Mario L. Chacón’s research while affiliated with New York University Abu Dhabi and other places

The ratification of constitutional changes via referendum is an important mechanism for constraining the influence of elites, particularly when representative institutions are captured. While this electoral device is commonly employed cross-nationally, its use is far from universal. We investigate the uneven adoption of mandatory referendums by examining the divergence between Northern and Southern U.S. states in the post-independence period. We first explore why states in both regions adopted constitutional conventions as the primary mechanism for making revisions to fundamental law, but why only Northern states adopted the additional requirement of ratifying via referendum. We argue that due to distortions in state-level representation, Southern elites adopted the discretionary referendum as a mechanism to bypass the statewide electorate when issues divided voters along slave-dependency lines. We demonstrate the link between biases to apportionment and opposition to mandatory referendums using a novel data set of roll calls from various Southern state conventions, including during the secession crisis of 1861.

We study the economic and political determinants of the Southern secession movement of 1860/61. While economic historians emphasize the importance of slavery to the South’s economy as the primary factor behind the movement, we demonstrate the important role that political inequality among whites played in facilitating secession. In particular, secession was decided in state conventions, which allowed secessionists to exploit biases to representation and may have been pivotal in Alabama and Georgia. Our results suggest that the region’s investment in slavery alone may not be sufficient to explain the electoral success of the movement in the largest Lower South states.

How important is the enforcement of political rights in new democracies? The authors use the enfranchisement of the emancipated slaves following the American Civil War to study this question. Critical to their strategy, black suffrage was externally enforced by the United States Army in ten Southern states during Reconstruction. The authors employ a triple-difference model to estimate the joint effect of enfranchisement and its enforcement on taxation. They find that counties with greater black-population shares that were occupied by the military levied higher taxes compared to similar nonoccupied counties. These counties later experienced a comparatively greater decline in taxation after the troops were withdrawn. The authors also demonstrate that in occupied counties, black politicians were more likely to be elected and political murders by white supremacist groups occurred less frequently. The findings provide evidence on the key role of federal troops in limiting elite capture by force during this period.