Why is the American South Poorer? A Multi-Level Analysis of Poverty in the U.S. South

• In Event: 496 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session. Issues in Race, Education, and Poverty: Micro and Macro Contexts

Abstract

Over 70 years ago, a report from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Emergency Council proclaimed the South was “the Nation’s number one economic problem.” This still rings true considering poverty has been proportionally concentrated in the South for the past several decades. In attempt to shed light on this issue, this research examines what explains the higher poverty in the U.S. South. Taking into account previous inequality research, I focus on four areas—1) individual/household demographics, 2) economic structure, 3) race/race regimes, and 4) politics/power resources—and the extent to which they help explain Southern poverty. I expand on existing research by employing relative measures of poverty and unique measures of race (i.e. an ethnic fractionalization index to measure diversity and a historical race regime scale to measure long-term effects of slavery, lynching, and share cropping), as well as by applying Institutional Power Resources Theory via the role of unionization, democratic control, and the welfare state. Data analyses involves employing multi-level regression analyses on a sample of 875,878 individuals nested in the 51 states (including D.C.) in the years 2000, 2004, 2007, and 2010. Data comes from a variety of sources including CPS data from the Luxembourg Income Study, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census of Agriculture, CQ Press, and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research. Preliminary results from multi-logit regression models show that both individual and state-level variables have a significant effect on poverty and help explain the effect of southern residence. Preliminary results also suggest that race factors best explain the higher Southern poverty since the race measures have the largest effect on the Southern residence coefficient. The overall goal of this research is to illustrate how both micro and macro characteristics [of place] help create, maintain, and reproduce systems of inequality. This will not only contribute to a deeper understanding of enduring Southern poverty, but also more general theoretical discussions regarding inequality.

Author

• Regina S. Baker, Duke University