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Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching,
Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution
of Voter Suppression in the U.S.
Brad Epperly, Christopher Witko, Ryan Strickler, and Paul White

Although restricting formal voting rights—voter suppression—is not uncommon in democracies, its incidence and form vary widely.
Intuitively, when competing elites believe that the benefits of reducing voting by opponents outweigh the costs of voter suppression, it is
more likely to occur. Internal political and state capacity and external actors, however, influence the form that voter suppression takes.
When elites competing for office lack the ability to enact laws restricting voting due to limited internal capacity, or external actors are able to
limit the ability of governments to use laws to suppress voting, suppression is likely to be ad hoc, decentralized, and potentially violent. As
political and state capacity increase and external constraints decrease, voter suppression will shift from decentralized and potentially violent
to centralized and mostly non-violent. We illustrate our arguments by analyzing the transition from decentralized, violent voter suppression
through the use of lynchings (and associated violence) to the centralized, less violent suppression of black voting in the post-Reconstruction
South. We also place the most recent wave of U.S. state voter suppression laws into broader context using our theoretical framework.

I
n 2016, some of Donald Trump’s armed supporters
were observed “menacing” a Democratic Party campaign
office; during the same election, a Republican campaign

office was firebombed (Rosza 2016). Though rare today,
electoral violence was once widespread in the United States,
and remains so in a number of democracies.1 Attempts to
restrict voting are not unusual, but in consolidated de-
mocracies voter suppression is seldom violent. Why? We
examine why approaches to voter suppression vary, and why

it appears to evolve from violent to non-violent. To illustrate
our arguments, we examine a critical transitional period in
voter suppression in the post-Reconstruction American
South: the shift from decentralized violence and intimida-
tion to institutionalized means of disenfranchising blacks.
We also place recent suppression efforts into this broader
historical and theoretical context.

Fundamentally, political competition—in modern de-
mocracies this almost always means party competition—

A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.

*Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YFQE9W

They would like to thank Larry Cushnie, Rachel Kleinfeld, Margaret Levi, the five reviewers at Perspectives on Politics, and
participants of the Citadel Symposium on Southern Politics and American Political Development Speaker Series, University of
Washington, for helpful comments on the manuscript.

Brad Epperly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina (epperlyb@mailbox.sc.edu). His
research focuses on the rule of law, especially judicial institutions.

Christopher Witko is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Pennsylvania State University (cxw877@psu.edu). His
research focuses on public policy, especially related to economic and political inequality.

Ryan Strickler is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University–Pueblo (paul.strickler@csupueblo.edu).
His research interests include partisan polarization in the United States, political psychology, and deliberative democracy.

Paul White is a research analyst for D&J Investments (white5@email.sc.edu). His academic research focuses on black politics in
the American South, especially black candidate evaluation and white voting behavior.

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drives voter suppression. Yet suppression is not ubiqui-
tous, reflecting its varying costs and benefits. Similarly, the
form that suppression takes (our main focus) varies
considerably. We argue that when suppression is desired,
but would-be suppressors are unable to enact and imple-
ment laws to accomplish this from a lack of political and
state capacity or from external actors making the enact-
ment of suppression laws prohibitively costly, then we will
see ad hoc, decentralized, and sometimes violent voter
suppression. But decentralized violence has high reputa-
tional costs, is less effective, and can itself undermine state
power. Therefore, as political and state capacity increase
and external constraints recede, voter suppression will
generally shift from being decentralized, ad hoc, and
sometimes violent to centralized, (mostly) non-violent
approaches.

Our arguments are general to democracies, but we
illustrate and test our argument with qualitative and
quantitative analysis of the suppression of black voting in
the post-Reconstruction American South. The intense
party competition of the era led to voter suppression by
state political parties and governments on both sides of
the Mason-Dixon line, and calculations about electoral
outcomes shaped the willingness of federal Republicans
to intervene in defense of black voting rights. In the
South, voter suppression was driven by the fact that
blacks were numerous enough to threaten white, Dem-
ocratic control of government . . . if they voted. Initially,
however, Southern Democrats lacked the internal capac-
ity to enact and implement voter suppression policies
and, even after this capacity was achieved, federal (Re-
publican) intervention—or the threat thereof—protected
black suffrage. Therefore, voter suppression was decen-
tralized, ad hoc and violent, directed by elites within the
Democratic Party, and carried out by elites and the rank
and file.2 After Democrats consolidated control over state
governments, state capacity increased, and federal Repub-
licans largely abandoned black voting rights, Southern
states shifted to using laws to suppress black voting, due to
the reputational costs and relative ineffectiveness of
violence. We examine whether law (largely) replaced
violence to suppress voting during this period.

Systematically measuring electoral violence is difficult,
but reliable data on lynchings exists. The social science
literature is skeptical on whether lynchings were used to
suppress voting, but astute contemporary observers noted
this link (Johnson 1924; Wells 1900; see also Ortiz 2006).
Here, we take advantage of a larger dataset and finer-
grained temporal variation in the “threat” of black voting,
and importance of violence to suppress it, to examine the
link between lynchings (which we view also as a proxy for
more common forms of electoral violence) and voter
suppression. We find that before Jim Crow disenfran-
chisement more lynchings occurred in areas of Populist
Party strength and as elections approached. Under Jim

Crow, lynchings declined overall and the link between
electoral factors and lynchings was severed. Centralized
law mostly replaced decentralized violence.
Understanding voter suppression’s evolution during

this period is important in its own right. The roll back
of black (male) voting rights is one of the largest
disenfranchisement of voters in history (Gibson 2013),
with effects—both domestic and international—that re-
verberated for over a century, shaping the American state’s
development and policy outcomes for decades and con-
tributing to the creation of the “Solid South” (Borstel-
mann 2009; Francis 2014; Katznelson, Geiger, and
Kryder 1993; Rohde 1991). But our framework also helps
us understand current attempts to restrict voting. Due to
earlier federal interventions, the forms of legalized sup-
pression used after Reconstruction are no longer permis-
sible. Yet in recent years we see growing attempts to restrict
voting by blacks and other groups (e.g. college students,
immigrants). We place these attempts in broader historical
and theoretical context using our framework.

