Political Foundations of Racial Violence: Testa & Williams (2026)

What this is. The paper’s core results, the conceptual framework it tests, the identification strategy, and the estimating equations: enough to know what it found and how, without reading all 62 pages. To replicate or extend, read the original at doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf045.

TL;DR

Testa and Williams use a regression discontinuity design on county-level popular-vote shares in presidential elections across the post-Reconstruction South (1880-1900) to show that a narrow Democratic Party loss in a county raised the probability of a Black lynching in the following four years by about 10 percentage points, equivalent to an 80% increase over the control mean. No comparable effect exists for white lynchings, ruling out a general violence response. Southern newspapers aligned with the Democratic Party amplified anti-Black crime narratives in the aftermath of Democratic losses, providing the coordination mechanism through which elite-fomented racial antagonism translated into mob violence. These effects are concentrated in counties with all-white, all-Democratic local elites facing a large Black electorate, consistent with Blalock (1967)‘s power threat hypothesis. The paper further shows that Black lynchings had a positive mediating effect on Democratic electoral success in the early twentieth century, echoing Jones, Troesken, and Walsh (2017) on lynching and Black political participation. Racial violence helped consolidate the Solid South by suppressing Black political participation and foreshadowing the de jure vote-suppression of Jim Crow.

Core results

Magnitudes and significance are as reported; */**/*** = 10%/5%/1%. Locators point into the source PDF.

#	Result	Locator	Magnitude
R1	Democratic county loss raises Black lynching probability by ~10 pp (80% over control mean); robust across polynomials, bandwidths, and spatial controls	Table II Panel A col 3, p. 755	beta = 0.104** (SE 0.041); control mean = 0.13; optimal bandwidth ~15 pp
R2	No comparable effect on white lynchings (placebo); coefficients small and insignificant across all specifications	Table II Panel A cols 5-8, p. 755	beta = -0.009 (SE 0.013) in col 7; indistinguishable from zero
R3	Effect nearly doubles in previously uncompetitive counties (the election constitutes new information about local political strengths): beta = 18.8 pp	Table II Panel B col 3, p. 756	beta = 0.188*** (SE 0.072); 703 obs
R4	Anti-Black crime accusations in Democratic newspapers rose 29-88% after Democratic county losses; effect driven by Democrat-affiliated outlets	Table V cols 1-5 and 7-8, p. 772	beta = 0.126*-0.168** (SE 0.073-0.089); control mean 0.19-0.20 pages per 100
R5	Democratic newspapers actively reported county presidential losses (39% increase); Democratic papers show 99% increase vs. near-zero for non-Democratic papers	Table VI cols 1, 3-4, p. 776	beta = 0.043*** (SE 0.016) for any coverage; beta = 0.119*** (SE 0.020) for Democratic papers
R6	Effects concentrated in counties with all-white/Democrat elite and large Black constituency — consistent with the Blalock power-threat profile; near zero elsewhere	Table VII Panel A col 1 and col 5, p. 779	beta = 0.127*** (SE 0.044) in Democrat/white-elite sample; beta = 0.117*** (SE 0.065) for large-Black-population subsample
R7	Black lynchings in 1880-1900 predict Democratic electoral victory in 1904-1912, even conditioning on prior Democratic performance; correlation is suggestive of electoral reversal	Table IX cols 1-2, p. 784	beta = 0.021*** (SE 0.006) on any Democratic win 1904-1912
R8	Causal mediation confirms Black lynchings as a positive channel for the Democratic electoral reversal; indirect effect is positive and significant; ~25% of total effect mediated via lynching	Table IX col 5, p. 784; Online Appendix Table E.2	Indirect effect = 0.004* (SE 0.002); direct effect = -0.013 (SE 0.018)

Overall (paper’s conclusion). The post-Reconstruction Democratic Party used racial violence, amplified through partisan newspapers, as a strategic tool to suppress Black political participation when legal disenfranchisement was unavailable. Close presidential election losses served as focal signals that credibly threatened Democratic hegemony; the ensuing lynching surge helped reverse Democratic electoral fortunes and prefigured the formal vote-suppression mechanisms of Jim Crow. These findings qualify the prevailing economic explanation of lynching, which emphasizes Black-white labor competition, by showing that political factors were primary.

