The Legacy of Lynching

• In Event: Historical Roots of Democratic Support

Abstract

What is the political legacy of violent, oppressive, or authoritarian state institutions, particularly after the demise of those institutions through democratization? Efforts to answer this question empirically have typically been hampered by a lack of accurate historical data, a lack of microdata on attitudes or behaviors closely linked to historical phenomena, or both. In this paper, we leverage historical data on the locations of lynchings in the U.S. South and West, county-level demographic data from the seventh decennial Census of the United States (from 1850), and geo-coded microdata on political attitudes and behaviors from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to illustrate that living closer to the location of a late 19th or early 20th century lynching in 2016 is a strongly significant predictor of having experienced a problem voting or feeling intimidated while trying to vote in the 2016 election, and this relationship is even stronger for Black survey respondents. This relationship is invariant to the inclusion of a variety of individual demographic characteristics and historical characteristics of the respondent's county. These results provide evidence that lynching's history as a tool of political oppression persists in today in the form of voter suppression and voter intimidation.

Authors

• Rebecca Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley

• Mayya Komisarchik, University of Rochester