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

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 pre-determined 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 counter-mobilization, the surge in white registrations is concentrated in counties where African Americans represent a political threat. Counter-mobilization leads to a short run increase in support for racially conservative candidates, and to a slow-down in local public spending salient to Black Americans, such as public sector employment and education.