PIPE Workshop: John Matsusaka (USC Marshall)

By the early 20th century, all ex-Confederate states had adopted disfranchisement laws such as poll taxes and literacy tests that sharply reduced voter participation among blacks and many poor whites. Traditional accounts emphasize racial animosity and white supremacy as the central motivation for these reforms. Yet disfranchisement did not spread widely until the 1890s and early 1900s, almost a generation after the return of white Democratic control in the South. This suggests that racial motives, while central, are not sufficient to explain variation in the timing and distribution of franchise restrictions. Thispaper develops a political economy model of disfranchisement to show how voting restriction becomes an effective electoral strategy when two conditions coincide: (i) a credible third-party threat emerges (the emergence of the Populist party), and (ii) the ruling party has a large structural electoral advantage (the one-party South). (This is joint work with Jeff Jenkins.)

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