Explaining the Timing of Confederate Monument Removal

• In Event: Influence of Identity on Political Perceptions and Outcomes (Virtual Session)

Abstract

As American BIPOC activists seek to prompt a reckoning with the country’s centuries of race-based physical and structural violence, their justice mobilization resembles that of, and sometimes has inspired, movements of victims’ groups and human rights activists across the world. International discourse commonly refers to such processes as transitional justice, but the term, until recently, has been a foreign concept in American politics. One of the ways in which American racial justice activists have vernacularized transitional justice is through campaigning for the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials. We build upon Evans and Sims’ (2021) quantitative analysis to explain variation in whether and when American communities choose to remove Confederate monuments. The project incorporates insights from American Politics and Transitional Justice scholarship. American politics research explores how racial resentment (e.g., Kinder and Sanders, 1996; Tesler and Sears, 2010), racial sympathy (Chudy, 2021), and collective guilt (e.g., Chudy et al., 2019) shape individual policy preferences, but views on truth-telling, memorialization, and reparations are underexamined. Examination of commemorations of victims of racial violence remains dominated by case studies (e.g., Pelak 2015; Blain and Kytle 2012; Whitlinger 2015; Yuhl 2013). Meanwhile, while some research examines the use of transitional justice in non-transitional contexts (e.g., Wiebelhaus-Brahm, 2019), American exceptionalism prevails in the field (Posthumus and Zvobgo Forthcoming). Moreover, little broadly comparative research addresses variation in how local communities address histories of violence. Using data from The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Mapping Police Violence Database, and the MIT Elections database, we statistically identify the factors that influence the probability of and speed with which Confederate monuments are removed.

Authors

• Ra'phael Davis, Ohio State University

• Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, University of Arkansas, Little Rock