The Whys and Hows of Voter
Suppression
Political elites engage in many types of electoral manip-
ulation (Svolik and Chernykh 2014). One approach is to
interfere with the exercise of the legal right to vote.
Though possible in non-party systems because parties
are central to political competition in modern democra-
cies, in practice party competition drives voter suppres-
sion. Parties value holding office for its own sake, but also
to achieve other material and policy goals (Aldrich 1995).
This desire to hold office leads parties to mobilize their
supporters, and sometimes demobilize their opponents.
Not all parties attempt to restrict voting, reflecting

suppression’s varying costs and benefits. If parties believe
they will easily win free and fair elections, there is no
reason to suppress the vote, especially since keeping
electoral practices clean has benefits in terms of perceived
legitimacy (Hafner-Burton, Hyde, and Jablonski 2014;
Rozenas 2016). The “legitimacy cost” of voter suppression
is problematic if internal opposition groups are strong
enough to capitalize on it, or if elites are reliant on external
actors for support. While state governments have primary
responsibility for determining voting procedures in the
United States, the federal government nonetheless acts as
an external constraint, via the creation and enforcement of
laws related to voting rights. Therefore, the federal stance
toward voting rights is important. In most countries—
even many federal states—there is no similar system, but
external entities (e.g., the European Union) can potentially
impose constraints.
Voter suppression is sometimes pursued despite these

potential costs and constraints, because suppression has
large potential benefits. Numerically larger out-groups
present larger threats, since voting systems provide more

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power to larger groups, but if elections are closely divided,
then suppressing the vote of smaller groups becomes
attractive (Blalock 1967). Voter suppression will also be
more likely when groups competing for power have large
policy preference gaps because this raises the benefits
(costs) of winning (losing) elections.3

Our focus is on understanding why parties choose
among different means of voter suppression. For our
purposes, suppression can be placed into two categories:
ad-hoc, extra-legal, and decentralized versus institution-
alized, legal, and centralized. The former is more likely to
employ intimidation and violence (e.g., contemporary
terror attacks at polling places). Jim Crow voting
restrictions are paradigmatic examples of the centralized,
institutionalized approach. Why do actors choose among
different approaches to suppression? Centralized, institu-
tionalized approaches require law-making majorities in
favor of suppression, which we call political capacity.
Centralized suppression also requires a relatively knowl-
edgeable and well-developed bureaucracy—state capacity
—to craft and implement effective laws (Skocpol and
Finegold 1982). For instance, using poll taxes to suppress
only certain voters requires information on who can pay
and institutions capable of record-keeping and processing
payments. Thus, only parties with reasonable political and
state capacity can engage in institutionalized, centralized
suppression.4

Especially in a federal system like the United States,
external constraints also matter. Enacting formal laws
repealing voting rights can invite external intervention.
Nation-states may face similar constraints to the degree
that they are part of supra- or international organizations
or are reliant on outside actors for resources. These
internal and external constraints interact, and internal
actors actively attempt to influence external actors to use
their power to allow or prevent voter suppression as they
desire. Thus, due to internal and external constraints, not
all elites are capable of creating and implementing
effective legislative, bureaucratically-implemented voter
suppression schemes. Where suppression has substantial
benefits to a party or faction it may still occur, but it will
necessarily be ad hoc and decentralized.
One benefit of decentralized suppression is plausible

deniability, minimizing reputational costs. However,
even ad hoc approaches often convey to observers which
groups are responsible for suppression, since political
opponents, journalists, and NGOs monitor elections for
precisely these types of activities. Furthermore, if extra-
legal suppression becomes violent there are substantial
reputational risks for suppressors, increasing the costs of
suppression. In addition, extra-legal approaches to sup-
pression are less predictably effective since they rely on
semi-autonomous actors for implementation, who must
overcome both collective action costs to organize and
transaction costs related to information, monitoring, and

sanctioning. Decentralized ad hoc suppression, especially
if it turns violent, also risks further undermining the
power of the state by demonstrating its inability to
maintain order (Johnson 2010).

Institutionalized forms of voter suppression have
several benefits opposite the aforementioned costs of
extra-legal suppression. First, people are generally com-
pliant with laws benefiting their group, even those
imposing costs, if they expect compliance by others (Levi
1997). Not only do laws induce cooperation by threaten-
ing sanctions for their violation, they further induce
cooperation by affecting expectations about others’ behav-
iors and the pay-offs of different strategies (McAdams
2000). Second, though even voting laws implemented by
formal bureaucracies leave some room for discretion in
enforcement, formal laws are more predictably imple-
mented and therefore have more predictable effects
(Bishop 1892; Atkeson et al. 2010). Being able to
reasonably predict the extent of voter suppression is
important for politicians strategic about where to cam-
paign and direct their resources. Third, legal restrictions
are less likely to produce violence, which imposes reputa-
tional costs on regimes. Finally, once it is harder for certain
groups to vote, opposition parties that might find a natural
constituency in marginalized groups will spend less time
appealing to and mobilizing these groups’ members.5

Formalized policies thus have characteristics of self-
enforcing institutions, which ad hoc voter suppression
lacks.

There are downsides to using formal laws to suppress
voting. As Perman (2003) notes, formal laws tie the
violation of democratic norms and rights very directly to
a particular regime, damaging its reputation. Elites
attempt to avoid this by writing restrictions to appear
neutral to different groups and in the service of acceptable
goals, like preventing voter fraud. Furthermore, to the
extent that internal and external audiences are uncon-
cerned, legitimacy costs are minimized. Overall, then,
institutionalized voter suppression is generally preferable.
This means that when internal political and state capacity
increase and external constraints decrease we should see
a shift from ad hoc, decentralized, and violent voter
suppression to centralized, non-violent approaches, which
we discuss further in the context of the U.S. South.

