When coercive economies fail: the political economy of the US South after the boll weevil
Files
First author draft
Date
2022-02-01
DOI
Authors
Feigenbaum, James J.
Mazumder, Soumyajit
Smith, Cory B.
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
J. Feigenbaum, S. Mazumder, C.B. Smith. 2022. "When Coercive Economies Fail: The Political Economy of the Us South after the Boll Weevil."
Abstract
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."
Description
License
© 2020 by James J. Feigenbaum, Soumyajit Mazumder, and Cory B. Smith. A.