolitical behavior through an unprecedented individual-level analysis linking contemporary political records to the 1940 U.S. Census. These linked data allow us to measure the exact residential context of nearly every person in the United States in 1940 and, for men, connect this with the political behavior of those still alive over 70 years later. We find that, among white Americans, early-life exposure to black neighbors predicts Democratic partisanship over 70 years later.Published versio
From Immigrants to Americans: Race and Assimilation during the Great Migration
How does the appearance of a new immigrant group affect the integration of earlier generations of migrants? We study this question in the context of the first Great Migration (1915-1930), when 1.5 million African Americans moved from the US South to northern urban centers, where 30 million Europeans had arrived since 1850. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation induced by the interaction between 1900 settlements of southern-born blacks in northern cities and state-level outmigration from the US South after 1910. Black arrivals increased both the effort exerted by immigrants to assimilate and their eventual Americanization. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity: while initially less integrated groups (i.e. Southern and Eastern Europeans) exerted more assimilation effort, assimilation success was larger for those culturally closer to native whites (i.e. Western and Northern Europeans). Labor market outcomes do not display similar heterogeneity, suggesting that these patterns cannot be entirely explained by economic forces. Our findings are instead more consistent with a framework in which changing perceptions of outgroup distance among native whites lowered the barriers to the assimilation of white immigrants
Replication Data for: Can I Stay a BIT Longer? The Effect of Bilateral Investment Treaties on Political Survival
Files to replicate analyses in Mazumder (2015
The Power of the Weak: How Informal Power-Sharing Shapes the Work of the UN Security Council
To what extent is the work of international organizations shaped by their most powerful members? Can minor powers influence the decisions taken by these organizations? This dissertation presents the argument that great powers engage in power-sharing in order to attain unanimity inside international organizations, which enhances compliance and increases the effect of the signals these organizations convey to the public. The pursuit of unanimity lends weight even to votes that are not needed for the adoption of a proposal under the formal rules. It enables minor powers to exert more influence inside international organizations than they could if the formal rules and/or the balance of material power between member states determined the outcome of decision-making in international organizations. An analysis of the UN Security Council tests this argument. The dissertation identifies a series of informal power-sharing practices in the Security Council, which systematically depart from the organization's formal rules, and which promote consensus and augment minor powers' influence far beyond what one would expect on the basis of the material capabilities and voting power of these states. In turn, these informal power-sharing practices are motivated by great powers' desire to attain unanimous support for the policies enacted in the Security Council, irrespective of the body's formal voting rules. Survey experiments demonstrate the rationale behind great powers' pursuit of unanimity. They show that a policy's endorsement by a united Security Council has a much larger signaling effect on public opinion than the policy's approval by a divided Council. Qualitative case studies and novel design-based causal inference that exploits natural experiments show that minor powers strongly influence the deployment of UN peace operations and UN counter-terrorism sanctions, and that minor powers also use their influence in the Council to attain side-payments. Minor powers' influence is particularly strong during crises, when great powers are most eager to secure small states' votes through power-sharing. Interviews with diplomats in seven countries and quantitative analyses of exogenous variation in minor powers' representation on the Security Council under pre-determined rotation rules trace minor powers' influence to informal power-sharing practices in the Council