Evolving Voter Suppression in the
South after Reconstruction
To be readmitted to the Union, Southern states had to
rewrite their constitutions and ensure the rights guaranteed
to blacks in the U.S. Constitution and federal enforcement
statues, including suffrage for black males. White Demo-
cratic Party leaders in the South wanted to reinstitute
control over black citizens. But this would require sub-
stantial policy changes from the Reconstruction-era status
quo, and was virtually impossible as long as many blacks

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voted because, even in areas lacking black majorities, blacks
could be pivotal to election outcomes (Foner 1993; Perman
2003).

Almost immediately after blacks won the right to vote,
white Southern Democrats began trying to reverse black
suffrage (Redding 2010). There was nothing unique about
the South that led to voter suppression in this era. Due to
intense party competition governments throughout the
country engaged in suppression, and federal officials
weighing intervention considered how voter suppression
in the states would affect their electoral fortunes, as we will
discuss. Republicans wanted to expand voting by their
supporters, including Southern blacks, but many
Republican-controlled state governments in the North
enacted laws like literacy tests and poll taxes, aimed at
recent immigrants who supported the Democratic Party
(Keyssar 2009).6 Party competition can drive both expan-
sions of voting and voter suppression (Ansell and Samuels
2014; Valelly 1993).

In contrast with the North, however, violence was
central to suppressing black voting in the South. As Key
(1949, 536) notes, “force and the threat of force had put
the whites in power.” What can explain the use of violence
in the South, rather than the institutionalized approaches
in the North? Though some argue that a particularly
violent culture led to the use of violence (Cash et al. 1941),
rapid changes in levels of violence over short periods of
time cast doubt on this.7 A violent culture may facilitate,
but variation in the use of violence, both in the South
compared to the North and in the South over time, is
better explained by our internal and external constraints
framework.

In the late 1860s some Southern states did attempt to
enact laws restricting black suffrage, but these were over-
turned by federal legislation and enforcement of voting
rights because Republicans controlling the federal govern-
ment wanted to develop a national party to consolidate the
political victories of the Civil War; this would require
black votes in the South (Valelly 2009a). While Repub-
licans wanted to compete in the South and stationed
federal troops there to enforce voting rights, Southern
states could not implement legal, institutionalized forms of
suppression (Perman 2003). Internal factors also limited
the enactment of voter suppression laws. Because of the
Republican Party’s efforts (both via official government
institutions and party organization), many blacks and
white Republicans supportive of black suffrage held power
in Southern governments, limiting the political capacity of
Democrats to enact laws (Foner 1993). Second, even once
Democrats regained control of government, implementing
effective laws was difficult due to the relative lack of state
capacity after the Civil War (Herron 2017; Hyman 1989).

Given these constraints, decentralized violence and
intimidation quickly became the preferred means of voter
suppression, often initiated by Democratic Party leaders,

with the support of average white Southerners (Brundage
1993; Foner 2014; Mickey 2015). For example, the
“Edgefield Plan” in South Carolina, written by former
Confederate General Martin W. Gary, laid out a scheme to
organize citizen militias to ensure white Democrats sup-
pressed black participation. Decentralized and violent, it
read, in part: “Every Democrat must feel honor bound to
control the vote of at least one negro, by intimidation,
purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may
determine, how he may best accomplish it.”8

Though the Democrats had generally regained power
in Southern governments by 1877, concerns that white
competitors and blacks could ally and threaten their
control remained (Perman 1985). Thus, violence was used
to suppress black voting and drive Republicans from office
(Gibson 2013; Rushdy 2012). Voter turnout declined
dramatically for whites and blacks over two decades, but
Redding and James (2001) show that black turnout
declined much more dramatically than white. Neverthe-
less, violence was only partly effective in suppressing black
voting. In 1892, fifteen years after federal troops largely left
the South, the black turnout rate remained roughly 50%
in some Southern states. As Redding (2010) notes when
comparing North Carolina to the rest of the South,
“violence and fraud had turned out to be effective
elsewhere, but involved collective action mobilization
and tended to only work as a temporary fix.” Relying on
whites to feel “honor bound” to suppress black voting and
decentralized actors to coordinate voter suppression was
never going to be entirely effective, particularly as long as
some blacks heroically risked life and limb to continue to
vote (Kousser 1974, 14). As John Lynch, the last black
Congressman from Mississippi until the 1980s, told the
House in 1882, black voters in the South “have bravely
refused to surrender their honest convictions, even upon
the altar of their personal necessities.”9

Furthermore, violence—especially lynchings—troubled
some Southern and many Northern elites (Francis 2014;
Kato 2015; Mickey 2015). The inability to prevent
“excessive” violence resulted from and vividly highlighted
the weak state capacity of the South (Johnson 2010).
While violence persisted, Southern leaders feared that the
federal government might reoccupy the South to monitor
elections (Valelly 2009a; Gibson 2013). In sum, ad hoc
violent voter suppression was used due to internal and
external constraints on “legal” approaches, but was only
partly effective and had serious reputational costs. This
led Southern Democrats to search for a centralized, in-
stitutionalized, and non-violent means of suppression
(Kousser 1999). For example, at the Alabama Democratic
convention in 1900, one delegate stated that “we have
disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods,
but in the future we’ll disfranchise them by law.”10 The
pursuit of legalized voter suppression by Southern Dem-
ocrats only became possible once violence had been

