Black Out-Migration and Southern Political Realignment

Leah  Boustan; Marco  Tabellini

Working Paper | 2018

Black Out-Migration and Southern Political Realignment

Abstract

Can emigration from less democratic and economically less developed areas induce political and economic change? We study this question in the context of the second Great Migration of African Americans (1940–1970), when more than 4 million blacks left the U.S. South and moved to the urban North. To deal with the endogeneity of black emigration, we construct a “reversed” shift-share instrument which predicts black outflows by interacting pre-determined shares of blacks born in southern counties and living in the North with observed migration flows into northern areas. Using this empirical strategy and relying on a variety of datasets assembled and digitized from historical archives, we find that black emigration reduced support for segregationist candidates in Presidential and in Democratic primary elections, and increased the share of county resources devoted to black schools. Our interpretation is that black emigration was economically costly for the white elites who reacted by making political concessions to limit the outflow of African Americans. Consistent with the idea that black departures increased labor costs in agriculture, we find that the Great Migration reduced the prevalence of tenancy and lead to farm consolidation. We conclude by documenting that the effects of black emigration on mechanization and on farm value were highly heterogeneous, and depended crucially on initial farm size.

Keywords: Great Migration; Immigration; Race; Government and Politics; Economics; United States;

Language: English

Format: Print

Citation:

Boustan, Leah, and Marco Tabellini. "Black Out-Migration and Southern Political Realignment." Working Paper, 2018.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

The Seeds of Ideology: Historical Immigration and Political Preferences in the United States

Paola Giuliano and Marco Tabellini

We test the relationship between historical immigration to the United States and political ideology today. We hypothesize that European immigrants brought with them their preferences for the welfare state, and that this had a long-lasting effect on the political ideology of US born individuals. Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we document that the historical presence of European immigrants is associated with a more liberal political ideology and with stronger preferences for redistribution among US born individuals today. Next, we show that this correlation is not driven by the characteristics of the counties where immigrants settled or other specific, socioeconomic immigrants' traits. Finally, we conjecture and provide evidence that immigrants brought with them their preferences for the welfare state from their countries of origin. Consistent with the hypothesis that immigration left its footprint on American ideology via cultural transmission from immigrants to natives, we show that our results are stronger when inter-group contact between natives and immigrants, measured with either intermarriage or residential integration, was higher. Our findings also indicate that immigrants influenced American political ideology during one of the largest episodes of redistribution in US history — the New Deal — and that such effects persisted after the initial shock.

Keywords: political ideology; Immigration; History; Values and Beliefs; Welfare or Wellbeing; United States;

Citation:

Giuliano, Paola, and Marco Tabellini. "The Seeds of Ideology: Historical Immigration and Political Preferences in the United States." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-118, May 2020. (Available also from VOX and in UCLA Anderson Review.) View Details

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Black Out-Migration and Southern Political Realignment

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