Overview

In the decades after Reconstruction, African Americans were systematically removed from the electorate in the American South using tools such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Stolen Representation draws on significant amounts of new historical data to explore how these tools of Black disfranchisement shaped state legislative politics in the American South. The book draws on contemporary scholarship to develop theoretical arguments for how disfranchisement plausibly affected roll-call voting, committee assignments, and policymaking activity in southern state legislatures, and uses rich data on each of these areas to demonstrate disfranchisement's profound effects. By analyzing state legislative data and drawing on historical sources to help characterize the nature of politics in each state in the period around disfranchisement, Olson offers a nuanced, context-driven exploration of disfranchisement's effects, making a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between racial discrimination at the ballot box and public policymaking in the United States.

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9781009700238

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Reviews

'Scholars have long understood that Jim Crow robbed Black Americans of the vote, but only with Michael Olson's Stolen Representation have the costs to legislative activity and lawmaking become systematically clear.  With painstaking and detailed research showing that disfranchisement played out differently across southern states, Olson's revolutionary study reshapes our understanding of southern politics, democratic backsliding, and American political development.' Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University 'Michael Olson's Stolen Representation will transform our understanding of the several decades between the end of Reconstruction and the legal disenfranchisement of African American men in the US South. Olson carefully reconstructs the structure of conflict in southern legislatures between the 1880s and the early 1900s, and shows that even after the end of Reconstruction African American constituencies in the South were able to exert real influence on state legislative actions. This influence disappeared immediately with the imposition of disenfranchisement, transforming the lie of a Solid South into a political reality and eradicating democracy. Stolen Representation is a powerful reconstruction of lost alternatives, and will set the agenda for deepening the study of post-Reconstruction southern legislative politics.' David A. Bateman, Cornell University 'The most consequential episode of US democratic backsliding began in the late 1880s when states of the former Confederacy rewrote their constitutions to prevent the electoral participation of the African American community. Yet the consequences of Jim Crow disenfranchisement for substantive representation are still not well understood. In an important data-rich new book, Michael Olson unpacks how the ways in which African American representation was undermined depended on the political economic context of each state. The book has much to say over our current debates about democracy and representation.' Nolan McCarty, Princeton University

Author Information

Michael P. Olson is Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of numerous articles on American legislative and electoral politics, and has been published in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science and Journal of Politics.

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