How do dominant political actors suppress minority votes amid institutional constraints? I argue that "repertoires of vote repression"-the set of repressive tactics that political actors can choose from-expand or contract over time amid institutional and structural constraints, and that political actors who seek to repress votes prefer the most efficient tactic available to them amid these constraints. Examining historical case studies of vote repression in the American South following Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era, I show how subnational political actors reconfigured suppression strategies in response to changing institutional constraints. During Reconstruction, federal oversight of local politics and reliance on agrarian labor limited institutional repression, leading to widespread violence. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal constraints on legal vote restrictions led to the rise of administrative and carceral workarounds. My findings suggest that a historically grounded examination of institutional constraints is essential for understanding both past and present struggles over voting rights in America.
Why did the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan and interwar fascism share such profound similarities? My basic argument is that the Klan prefigured interwar fascist movements that sought political revolution after military defeat. Modern warfare, mass demobilization, and labor revolt converged with American settler institutions during Reconstruction to yield what I call early fascism. The importance of my argument is that it highlights how the Klan was a break from previous traditions of American racist violence and represented a more modern movement than many accounts recognize. Moreover, this article highlights a more transnational perspective on fascist politics and situates the Klan and interwar fascism within the broader arc of colonial racism. I conclude by discussing the implications for discussions about home-grown varieties of American racism, especially what observers called the "fascism debate." Certain contemporary American social movements-such as the Paleoconservatives-have attempted to adapt fascist politics to a post-civil-rights, post-colonial context and represent counterparts to European post-fascism.
In Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice Roberts tied the notion of equal state sovereignty to the constitutional order. Yet, asymmetric federalism has long existed in the Constitution and in practice. Asymmetry has long been theorized in comparative politics literature but is missing in American politics' conceptualizations of federalism and democratization. By attending to multidimensional federalism, this paper moves the debate over federalism's positive or negative consequences on democracy toward a more precise understanding of how different dimensions of federalism might strengthen democracy under historically contingent conditions. Analyzing multidimensional federalism, whereby federalism is characterized by the relationship between the federal government's power over state governments (i.e., centralization), as well as how state governments experience federal authority relative to one another (i.e., symmetry), this paper examines how the federal government's selective, concentrated oversight over Southern states shaped democratization efforts in the United States during the post-Civil War era. This study finds democratization occurred in the South during Reconstruction, in part, due to the presence of asymmetric federalism. In the face of democratic backsliding, asymmetric federalism may be used as a toolkit of democratization, especially when a democratically committed government lacks the state capacity and political feasibility to institute expansive reforms.
For most of American history, the American state has been an active agent of racial oppression. As the country democratized, it retained structures and practices of racial authoritarianism and coercion. But in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the United States underwent waves of racial democratization. For a brief while during those periods, the American state transformed itself, on balance, into an agent of racial equality. We explain the reasons for this turn and present a theoretical scheme to explain the transformation of the state's role in American democratization. We show that the construction of a "civil rights state," a distinctive historical alignment combining national standard-setting and varieties of coercive enforcement, best accounts for these democratizing surges. We further demonstrate that both standard-setting and coercion are essential components of the civil rights state. When they converge, racial democratization is possible; when they do not, racial democratization is less likely.
This article examines how Afro-Caribbean immigrants navigated, challenged, and ultimately reshaped the racial and political terrain of early twentieth-century Harlem. Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism and the concept of political Blackness, the paper traces the interplay of labor market stratification, ethnic civic life, and party realignment in the making of a new Black political order. It excavates how Afro-Caribbean migrants, initially maligned as "foreign," were positioned as both labor competitors and cultural interlopers-and how they responded by building transnational institutions, cultivating parallel civic worlds, and, eventually, forging coalitions that redrew the boundaries of racial belonging. This study shows how party politics-not cultural affinity or the racial order-created space for Afro-Caribbean incorporation, culminating in their ascent as key power brokers in Harlem's Democratic machine. Through archival records, press coverage, labor surveys, and organizational correspondence, this study reveals that political Blackness was not inherited or inevitable-it was constructed through contestation, coalition, and the strategic reimagining of race in the crucible of urban politics.
