Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics: 6 (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior) - Softcover

Acharya, Avidit; Blackwell, Matthew; Sen, Maya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691203725 ISBN 13: 9780691203720

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2020

Synopsis

The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South

Despite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentiments evolved? Deep Roots shows that the entrenched views of white southerners are a direct consequence of the region's slaveholding history. Today, southern whites who live in areas once reliant on slavery―compared to areas that were not―are more racially hostile and less amenable to policies that could promote black progress. A groundbreaking look at the ways institutions of the past continue to sway attitudes of the present, Deep Roots demonstrates how social beliefs persist long after the formal policies that created those beliefs have been eradicated.

About this title

About the Author

Avidit Acharya is associate professor of political science at Stanford University. Matthew Blackwell is associate professor of government at Harvard University. Maya Sen is professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

From the Back Cover

"This book's arguments can't be right, can they? But the authors bring evidence to bear so well that they have knocked the ball back into the skeptics' court. Deep Roots will be enormously productive in advancing knowledge--it is what we want books to be."--Robert Mickey, author of Paths Out of Dixie

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691203725
• ISBN 13: 9780691203720
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296