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. My dissertation examined how and why southern states during the Jim Crow era differed more than we might expect in the amount and distribution of public goods they provided to their white citizens. I showed that these differences can be explained in part by events that had occurred decades earlier. As these states devolved in the 1890s from unstable democracies to authoritarian one-party states, farmers and farmworkers organized social movements to defend their rights and interests. In states where these movements were stronger, they forced Democratic Party elites—the leaders of the effort to undermine democracy in the South—to write state constitutions that gave poorer farmers more political power. My research shines a light on how the founding momentsof new constitutional systems can set the terms of political conflict and public policy.

Dissertation Summary

When the last federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, conservative white southern Democrats were intent on preventing multi-racial democracy from flourishing in the South; however, they initially failed to suppress multi-party competition and social movement ferment. Between 1888 and 1901, insurgent white farmers (along with some of their Black peers), angered by a weak agricultural economy, founded the Farmers Alliance. In some states, these farmers successfully built an autonomous political movement via the Populist Party. Conservative Democrats responded by convening state constitutional conventions to disenfranchise Black voters and many poor whites and entrench one-party rule. These elite actors aimed to build anti-democratic institutions that would frustrate future efforts to translate mass agrarian discontent into political power. The Populists sought, with varying degrees of success, to contest these efforts and protect the rights and political power of poor white farmers, and often, the rights and political power of their black peers.

In my dissertation, I compared four relatively similar Deep South states: Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, tracing the processes by which agrarian mobilizations in each of these states emerged and evolved. I showed that agrarian discontent was similarly intense across the region, but that this discontent took different institutional and political forms in different states. In Alabama and Louisiana, agrarians mounted powerful challenges to the Democratic Party. In Mississippi and South Carolina, they were beset by division and co-opted by Democrats, only managing weak challenges to the political status quo. An article based on my dissertation project that focuses on Louisiana and South Carolina is forthcoming in Studies in American Political Development. 

Using archival materials from each state’s constitutional convention to analyze the decision-making processes and voting patterns of their respective convention delegates, I showed how the divergent trajectories of Populism influenced southern constitutional conventions between 1890 and 1901. In Louisiana, the Populists forced the Democratic Party to compromise on the apportionment of the legislature, the state’s tax capacity, and the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches In Alabama, Populists were less successful; nevertheless, like their peers in Louisiana, they built a faction within the Democratic Party that could advocate for their interests. In Mississippi and South Carolina, where elite Democrats successfully defused agrarian discontent, both the state governments and the structure of the Democratic Party reflected the preferences of the states’ conservative large landowners.

I showed that the legacies of these different founding moments produced divergent historical legacies that shaped the region’s long-term political development. During the first half of the 20^th century, the authoritarian state governments of Louisiana and Alabama were more responsive to the preferences of poor, white farmers and farmworkers than were the state governments of Mississippi or South Carolina. I constructed an original dataset of state and county-level spending, and my analysis revealed that by the 1920s and 1930s theses states’ different constitutional structures contributed to a significant and enduring difference in the overall provision and geographic distribution of funding for both white public schools and public highways.

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.

I further explore how institutions shape political outcomes in a chapter I contributed to an edited volume on the politics of impeachment. In my chapter, I argue that the institutions that arose out of the conflict between conservative Democrats and agrarian radicals in the 1890s (more so than his individual political talents) helped Huey Long rise to power in Louisiana, achieve more of his policy agenda than other Deep South governors with similar ideologies, and survive an impeachment push from his conservative opponents in the Democratic Party. The edited volume will be published in early 2027.

Other Research Project:

Aside from my dissertation, I am also the lead co-author on a paper alongside Rob Mickey (University of Michigan) and David Waldner (University of Virginia) that offers a new interpretation of Southern Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War.

I am also the lead co-author on an article that reexamines the failure of Reconstruction. Treating each southern state as a distinct case study, we argue that building and maintaining a durable pro-democracy coalition required the participation of an administratively capable and institutionally impartial state government. Despite the ideals of multiracial democracy Republicans embedded in the Reconstruction-era state constitutions, prior decades of planter-driven politics meant that southern states lacked administrative capacity. As a result, these states could not fund the ambitious projects or regulate the necessary inflows of capital necessary to maintain support for Reconstruction among the decisive, median voter—often a white farmer of modest means. Public goods and state services arrived slowly, and state governments often paid for these services with unpopular taxes on the nearest available asset: agricultural land. We conclude that the political economy of Reconstruction could not maintain the political coalitions necessary to sustain multiracial democracy. 

We are preparing to submit this article to Studies in American Political Development.

I am currently at work on two additional research projects. The first is animated by the following question: how do authoritarian movements coerce reluctant elites into accepting a new non-democratic regime? In the paper, 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. This project is separate from my dissertation, but will likely form a chapter in my book manuscript. The second examines how American state constitutions have shaped the development of the federal constitution, continuing my broader investigation into the subnational sources of American political and institutional development. I want to explore when and how conflicts at the state level have served as models for movements that seek to nationalize either expansions and contractions of democratic freedoms.