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successful enough to put Democrats back in power,
Southern state governments (re)developed electoral insti-
tutions, and national Republicans abandoned black voters
(Brandwein 2011; Mickey 2015; Kato 2016). Internal
capacities and external constraints interacted to shape the
form of suppression, and the ensuing shift toward law
made possible by the removal of internal and external
constraints.
The suppression of Republican voting and the removal

of a sufficient number of black and white Republicans
from office through violence and intimidation meant that
white Democratic “Redeemers” controlled law-making
institutions in most Southern states by the late 1870s.
Despite this, Southern states did not necessarily have the
capacity to implement voter suppression laws. Herron
(2017) details how a primary goal of Redeemer govern-
ments upon assuming power was cutting funding for or
eliminating institutions created or expanded by Republi-
can governments.11 This state retrenchment limited state
capacity. Furthermore, before they could effectively dis-
enfranchise blacks, election oversight institutions also
needed to be reconfigured along the lines of Democratic
preferences after being controlled by Republicans during
Reconstruction.12 Over time, state capacity and control
over election administration institutions increased, and
Southern Democratic governments had a growing ability
to create and implement effective voter suppression laws
(Key 1949; Johnson 2010).
Yet, as long as Republicans attempted to compete in

the South, which required black votes, federal interven-
tion in Southern elections was a possibility (Brandwein
2011).13 Records from post-Reconstruction state consti-
tutional conventions illustrate that Southern governments
were concerned about federal intervention if legal disen-
franchisement was aggressively pursued (Brandwein 2011;
Herron 2017). The defeat of the Lodge Elections Bill in
1890, which would have allowed for federal judicial
oversight of registration and voting in congressional
elections, was a sign of wavering Republican commitment
to black voting rights. But this bill did not fail due to an
opposition to black voting rights per se, and in the next
couple of election cycles some leaders of the Republican
Party thought that competing in the South remained
important (Valelly 2009b).
This commitment to competing in the South and

black voting rights did not last too much longer,
however. Due to significant defeats in the 1890 and
1892 elections, along with deaths and retirements, very
few Republicans who had engaged in the early fights over
suffrage and were committed to building the party in the
South remained in Congress. As Kousser (1974, 31)
notes, the “old guard” was replaced by “younger men to
whom abolition and Reconstruction seemed irrelevant,
merely picturesque, or even evil.” The electorate had tired
of sectional fights by the 1890s and new Republican

leaders were more committed to the promotion of business
as a way to build a national party (Brandwein 2011). And
once this approach was at least partly vindicated by
winning unified government in the election of 1896
without being competitive in the South, black voting
rights were abandoned (Gibson 2013; Valelly 2009a).
Indeed, in 1894 Republicans won one of the then-largest
Congressional victories in history, taking over 70% of the
House and more than doubling their previous seat share;
in 1896 Republican McKinley won the presidency in
a landslide. These overwhelming Republican majorities
did not attempt to reverse the Democrats’ 1894 undoing
of some federal election statutes, and in 1896 the GOP
removed from its platform a plank calling for free and fair
elections in the South (Kousser 1974; Mickey 2015).

The first laws limiting black voting had a limited reach,
for instance disenfranchising those convicted of a crime.
As Valelly (2009a, 130) explains, legal disenfranchise-
ment was “a process . . . its backers could not and did not
do all of what they wanted right away.”14 Once it became
clear that the federal government would not intervene in
Southern elections, however, broader laws eliminating
black suffrage were enacted (Kousser 1974; Brandwein
2011). Compared to decentralized violence, these broader
suffrage restrictions were very effective. In Louisiana in
1896, over 130,000 blacks were registered to vote; by
1904, after the enactment of several restrictions on voting,
only 1,342 black voters were registered. A contemporary
Congressional report stated that violence was “no longer
necessary because the laws are so framed that the Demo-
crats can keep themselves in possession of the governments
in every Southern State.”15

Analyzing the Evolution from Violence to Law
Violent voter suppression did not disappear entirely even
after Jim Crow’s enactment; activists registering black
voters in the South were murdered as late as the 1960s. But
if Jim Crow laws actually served as a change in the tactics of
suppression, we should see declining violence to suppress
black voting once in place. One difficulty with testing this
argument is that reliable measures of the myriad types of
violence are lacking. However, there are reliable data on
the notorious lynchings widespread across the South
during this period. While it is agreed that violence and
intimidation were used to suppress black voting, it is not
clear that lynchings, specifically, served this purpose.

Perhaps the dominant interpretation of lynchings is
that they were largely a response to economic threats
posed by newly-freed black laborers (Beck and Tolnay
1992; Soule 1992; Tolnay and Beck 1995). Beck and
Tolnay (1990), for example, find that—along with the
black percentage of the population—inflation and low
cotton prices were associated with more lynchings. Other
scholars argue that lynchings were aimed at maintaining
white racial solidarity in a general sense (Johnson 2010;

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Smångs 2016). It is also argued that lynchings were
essentially a form of localized, ad hoc law enforcement
and that once state capacity increased, lynchings declined
(Clarke 1998).16 It is true that most lynchings involved
some criminal accusation.17 But sometimes the “crimes”
involved little more than blacks asserting their political
rights. Even in instances where victims were accused
of crimes, in some cases the root cause was political
conflict.18

While a number of factors drove lynchings, Ida B.
Wells (1900)—writing near the height of lynching activity
—observed that the desire to suppress black suffrage was
central to lynching’s emergence:

in support of its plans [to nullify black voting rights] the Ku-
Klux Klans, the “red-shirt” and similar organizations proceeded
to beat, exile, and kill negroes until the purpose of their
organization was accomplished and the supremacy of the
“unwritten law” was effected. Thus lynchings began in the
South, rapidly spreading into the various States until the national
law [ensuring black voting rights] was nullified.”

