Full Citation
Title: Southernization: The Long-Term Effect of Migration on Racial Prejudice and Political Preferences
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2021
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Abstract: Between 1940 and 1970, eight million white southerners left the US South and settled in states outside that region bringing with them their distinctive political preferences, religious practices, and racial attitudes. I demonstrate that their settlement had a large effect on the Republican vote share in northern and western counties even in the 2020 election, fully 50 years later. The political impact of these southern migrants was largely due to their adherence to evangelical Protestantism. I also show that the migration caused a long-lasting increase in anti-Black hate crimes that is reflected in measures of implicit and explicit racial bias of the white population. I obtain causal estimates of these effects through the use of a shift-share instrument to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in the southern push-factors that drove the migration. Importantly, I show using survey data that these effects partly operated through a spillover on non-southerners. The impact of southern migrants on the beliefs, actions, and politics of northern and western communities was not simply the result of a compositional change of the population.
Url: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3930708
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Authors: Reisinger, James
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data, IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Population Mobility and Spatial Demography, Race and Ethnicity
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