2025/05/27 by Andrea Bernini, Giovanni Facchini, Marco Tabellini +1 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Race, History, and American Society #Social Policy and Reform Studies
paper · doi:10.1086/736766
openalex publication_date 2025/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
How did Southern whites respond to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA)? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration by race between 1956 and 1980 and exploiting predetermined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we document that the VRA increases both Black and white political participation. Consistent with the VRA triggering white countermobilization, the surge in white registrations is concentrated in counties where African Americans represent a political threat. Countermobilization leads to a short-run increase in support for racially conservative candidates and to a slowdown in local public spending salient to Black Americans, such as public-sector employment and education.