The Political Legacy of American Slavery | Maya Sen

The Political Legacy of American Slavery | Maya Sen: We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South trace their origins back to the influence of slavery's prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves population in 1860 are less likely to identify as Democrat, more likely to oppose to affirmative action policies, and more likely to express racial resentment toward blacks. These results are robust to accounting for a variety of attributes, including contemporary shares of black population, urban-rural differences, and Civil War destruction, and strengthen when instrumenting for the prevalence of slavery with agricultural cotton suitability. The results suggest that political attitudes were at least in part determined by the local prevalence of slavery and the political and economic incentives that emancipation created for Southern whites. In turn, these attitudes have been passed down from one generation to the next.