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Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in the American South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2020

PAVITHRA SURYANARAYAN Open the ORCID record for PAVITHRA SURYANARAYAN [Opens in a new window]  and
STEVEN WHITE Open the ORCID record for STEVEN WHITE [Opens in a new window]
PAVITHRA SURYANARAYAN*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
STEVEN WHITE*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
*
Pavithra Suryanarayan, Assistant Professor, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, psuryan1@jh.edu.
Steven White, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Syracuse University, swhite10@maxwell.syr.edu.
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Abstract

Conventional political economy models predict taxation will increase after franchise expansion to low-income voters. Yet, contrary to expectations, in ranked societies—where social status is a cleavage—elites can instead build cross-class coalitions to undertake a strategy of bureaucratic weakening to limit future redistributive taxation. We study a case where status hierarchies were particularly extreme: the post-Civil War American South. During Reconstruction, under federal oversight, per capita taxation was higher in counties where slavery had been more extensive before the war, as predicted by standard theoretical models. After Reconstruction ended, however, taxes fell and bureaucratic capacity was weaker where slavery had been widespread. Moreover, higher intrawhite economic inequality was associated with lower taxes and weaker capacity after Reconstruction in formerly high-slavery counties. These findings on the interaction between intrawhite economic inequality and pre-War slavery suggest that elites built cross-class coalitions against taxation where whites sought to protect their racial status.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 568 - 584
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Kimuli Kasara and Isabela Mares for the many conversations about this project. We thank David Bateman, Alexandra Cirone, Toni Rodon Cassaramona, Tulia Falleti, Albert Fang, Alisha Holland, Mala Htun, Francesca Jensenius, Ira Katznelson, Alexander Lee, Evan Lieberman, Keri Leigh Merritt, Maria Victoria Murillo, Didac Queralt, Emily Sellars, Ganesh Srivats, David Stasavage, Steven Wilkinson, and the participants at the Political Institutions and Political Economy Annual Conference at the University of Southern California, the Comparative Politics Workshop at George Washington University, the Citadel Symposium on Southern Politics, the Politics and History Conference at the London School of Economics, the Historical Political Economy Workshop at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, and the American Political Science Association for their feedback. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BC2HEO.

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