Black Empowerment and White Mobilization: The Effects of the Voting Rights Act

Andrea Bernini, Giovanni Facchini, Marco Tabellini and Cecilia Testa

Journal of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 133, issue 10, 3078 - 3131

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2025
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