Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics
Maya Sen, Associate Professor of Public Policy; Avidit Acharya, Stanford University; Matthew Blackwell, Harvard University
Many studies seek to understand race relations and political attitudes by focusing on current demographics and efforts to persuade voters. Such analyses may yield valuable information, but they miss a crucial influence on people and communities: history.
The authors of Deep Roots draw on a concept called “behavioral path dependence”—ideas, norms, and behaviors passed down through generations of families and local institutions such as schools and churches—as well as empirical data to posit that the legacy of slavery still drives political attitudes in the South. They document that southern whites who live in communities where slavery was prevalent are more conservative and hostile toward policies designed to help African-Americans, shown, for example, in the differing attitudes within the cities of Greenwood, Mississippi, and Asheville, North Carolina—the former a town that once claimed the title “cotton capital of the world” and relied on slave labor, the latter a small trading town where slavery was a relative anomaly.
The divergent attitudes among southern communities first took shape during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, the authors write, when emancipation incentivized the economic and political suppression of African-Americans, who formed a large portion of the labor force. Even though the civil rights era led to a narrowing of the equality gap between whites and African-Americans, these political attitudes persist, they say. Although some may be skeptical that the institution of slavery continues to have such a lasting effect, the authors write, contemporary factors can go only so far in explaining the differences on the basis of region. Indeed, they note, the differences have remained consistent for the past 150 years: “This is an example of how an institution can lead to a political geography that remains long after the demise of the institution.”
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Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action
Matt Andrews, Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development; Lant Pritchett, Professor of the Practice of International Development; and Michael Woolcock, Lecturer in Public Policy
The authors argue that not even the best policy prescriptions will alone spur sustainable development. The process of implementing those policies is too often overlooked, they say, leading, for example, to building a school without ensuring that a high-capability education system has been established. To spur more effective functioning, they propose an approach called problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA), which begins with “generating locally nominated and prioritized problems” and proceeds “iteratively to identify customized ‘best fit’ responses.”
Constructing problems out of conditions is the first step in PDIA, they write, which forces policymakers and reformers “to ask questions about the incumbent ways of doing things, and promote a search for alternatives that actually offer a solution.” In a novel introduction to the potential uses of PDIA, the authors cite Lewis and Clark’s 18