Welcome!

My name is Daniel Blinderman and I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy and Politics Department at the University of Virginia.

My research explores how American social movements and state constitutions interact to create new subnational polities, promote or undermine multiracial democracy, and structure patterns of political competition and the provision of public goods.

I focus on the political development of the U.S. South, specifically how the social and political mobilization of farmers and farmworkers in the late 19th century shaped and contested the constitutional entrenchment of racially exclusionary, non-democratic rule in the region.

An article based on my dissertation is forthcoming in Studies in American Political Development. I am also the author of a book chapter on the institutional roots of the impeachment of Huey Long that is forthcoming in the second edition of the edited volume The Politics of Impeachment.

I am now working on a book project based on my dissertation. In the book project, I expand on and deepen my dissertation research in several ways. I widen my temporal focus to examine how legacies from Reconstruction interacted with agrarian mobilizations to produce the most potent electoral challenges to the Democratic Party. I broaden the geographic scope of the project to include Outer South states, including North Carolina. I also expand my outcome of interest to include a more thorough examination of how state constitutional design produced variation in the regulatory policies that governed the operation of railroads and utilities.

Part of the book project will be drawn from a new manuscript I am currently working on that is animated by the following question: how do authoritarian movements coerce reluctant elites into accepting a new non-democratic regime? In the manuscript, I examine whether conservative Democrats in 1890s Louisiana used their control of state institutions to economically retaliate against wealthy landowners who defected from the Democratic Party to support opposition candidates.

Feel free to contact me at dgblinderman [at] gmail [dot] com