Social Transformation and Violence: Evidence from U.S. Reconstruction

Stewart, Megan; Kitchens, Karin E.

doi:10.1177/0010414021997164

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…When the vanquished do not recognize the authority of the victors or accept their vision of sovereignty, the victors will struggle to govern the vanquished. Radical Republican efforts to engineer social transformation during Reconstruction were met with violent backlash from the South that left the revolutionary project incomplete (Foner 1988; Stewart and Kitchens 2021). Following the departure of federal troops, Southern elites successfully hollowed out the bureaucratic capacity of the state, and Southern Democrats overwhelmingly elected unrepentant former Confederates to the U.S. Congress (Suryanarayan and White 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Pluribus to Unum? The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century America

2023

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Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority—the right to make and enforce binding rules—occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and institutionalized the victor’s vision of sovereignty. Yet sovereign authority requires more than institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition of the governed. How does war shape imagined sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare in the United States, where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty erupted into the American Civil War. We exploit the grammatical shift in the “United States” from a plural to a singular noun as a measure of imagined sovereignty, drawing upon two large textual corpuses: newspapers (1800–99) and congressional speeches (1851–99). We demonstrate that war shapes imagined sovereignty, but for the North only. Our results further suggest that Northern Republicans played an important role as ideational entrepreneurs in bringing about this shift.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Pluribus to Unum? The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century America

2023

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“…In addition to having clear implications for electoral politics, backlash may take the form of violence committed against groups that are beneficiaries of egalitarian policies. To take a historical example, Stewart and Kitchens (2021) observed a positive correlation between Black literacy rates in a given county and White individuals' acts of aggression against Black people in that county during the long period of Reconstruction that followed the US Civil War. In a more recent analysis based on the United States Extremist Crimes Database, Mills et al (2020) observed a positive association between county-levels of gender parity and far-right violence in that county.…”

Section: How Policy Backlash Impedes Progress Toward Equalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

System justification motivation as a source of backlash against equality‐promoting policies—and what to do about it

Liaquat

Jost

Balcetis

2023

Social Issues Policy Review

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One of the most pressing tasks facing policymakers in the 21st century is reducing stark group‐based inequalities that have developed within many societies because of centuries of structural discrimination. However, efforts to redress group disparities through equality‐promoting policies are frequently met with policy backlash and countermobilization. We describe several social psychological contributors to policy backlash, distinguishing between identity‐based and ideology‐based processes. While the role of identity politics in driving support and opposition to policies pertaining to race, gender, and sexual orientation is well‐known, less attention has been given to the role of ideological motivation, including individual and group differences in system justification tendencies to defend and bolster the societal status quo. In this article, we develop a framework based on system justification theory to understand why backlash against equality‐promoting policies occurs, when such backlash is most likely to occur, and who is most likely to be countermobilized against such policies. From this perspective, policy backlash is motivated not only by the desire on the part of advantaged group members to maintain their own existing privileges but also by the broader desire to maintain the perceived legitimacy and stability of the overarching social system. We make recommendations about how leaders can develop and communicate about equality‐promoting policies in a way that reduces the likelihood of backlash due to system justification motivation.

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“…After the retreat from Reconstruction and the removal of federal troops, the lack of a national police power to enforce civil rights law, as we have seen, severely constrained the federal government's capacity to promote racial equality even if it had been so inclined (and it was, for the most part, decidedly not so inclined). Moreover, Reconstruction and military occupation provoked an exceedingly violent reaction on the part of white Southerners, and for most of the twentieth century, the state effectively ceded the means of coercion through violence to organized, and often sanctioned groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan) and activities (such as lynching) that obviated any possibility of real civil rights enforcement (Stewart and Kitchens 2018). Reconstruction, moreover, was viewed for much of the twentieth century as a shameful episode of corrupt and illegitimate federal overreach and not a program worth emulating.…”

Section: Coercionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Latter-Day General Grant”: Forceful Federal Power and Civil Rights

King

Lieberman

2020

J. Race Ethnicity Politics

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Progress toward racial equality requires the engagement of the American state, centered in the presidency and the executive branch, and in fact is not possible without the state's direct and forceful intervention. The key to this transformation is what we call “Forceful Federalism,” a multidimensional understanding of the American state. Forceful Federalism has four essential dimensions: standard-setting, coercion, associationalism, and fiscal authority. These four processes rise and fall over time, each charting its own history and unfolding according to its own logic. These processes usually work against each other. But occasionally they align with each other so that the state can pursue and achieve even difficult and challenging policy aims in a focused way. We sketch the outlines of Forceful Federalism and demonstrate its explanatory power with a case study of Forceful Federalism in action: James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. The Meredith case exemplifies the convergence of the four dimensions of Forceful Federalism and marks the first time the modern American state was thus mobilized on behalf of civil rights. The case offers suggestive evidence that Forceful Federalism was a necessary condition for the emergence of the Civil Rights State.

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Social Transformation and Violence: Evidence from U.S. Reconstruction

Cited by 14 publications

References 68 publications

From Pluribus to Unum? The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century America

From Pluribus to Unum? The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century America

System justification motivation as a source of backlash against equality‐promoting policies—and what to do about it

“The Latter-Day General Grant”: Forceful Federal Power and Civil Rights

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