The end of the Civil War brought freedom to 3.9 million formerly enslaved people. Yet, almost immediately following the war, Southern states started to incarcerate freedpeople at unprecedented rates in an effort to reinstate racial hierarchies in the post-Emancipation era. Not before long, Southern states introduced new carceral institutions, most notably the convict-lease system, under which prisoners were leased out as laborers to private contractors for the duration of their sentence. The emergence of convict leasing has often been portrayed as a programmatic attempt by the Southern whites to find an alternative to antebellum chattel slavery.1 Paying special attention to the sequencing of political events during Reconstruction, I revisit this story by highlighting the role that state capacity and public finance played in the introduction of the policy. As conviction numbers swelled after Emancipation, the carceral capacity of Southern penitentiaries was quickly overwhelmed, prompting Reconstruction legislatures and governors to search for alternatives to conventional imprisonment. I argue that convict leasing emerged from these capacity challenges as a cost-effective solution that initially enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Over time, leasing grew more profitable, both for the state governments and the lessees, and abolition efforts were stalled for decades, even when the system became increasingly abusive. Using a range of archival materials, I illustrate these carceral developments in an in-depth case study of the origins of convict leasing in Georgia.

How do citizens interpret contentious symbols that pervade their community? And what downstream effects does state protection of these symbols have on how citizens of different backgrounds feel they belong in their community? We approach these questions through the lens of race and Confederate monuments in the American South. We rely on two original surveys to illustrate 1) the symbolic meanings Americans attach to these monuments and 2) how state protection of them impacts residents’ feelings of belonging. We find that perceptions of Confederate monuments vary by race: White U.S. residents are drastically less likely to perceive them as symbolic of racial injustice than are Black U.S. residents. Further, state protection of Confederate monuments leads to a diminished sense of belonging among Blacks, while leaving Whites unaffected. This research moves beyond scholarship examining simple support for or opposition toward contentious symbols, developing a deeper understanding of what meaning those symbols can hold for individuals and what their impacts are on individuals’ feelings of belonging and engagement in their communities.

In 1943, Georgia’s constitution was amended to lower the voting age to eighteen, making it the first—and for twelve years, the only—state in the Union to establish a voting-age requirement below twenty-one. Despite being widely considered at the time by several national and state political actors, Georgia’s reform represents an important and unappreciated historical puzzle. First, few would regard mid-twentieth-century Georgia as being even modestly progressive, especially regarding voting rights. Second, there is no evidence that an organized group lobbied for the reform. Further, there is no reason why lowering the voting age was inherently unique to Georgia qua Georgia. Instead, this study offers a detailed historical analysis highlighting the dedication of its young governor, and argues that Ellis Arnall’s political entrepreneurialism coupled with growing intraparty factionalism in Georgian politics and strategic timing facilitated this rare instance of electoral progressivism in the Deep South.

How does gerrymandering affect intraparty and interparty electoral competition in state legislatures? Research has shown that electoral competition produces better representation and that descriptive representation positively affects substantive representation or policy outcomes. However, other studies have found an ever increasing incumbency advantage. I argue that the incumbency advantage within Majority Minority Districts is significant and distinct from that of majority White Democrat and Republican districts. I estimate levels of intraparty and interparty competition among Majority Minority Districts, majority White Democrat districts, and majority White Republican districts in the state legislature of Alabama. I use majority White Democrat districts as an intraparty comparison group because of African American’s statistically high support for the Democrat Party. Using three separate measures of competitiveness, I find racial gerrymandering in Alabama has a significant and sui generis negative effect on competition within Majority Minority Districts, compared to majority White districts.

What explains state agency resistance to actions taken by their federal counterparts? And do sectional tensions make state bureaucratic nonacquiescence particularly likely in the U.S. South? We theorize that state resistance to federal administrative policy is more likely among Southern state bureaus due to administrative sectionalism. We argue that state agencies can and do resist federal administrative orders independent of other political constraints. This study is among the first to consider the policy consequences of sectionalism in state bureaucracies. We test our claims by employing a mixed methods approach that analyzes each instance of litigation and intervention by state bureaucrats in opposition to actions and orders by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) from 2010 to 2017. We find that, all else equal, state agency resistance to federal utility policy is about 3.75 times as likely among Southern utility regulators. This research has important normative implications for administrative politics as it suggests agencies with putatively apolitical policy jurisdiction have political preferences driven by sectional tension.

This article examines the impact of electoral politics on state welfare policy in the post-civil rights era South. In contrast to an emerging consensus concluding that southern African Americans materially benefited from rejoining the electorate, this study suggests that higher black registration rates actually reduced states' poverty relief efforts. In the years immediately following the Voting Rights Act (VRA), when Democrats controlled state government, the significant negative relationship between the size of the black electorate and state welfare generosity was moderated to some extent by high levels of partisan competition. In such cases, Democrats ostensibly chose a “core” targeting strategy of pursuing lower-income votes and had the institutional wherewithal to purchase these votes with policy concessions. Overall, however, the liberal “Downsian” policy response to African American mobilization was dominated by an antiredistributive response. In the South, welfare policies were relatively conservative vis-à-vis the other states during Jim Crow and became more so in response to black voting.

In 2000, Virginia became the last state in the nation to add party labels to its ballots for state-level races. This article assesses the impact of this reform on citizen participation and the partisan behavior of down-ballot voters using precinct-level election returns. It finds that after the application of labels, roll-off in contested, down-ballot races dropped by about a percentage point, a reduction of approximately 15%. Roll-off dropped more in precincts with a larger share of African Americans. Also, the association between Republican vote shares in the Lt. Governor and state legislative races and presidential vote share in the 2000 general election became stronger in the presence of party labels. This result suggests that the labels made voters behave more as national partisans in state-level contests.

This study uses historical data from the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) to examine the effect of strategic policy making on policy outcomes. Strategic policy making refers to the exploitation of future policy resources by an incumbent government when it anticipates the policy change by a future government. In the South, the segregationist governments immediately after the enactment of the VRA still stayed in office but anticipated the future policy change that would result from minority voters acquiring the right to franchise. This political context provides an ideal setting for testing the theory of strategic policy making. Through analysis of county panel data analysis from the 1960s, this study finds that segregationist governments with large budgets increased long-term debts, education spending, and highway spending significantly when compared with the rest of the country. This finding supports a version of strategic policy making, namely, strategic use of debts, and is consistent with anecdotal evidence indicating that resistance to school integration through the creation of all-white suburban schools is one of the primary motives for bond issues.

Expansive and restrictive state electoral institutions have been instrumental in structuring the vote throughout American history. Studies focused on a small number of reforms, years, or states lack the scope necessary to comprehensively evaluate the effects of institutional change over time. This work, however, places recent reforms in historical context and offers a long-term perspective. Using an original data set, it identifies the institutions that have generated the most substantial effects on state turnout rates during presidential elections from 1920 to 2000. Findings demonstrate that restrictive laws (those aiming to limit the vote or make voting more costly) produced large and consistently negative effects in the Southern and non-Southern states alike, but the effects associated with expansive reforms (those making participation more convenient or less costly) vary. Although a few expansive laws have increased turnout in the non-Southern states, they have had no effect in the Southern states where turnout rates are lowest.