Writing during this era, Tourgée (1879, 229) noted
that violence was an expression of “an ineradicable
sentiment of hostility to the negro as a political integer.”
A couple of decades later James Weldon Johnson (1924)
agreed, noting that lynching was an “instrument for
terrorizing Negroes, keeping them from voting.” Contem-
porary whites also noted this aspect of lynching. Ortiz
(2006) quotes a Florida Times Union editorial from 1904
that read: “In the South, the negro in politics is not
tolerated . . . there are lynchings so nearly everywhere that
the rule is established.”19

Though commonly understood as highly public spec-
tacles, many lynchings were done in relative secret
(Smångs 2016). These secret, targeted assassinations of
black office holders or activists could have tangible
consequences on black mobilization, and were critical to
Democrats regaining power in the South (Gibson 2013).
Highly public lynchings were more akin to terrorism
(Wood 2011), creating a spectacle designed to reinforce
group boundaries and strengthen white racial solidarity,
including identification with the “white man’s” Demo-
cratic Party, according to Smångs (2006).20

If lynchings were used to suppress black political
mobilization, we should observe more of them where
such mobilization was a greater threat. Sociologists
analyze how the Populist challenge to Democratic power
in the 1880s and 1890s may have fueled lynchings, and
historians document the use of violence to suppress
“opposition” (non-Democratic) voting during this era,
including targeted violence (including murder) prior to
elections and on Election Day itself.21 The Populist Party
threatened white supremacy and Democratic hegemony
because in some states it was explicitly biracial; even where
this wasn’t the case, though, once party competition
existed there would always be the temptation to mobilize

blacks and poor whites to win (Key 1949; Kousser 1974;
Valelly 2009a).22 In addition, party competition would be
likely to lead to policy appeals to whites and poor blacks
that the land owning-elites who ran the Democratic Party
feared, e.g., expanding social services and taxation (Aldrich
and Griffin 2018; Key 1949). In a national-level analysis
from 1882–1941, Olzak (1990) finds that lynchings did
increase following elections in which the Populists ran
a candidate in the presidential election; Soule (1992),
however, fails to find that lynchings were higher in Georgia
counties where Populists received greater shares of the vote
in the 1892, 1894, and 1896 elections.
While suggestive, existing studies are generally limited

to a small number of years or states, and further fail to
account for changing legal/institutional environments.23

In examining whether law supplanted violence, we put
forward three expectations regarding the timing and
incidence of lynchings (which we think are a reasonable
proxy for other harder to measure forms of violence). First,
we expect more lynchings in areas of Populist Party
strength. Second, if lynchings were used to suppress black
voting, we should observe that lynchings increase as
elections approach. To our knowledge, no research has
examined this latter possibility. Third, if law supplanted
violence, we expect these two relationships only before the
enactment of Jim Crow voter suppression laws. Lynchings,
of course, continued for other reasons even after “the
political excuse was no longer necessary,” as Wells (1900)
put it. But after Jim Crow laws are in place, we expect to
observe a decline in the total number of lynchings and that
Populist strength and the time to an election are no longer
significant predictors of lynchings.
Because collecting data even for this most notorious

form of violence against blacks is very burdensome, most
studies focus on one or a small number of states. Seminal
studies by Tolnay and Beck (1992, 1995) are notable
exceptions, and we use these data, which Cook (2012)
argues are the most comprehensive data on lynchings in
the South and the best for academic study. We analyze
eleven Southern states that experienced more than one
lynching event between 1876 and 1952, using county-
month as the unit of analysis. We examine counties
because they were critical units of government in the era,
and the threat of black political participation varied within
states (Redding 2010).24 This comprehensive database of
numerous states is essential for adequately testing our
arguments because lynching was a relatively rare activity.
The outcome variable presented in our primary analyses is
whether a given county experienced a lynching event in
a given month.
To identify the institutionalization of voter suppres-

sion via Jim Crow, we consider nine distinct laws
identified by Kousser (1974): poll taxes, registration
requirements, multiple-box voting, secret ballots, literacy
tests, property tests, understanding clauses, grandfather

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clauses, and the white primary. Valelly (2009a) shows that
legal disenfranchisement was a process, and that these laws
took time to eliminate black suffrage. We therefore make
the conservative decision of classifying a state as having
institutionalized voter suppression after the second
such law was adopted, the years of which are reported in
Table 1.
A key variable is the number of days until the next

Congressional election (for election timing, see Daven-
port 1997), assigning to each month the date of the
15th.25 For instance, if the county-month were the
October just prior to a Congressional election on Novem-
ber 5, this variable would take on the value of 21. If legal
suppression replaced lynchings, we should observe that
prior to Jim Crow this variable is associated with lynch-
ings, but that after Jim Crow this relationship disappears
(note that due to the fixed electoral calendar the timing of
elections is exogenous to contemporary political mobili-
zation, ensuring it is not endogenous to outbreaks of
political violence). The days to election variable is corre-
lated with seasonal patterns in lynchings observed in prior
research (because elections are held in the autumn), but
analyses show that prior to Jim Crow the days to election
variable fits the data much better than a simple seasonal
dummy (refer to the online appendix). To measure
Populist threat, we use the county-level Populist vote
share in the previous Congressional election.
We also include controls to generate more accurate

estimates. Because the threat of black voting is greatest
where blacks are more numerous, we include a county’s
black population (%) and its square, which enables us to
determine if the relationship between the black population
percentage is curvilinear. Based on previous research we
expect Republican electoral support in a county is actually
associated with fewer lynchings, since the Republican
Party was not generally a realistic electoral threat and areas
with more Republicans were more supportive of black

rights (Blalock 1967; Corzine, Creech, and Corzine
1983). We also include dependence on cotton, the most
commonly-used economic covariate, to proxy for eco-
nomic motivations for lynchings. Following Hagen,
Makovi, and Bearman (2013), we measure a given
county’s dependence on cotton as the ratio of acreage of
farmland devoted to cotton production and total agricul-
tural acreage (from U.S. Agricultural Censuses). Finally,
we include a time covariate to capture any potential trend
in the occurrence of lynchings not captured by our
variables of interest.

While included covariates account for county-level
factors, unobserved state-level political factors likely affect
lynchings and therefore we estimate both logistic re-
gression models with state fixed effects and hierarchical
models with state-varying intercepts. The supplemental
analyses examine robustness to our classification of both
lynching events and the institutionalization of Jim Crow.

