When Coercive Economies Fail: The Political Economy of the US South After the Boll Weevil / James J. Feigenbaum, Soumyajit Mazumder, Cory B. Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Feigenbaum, James J.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Mazumder, Soumyajit.

Smith, Cory B.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w27161.

NBER working paper series no. w27161

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

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.''

Notes:

Print version record

May 2020.