Theory / model

The paper proposes no formal structural model. Its conceptual framework (Section II.B, p. 743) draws on Blalock (1967)‘s power threat hypothesis, which posits that a dominant group increases its use of social control measures against a minority as the minority’s political power grows. In the post-Reconstruction South, lynching of Black people was plausibly an instrument for maintaining white Democratic hegemony after emancipation removed formal slavery and before Jim Crow provided legal disfranchisement tools.

The framework posits two specific mechanisms through which a Democratic electoral loss could galvanize racial violence:

Informational channel (Section II.B, p. 745). Local political actors use recent vote shares to assess the relative strengths of competing groups. When actors lack complete information, even a close Democratic loss can serve as a focal point for coordination among members of the pro-Black opposition (following Anagol and Fujiwara (2016) and Granzier, Pons, and Tricaud (2023)). Anticipating such mobilization, local Democratic elites have an incentive to mount a violent preemptive backlash. This mechanism predicts that effects should be stronger where the loss constitutes more novel information, that is, in counties where Democrats had previously won by comfortable margins.

Elite strategy channel (Section II.B, p. 746 and Section IV.B, p. 768). Democratic newspapers, which dominated the Southern press and reported on county-level presidential results, could operationalize racial hatred by publishing anti-Black crime accusations (rape, murder, robbery). Such accusations served as narrative pretexts that lowered the coordination costs of lynch mobs. Glaeser (2005) models the supply side of this process: elites supply hatred to mobilize voters, dividing poor-white and Black coalitions. Ottinger and Posch (2024) document a related dynamic in which Southern elites used newspapers to mobilize white voters against populist political threats. In this paper, newspapers are the supply chain for manufactured racial antagonism directed specifically at suppressing Black political participation.

The framework is tested empirically; no equilibrium condition or Euler equation is derived. The two channels generate testable predictions: larger effects in previously uncompetitive counties (informational channel), and positive newspaper-violence correlation driven by Democratic-affiliated press (elite strategy channel). Both are confirmed in the data.

Method

The primary identification strategy is a sharp regression discontinuity design (RDD) exploiting the county-level popular-vote threshold for a Democratic loss (or win) in presidential elections. The method builds on regression-discontinuity-design for causal identification and panel-regression for the newspaper analysis.

Main RD estimator. Equation (1), p. 748:

$$\text{Any Lynching}_{c(s)\tau} = \beta \cdot \text{Democratic Loss}_{c\tau} + f(\text{Loss Margin}_{c\tau}) + \phi_\tau + \theta_s + \mathbf{X}'_{c\tau} \boldsymbol{\Gamma} + \varepsilon_{c\tau}$$

where $\text{Any Lynching}_{c(s)\tau}$ is a binary indicator for at least one Black (or white) lynching in county $c$ of state $s$ in the four-year window after presidential election $\tau \in \{1880, 1884, 1888, 1892, 1896, 1900\}$. $\text{Democratic Loss}_{c\tau}$ is a binary indicator for whether the Democratic presidential candidate lost the county popular vote. $f(\text{Loss Margin}_{c\tau})$ is a flexible running polynomial (linear in the main specification) in the Democratic vote-share loss margin. $\phi_\tau$ is an election-period fixed effect, $\theta_s$ is a state fixed effect, and $\mathbf{X}_{c\tau}$ is a vector of spatial controls including quadratic polynomials in county longitude and latitude.

The local average treatment effect (LATE) is identified under the assumption that counties where Democrats barely lost are comparable in all pretreatment characteristics to those where they barely won — a condition supported by balance tests (Table I, pp. 752-753) and a McCrary (2008) density test (p-value 0.4; p. 750).

Bandwidth selection. MSE-optimal bandwidths are computed following Calonico, Cattaneo, and Titiunik (2014), restricting estimation to county-elections close to the Loss Margin = 0 threshold. The core Black-lynching result (Table II col 3) uses an optimal bandwidth of approximately 15 percentage points, yielding about 1,481 observations.

Newspaper RD estimator. Equation (2), p. 769:

$$\% \text{Accusations}_{n(c)t(\tau)} = \beta \cdot \text{Democratic Loss}_{c\tau} + f(\text{Loss Margin}_{c\tau}) + \phi_\tau + \Upsilon_{t(\tau)} + \alpha_{\sigma(c)} + \varepsilon_{nt}$$

where $\% \text{Accusations}_{nt}$ is the share of newspaper pages (per 100) in newspaper $n$ in year $t$ (within the four-year period following election $\tau$) that contain anti-Black crime accusation phrases (“negro rape,” “negro murder,” “negro robbery” and variants). $\Upsilon_{t(\tau)}$ is a year-within-election-cycle fixed effect, and $\alpha_{\sigma(c)}$ is a newspaper-city fixed effect.