Law Replacing Violence in the South
A simple yearly time series of lynching events aggregated
across counties during the period discussed can serve as
a first, crude test of our arguments. Figure 1 plots the
yearly number of lynching events in the eleven states, and
is annotated with two vertical dashed lines. The first is in
1889, the year the first Jim Crow voter suppression law
was introduced, the second 1894, when two such laws
were in effect (both averaging across the eleven states, as
plotting nearly two dozen lines would be illegible; refer to
the online appendix for dates of adoption of each law in
each state). At least three notable things stand out looking
at figure 1. First, the number of lynchings rose dramati-
cally the moment Reconstruction ended and federal troops
left the South; from 1877, we see an increase until violence
reaches its apex in 1893, when lynchings were recorded in
118 counties. Second, the period when Jim Crow laws
were being debated and adopted in Southern legislatures

Table 1
Jim Crow law adoption by year

State Year of Second Policy

South Carolina 1882
Florida 1889
North Carolina 1889
Tennessee 1889
Arkansas 1892
Alabama 1893
Louisiana 1897
Mississippi 1890
Georgia 1900
Virginia 1902
Kentucky —

Notes: The year in each state the second Jim Crow voter suppression law was adopted. Although Kentucky adopted a poll tax in

1891, it never adopted a second such law.

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saw the highest levels of lynchings, peaking just before the
second Jim Crow law was put in place in most Southern
states. Third, a multi-decade decline follows almost
immediately after Southern states begin to enact multiple
Jim Crow laws to more fully disenfranchise blacks. The
descriptive statistics presented in figure 1 are broadly
consistent with our argument, but it is necessary to
examine the changing relationship between black political
threats and lynchings before and during Jim Crow to
adequately investigate our argument.

The results of models 1 and 2 in table 2 show that before
Jim Crow, when elections are more proximate and when
and where Populists present a greater threat, lynchings are
more likely. The coefficients for the control variables for all
models are in the expected direction and significant, and the
time trend coefficient is also significant. Models 3 and 4
illustrate that days to election and the Populist threat are
irrelevant to the number of lynchings once Jim Crow is in
place: the magnitude of the coefficient for Populist threat
falls by a quarter and does not approach significance, and
the estimated effect of days to election is zero. As crucial is
the fact that the economic factor associated with lynching
does not become irrelevant after Jim Crow is in place,
suggesting that legal disenfranchisement disrupted the
existing political equilibrium of violence while leaving the
economic forces driving lynching untouched.
Figure 2 shows the degree to which law replaced

violence by plotting the predicted probabilities (with
95% confidence intervals) of the political threat covariates
across the two eras. Each plot shows the expected
probability of lynching when days to election (plot a)
and Populist vote share (plot b) vary from their minimum
to maximum observed values, with all other covariates held
constant at their means; black lines show predictions for
the pre-Jim Crow-era, gray show Jim Crow-era data.
Electoral factors cease to be important determinants of
lynching once Jim Crow is firmly in place.
Sporadic violence to discourage black political partic-

ipation persisted as late as the 1960s and lynching
continued to be a tool to limit black civil rights, repress

Figure 1
Lynchings over time

Notes: Historical trend of number of lynching events per county-

month by year in the eleven states examined. The first dashed

vertical line is 1889, the year after the first Jim Crow voter

suppression laws were introduced (averaged across these

states), the second is 1894, the year after two such laws were in

effect.

Table 2
Lynching before Jim Crow

Before Jim Crow During Jim Crow

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4
Fixed effects Random effects Fixed effects Random effects

(Intercept) -5.80*** -6.05*** -6.62*** -7.08***
(0.13) (0.16) (0.09) (0.22)

Days to election -0.09* -0.09* -0.00 -0.00
(0.04) (0.04) (0.03) (0.03)

% Populist vote 0.08** 0.08** -0.02 -0.02
(0.03) (0.03) (0.02) (0.02)

% Republican vote -0.11** -0.11** -0.14** -0.14**
(0.04) (0.04) (0.05) (0.05)

% Black 1.53*** 1.50*** 1.48*** 1.47***
(0.15) (0.15) (0.13) (0.13)

% Black (squared) -0.99*** -0.97*** -1.02*** -1.02***
(0.13) (0.13) (0.11) (0.11)

Cotton dependence 0.11* 0.12* 0.24*** 0.24***
(0.05) (0.05) (0.04) (0.04)

Year -0.29*** -0.29*** -1.03*** -1.03***
(0.07) (0.07) (0.04) (0.04)

BIC 9912.26 9841.85 14,433.93 14,376.38
Observations 223,350 223,350 508,834 508,834

Note: Logistic regression models of lynching by county-month in eleven Southern states in the post-Reconstruction, pre-Jim Crow era.

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black labor, reinforce white racial solidarity, and punish
blacks for alleged crimes for many years (Smångs 2016;
Wood 2009). Indeed, the coefficient for the cotton
dependence variable is about twice as large after Jim Crow
laws are enacted, indicating that economic factors were
more closely tied to lynchings, which is what we would
anticipate if politics declined in importance as a cause of
lynching (Kousser 1999). The reputational costs of
lynchings led many Southern states to enact their own
anti-lynching laws and take other steps to limit lynchings
in the following decades (Johnson 2010; Rable 1985). But
lynchings did decline considerably after the introduction
of Jim Crow voting restrictions, demonstrating an evolu-
tion of suppression.

Jim Crow 2.0 and the Continuing
Evolution of Suppression
Bentele and O’Brien (2013) refer to recent attempts to
restrict voting as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Using seemingly
neutral policies such as voter identification laws to
discriminate against minorities, the poor, and the young
is certainly consistent with the original Jim Crow laws. In
light of our arguments and findings, why are these laws
being enacted now and why are they taking the form that
they are?
As before, the desire to win elections by political party

organizations motivates attempts to restrict the vote.
Voter restrictions are increasing as partisan control of
Congress (and the presidency) is more variable than it has
been for decades. And of course state-level electoral
calculations matter: research shows that restrictive voting
laws are most likely when control of government has
recently shifted to the Republican Party, indicating that
these states were competitive in the recent past (Biggers
and Hanmer 2017; McKee 2015; Rocha and Matsubaya-
shi 2014). Despite long having large minority populations,

voting restrictions have expanded recently in many South-
ern states because Republicans gained unified control of
state government for the first time in decades in the early
2000s.26 As in 1890, state governments are using law to
suppress voting to consolidate their control after obtaining
power.

