Political Foundations of Racial Violence in the Post-Reconstruction South

Election results act as powerful signals, shaping social behavior in ways that can be dramatic and even violent. This paper shows how racial violence in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South was tied to the local performance of the anti-Black Democratic Party in presidential elections. Using a regression discontinuity design based on close presidential vote shares, we find that Southern counties where Democrats lost the popular vote between 1880 and 1900 were nearly twice as likely to experience Black lynchings in the following four years. This backlash was enkindled by local elites, who amplified narratives of Black criminality through newspapers after such defeats. These findings point to the strategic use of racial violence by Democratic elites, prefiguring the formal vote suppression of Jim Crow.