[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jnlhpe/115.00000047.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Deeper Roots: Historical Causal Inference and the Political Legacy of Slavery

Author

Listed:
  • David A. Bateman
  • Eric Schickler
Abstract
The legacies of slavery have shaped nearly all aspects of American politics. Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen's Deep Roots: How Slavery Shapes Southern Politics deploys sophisticated methods of causal inference to empirically identify one of these legacies: the enduring impact that slavery has had on white southerners' racial attitudes. An important part of their causal argument is the role of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which they argue was the critical juncture when the distribution of white racial attitudes in the South began to diverge based on the prior pervasiveness of slavery. Before the secession crisis, they claim, white racial attitudes were unrelated to the level of enslavement within the South. We reconsider the evidence for this antebellum "homogeneity in racial attitudes" claim, which is critical to Acharya et al.'s strategy for identifying the causal effect of slavery and for their broader historical argument. Using multiple sources of data from different moments in southern history, we find that the pervasiveness of slavery was a systematically strong predictor of voting on slavery, secession, and the rights extended to free persons of color well-before the Civil War. Our findings suggest that there was no discrete moment at which the connection between the geographic pervasiveness of slavery and revealed commitments to white supremacy was established, raising questions about the causal identification strategies used by the authors. More generally, the findings point to some unappreciated limitations of design-based approaches when assignment to treatment is the product of a slow-moving complex historical process.

Suggested Citation

  • David A. Bateman & Eric Schickler, 2023. "Deeper Roots: Historical Causal Inference and the Political Legacy of Slavery," Journal of Historical Political Economy, now publishers, vol. 3(1), pages 95-124, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:jnlhpe:115.00000047
    DOI: 10.1561/115.00000047
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/115.00000047
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1561/115.00000047?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Abad, Leticia Arroyo & Maurer, Noel, 2024. "Does time heal all wounds? The rise, decline, and long-term impact of forced labor in Spanish America," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:now:jnlhpe:115.00000047. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucy Wiseman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nowpublishers.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.