As with Jim Crow 1.0, these laws target minorities
(Bentele and O’Brien 2013). Though technically neutral
with regard to race/ethnicity, class, and age there is little
doubt about the intended targets. One former Republican
staffer in Wisconsin described legislators as “giddy” at the
prospect of disenfranchising youth and minority voters,
and Pennsylvania’s House majority leader said his state’s
identification law would ensure Romney’s victory in the
state in 2012 (Wines 2016). The high degree of capacity
that exists in all U.S. states at this time allows policymakers
to very effectively target minorities for suppression. For
example, detailed data collection enabled North Carolina
Republicans to restrict voting in the times, places, and
manner most likely to be utilized by African Americans
(Ingraham 2016). It is attractive for the Republican Party
to suppress minority voting because minorities’ growing
loyalty to the Democratic Party. As during Reconstruc-
tion, black voters demonstrate tremendous loyalty to one
party, and Latinos have shifted strongly toward the
Democratic Party in recent years (Lopez et al. 2014). In
contrast, in states where they hold power, Democrats draw
support from a more diverse coalition, making targeting
particular voters for suppression unattractive.27

External constraints on the states have also recently
decreased. Republicans in Washington, D.C., are more
willing to allow states to restrict the voting of Democratic
constituencies so that Republicans will win. With Re-
publican judges in place and more frequent control of the
institutions of government, federal Republicans can pre-
vent Democrats from taking steps to ensure voting rights.
Republican appointees to the Supreme Court weakened
and then struck down key portions of the Voting Rights
Act, making it is easier for states to restrict voting because
new voting laws no longer needed preclearance by federal
judges (Liptak 2013, McCrary 2005). In the wake of this
decision, several Republican-controlled states promptly
enacted restrictive voting laws, and Republican Congresses
have refused to enact a revised Voting Rights Act. Thus,
with the combination of internal capacities and lack of
external constraints we can see why, despite occasional
invocations otherwise, we continue to see the overwhelm-
ing use of institutionalized rather than decentralized, ad
hoc approaches to voter suppression, and electoral violence
is exceedingly rare.

Conclusion
Driven by a fundamental desire to win elections, the same
basic considerations of costs and benefits shape decisions
by competing elites regarding suppression now as in

Figure 2
Predicted probabilities

Notes: The predicted probability of lynching in a given county-

month across levels of the listed covariate when all other covariates

are held at mean values. Black lines show the post-Reconstruction,

pre-Jim Crow era (Model 1), while gray lines show predicted

probabilities during Jim Crow (Model 3).

Plots (a) and (b) have different axes.

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previous eras. How suppression occurs depends on internal
conditions and external constraints. Ad hoc and often
violent suppression is more likely when internal political or
state capacity to implement formal legal techniques is
lacking, and when external actors present constraints.
When internal capacities increase and external constraints
decrease, elites will choose legislative, centralized, typically
non-violent approaches to suppression.

Thus, in affluent democracies like the United States we
have seen a shift from ad hoc, decentralized, and often
violent voter suppression toward centralized, legal, and
non-violent approaches. We illustrate this shift with the
use, and then relative abandonment, of one form of
violence—lynching—in the suppression of black voting
after Reconstruction. Immediately after federal troops left
the South, lynching and other forms of violence were tools
in the widespread suppression of black political participa-
tion. The use of violence reflected both a lack of political
and state capacity and the federal stance as guarantor of
black voting rights. Once internal capacities were present
and external constraints were removed, Southern Demo-
crats shifted to centralized, bureaucratically-implemented
voter suppression, which reduced political lynchings. We
showed that our arguments can adequately describe the
evolution of voter suppression in the post-Reconstruction
South, but we also think that our arguments would apply
in other systems and at other times and places in the
United States. Of course, further research should examine
this directly.

Our argument and findings also illuminate current
attempts to restrict the vote. Due to earlier federal
interventions, the sweeping disenfranchisement of Jim
Crow is no longer permissible. Nonetheless, attempts to
restrict voting by blacks and other groups have increased
in recent years. Like the post-Reconstruction South,
partisan calculations about how voting by different
groups affects election victories drive attempts at sup-
pression. Approaches have been institutionalized because
modern U.S. state governments have significant state
capacity, thus where Republicans have the political
capacity they have often enacted restrictive voting laws.
The national Republican Party is content to allow more
voter suppression because the targeted groups support the
Democratic Party. Despite occasional calls to violence
and intimidation, even by some prominent candidates, in
general there has been no return of widespread electoral
violence accompanying the new round of voter restric-
tions. This does not mean that the return of widespread
violence is impossible, but it does seem highly unlikely
based on the historical trajectory of voter suppression
toward centralized, institutionalized approaches.

One major difference with the post-Reconstruction era
is that, given the Voting Rights Act and other federal laws
that are weakened but still in place, these recent
restrictions on voting are neither as extreme nor as

effective in suppressing voting. In fact, it remains unclear
whether they effectively reduce voting at all (Rocha and
Matsubayashi 2014; Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson
2017). Even their critics must acknowledge that laws like
voter identification requirements have limited potential for
suppression due to the simple fact that the vast majority of
all Americans have identification. Yet it remains unclear
the degree to which such requirements interact with
restrictions on registration and early and absentee voting,
and it should not be assumed that more egregious attempts
to deny the voting rights of larger numbers of people will
not be pursued by states in the future. Perhaps it is the case
that the widespread disenfranchisement of certain groups
of Americans via law is no longer possible. Yet Jim Crow
1.0 started with relatively modest laws, designed to appear
neutral, that restricted the voting of relatively few individ-
uals, which then expanded to disenfranchise larger num-
bers of voters. Even though it is unlikely that modern
states, with their considerable political and state capacity,
would need to use violence to restrict voting, is it
impossible to imagine that broader laws disenfranchising
more voters will be enacted?

Supplemental Materials
Descriptive Statistics
Voter Disenfranchisement Laws
Probable versus Confirmed Lynchings
Alternative Operationalizations of Jim Crow
The “Era of Lynching”
Count Models
Rare Events Logit
State Fixed Effects
The Use of a Seasonal Dummy
Democratic Control of States after Reconstruction
To view supplementary material for this article, please

visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592718003584

Notes
1 Wilkinson 2006 examines federal and regional
governments in election-related violence in India.

2 Rushdy 2012 shows that even “disorganized” lynch
mobs are civil society actors and eminently “public.”
Wells 1895, among others, highlights the role of civic
and political elites in lynchings. In a study of 100
lynchings, Raper 1993 finds police participated in over
half and actively condoned over 90 of these.

3 Ritter 2014 advances this logic in the context of
repressing dissent.

4 Similarly, preventing private actors from engaging in
ad hoc voter suppression on their own also requires
relatively high state capacity.

5 The use of violence to discourage black voting was
a critical prerequisite for the later realization of legal
disenfranchisement by white “Redeemers” in the
South; Kousser 1974; Mickey 2015.

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6 An 1877 editorial in the staunchly Republican The
Nation (1877, 245) argues that majority government
was not for the “ignorant and penniless,” and that
order in Northern cities demanded property
requirements for voting.

7 On centrality of violence, see Woodward 1938.
8 See http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/after_
slavery_educator/unit_ nine_documents/document_11.

9 Congressional testimony, as quoted in Kousser 1974,
14.

10 As quoted in Perman 2003, 18.
11 Gibson 2013 discusses the political learning of the era

and early reliance on violence.
12 King 2001 notes how the entirely Republican Board of

Canvassers ruled that Democrat Wade Hampton lost
the disputed election of 1876 in South Carolina.

13 Here, our logic is similar to Wilkinson’s (2006)
comparative work, which contends that higher levels of
government controlling the use of force can prevent
electoral violence even when it is preferred by local elites.

14 See also Aldrich and Griffin 2018.
15 On Louisiana registration, see Smithsonian National

Museum of American History; as cited in Perman
2003, 19.

16 Of course, some lynchings were unrelated to politics or
economics, and committed in response to real or
perceived crimes (Beck and Tolnay 1990; Bailey and
Tolnay 2015).

17 Indeed, some scholars require an alleged crime to
categorize a murder as a lynching. But even these
criminal accusations were not devoid of political
content. One contemporary observer noted that the
“rapist is a product of the reconstruction period,”
and before then the crime “was unknown
throughout the South”; Avary 1906, 327; see also
Page 1904.

18 Examples include giving “incendiary speeches,”
causing “political troubles,” voting or attempting to
vote, being or having a family member who is a
Republican, being “anti-Democrat,” testifying against
a Democrat in court, testifying about election
irregularities, being a socialist or a political reformer,
organizing sharecroppers, and advocating for specific
policies. Other actual crimes were rooted in political
conflict: in Georgia’s Emanuel County, two black men
were lynched for killing a white man at the voting
polls; in West Feliciana County, Louisiana, a black
man was accused of killing the Democratic candidate
for sheriff; and in Greenwood County, South
Carolina, blacks were lynched for the alleged murder
of a white election manager. Examples are from the
allegations in the expanded Beck and Tolnay
inventory of lynchings, developed and maintained by
Amy Bailey as the CSDE Lynching Database, available
at http://lynching.csde.washington.edu.

19 Similarly, Cresswell 1995 details the use of violence to
suppress the vote in Mississippi.

20 In a comprehensive analysis of Georgia and Virginia,
Brundage 1993 finds that 39% and 43% of lynchings
in these two states were public mob lynchings of the
spectacle variety. Smångs 2016 argues that allegiance
to the Democratic Party was a key feature of white
identity after Reconstruction, and lynchings helped
solidify this.

21 Cresswell 1995 notes, for example, Mississippi
Democrats firing cannons at voters lined up at the
polls; Mickey 2015 discusses the Democrat’s
systematic use of violence against Fusion candidates in
the 1898 elections in North Carolina, including the
governor; Hackney 1969 details the importance of
violence in repressing Populists in Alabama.

22 As Aldrich and Griffin 2018, 82, note, while the
Republican party was not viable by the 1880s due to its
association with Lincoln and the war, “the numbers
were still there” for alliances by blacks and poor whites.

23 Tolnay and Beck 1995 offer the most comprehensive
treatment of disenfranchisement’s potential effects:
using an interrupted time-series analysis they find no
evidence for political threat. We suspect our divergent
findings are because rather than focusing on total
lynching activity we examine the specific relationship
between electoral factors before and after
disenfranchisement.

24 Including Southern states lacking multiple recorded
lynching events does not change our substantive
conclusions, but due to no variation in outcomes
estimates of fixed and random effects for these states
are highly problematic. Kentucky, although it did not
secede, witnessed a high number of lynching events in
the time period recorded; its antebellum economy was
built on slavery—Louisville a nationally notable slave
market—and although unoccupied by federal troops
after the war, it was overseen by the Freedman’s
Bureau.

25 Due to issues of data and comparability, we use federal
general elections every two years; due to the nature of
their electoral constituency and candidates,
Republican and Democratic primaries should not be
expected to have produced a perceived black political
threat.

26 Democrats controlled the legislatures in Alabama,
Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina until 2010,
and Arkansas until 2012.

27 One exception to this pattern is Rhode Island, which
enacted a voter identification law.

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