Causal mediation. Table IX column 5 combines the RD variation with a structural mediation analysis to decompose the effect of Democratic losses on downstream Democratic electoral success (1904-1912) into a direct effect and an indirect effect through the Black lynching channel, following a local average structural equation approach.

Empirical specifications

All specifications focus on the 11 former Confederate states (the “Solid South”) over the 1880-1900 presidential election cycle period, covering elections in November of each election year.

Main RD (R1, R2). Equation (1) with linear running polynomial, election-period and state fixed effects, and spatial covariates. Outcome: indicator for any Black (or white) lynching in the four years after election $\tau$. Estimated at MSE-optimal bandwidth. Standard errors clustered at the county level (counties reclassified if boundaries changed between elections; see p. 751). Reported in Table II Panel A, p. 755.

Uncompetitive-counties subsample (R3). Equation (1) restricted to county-elections where $|\text{Loss Margin}_{c,\tau-1}| > 16.2$ (the median vote margin among sample Democratic losses), so the loss in $\tau$ is relatively novel information. Reported in Table II Panel B, p. 756. Split-sample p-value tests the null of equal coefficients across subsamples.

Robustness suite (Table III, pp. 760-761): alternative clusterings (county, county-decade, state-election-period); specifications omitting covariates, spatial controls, or lat/lon polynomials; county fixed effects; county-pair fixed effects based on geographic proximity; quadratic controls for 1880 Black population shares; bandwidth multipliers of 0.5x and 1.5x; quadratic, cubic, and quartic running polynomials. All yield Black-lynching estimates of 0.073-0.160, all significant at $p < 0.10$.

Newspaper RD (R4, R5). Equation (2) estimated on a balanced panel of Southern city newspapers from newspapers.com (as of June 2023), linked to their contemporaneous county. Outcomes: % pages with anti-Black crime accusations (Table V), and probability of any county election reporting (Table VI). Election-cycle year fixed effects and newspaper-city fixed effects absorb within-newspaper trends. Subsampled by newspaper partisan affiliation from Gentzkow et al. (2014) and Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson (2014).

Elite composition and power-threat subsamples (R6). Equation (1) interacted with whether a county had a Democrat-only elite, a white-only elite, and an above-median Black population share (Table VII). The split-sample p-values test whether the Black-lynching effect differs significantly between the Blalock profile counties and the remainder.

Jim Crow moderation (Table VIII). Equation (1) and Equation (2) estimated separately for county-elections before and after a state enacted any Jim Crow ballot requirement or poll tax (timing from Jones, Troesken, and Walsh (2012)). The lynching effect is significant pre-Jim Crow (beta = 0.160***) and near zero post-Jim Crow (beta = 0.010), consistent with racial violence substituting for legal disenfranchisement.

Downstream electoral analysis (R7, R8). OLS regressions of Democratic presidential victory in 1904, 1908, or 1912 on a binary indicator for any Black lynching in the county during 1880-1900 election periods (Table IX cols 1-2). Causal mediation in col 5 adapts the baseline RD by fixing the Democratic loss margin at zero, then separately estimating the direct and indirect (through lynching) paths to later Democratic victory.

Datasets used

Dataset	Role in paper	Wiki page
Historic American Lynching (HAL) Project (Hines and Steelwater 2023)	County-level Black and white lynching indicator outcomes for all states except Texas and Virginia	Project HAL
Seguin and Rigby (2019) lynching data	County-level lynching outcomes for Texas and Virginia to supplement HAL	no page yet
U.S. Decennial Census (1870, 1880, 1900, 1910)	County demographics (population density, Black population share), slaveholder shares, Confederate veteran shares	Census
Clubb, Flanigan, and Zingale (2006) ICPSR presidential and congressional election returns	County-level vote tabulations for presidential elections 1880-1900 and congressional elections; main explanatory variable	no page yet
newspapers.com full-text archive (as of June 10, 2023)	Anti-Black crime accusation rates (% pages) and county election-reporting rates in Southern city newspapers	no page yet
Gentzkow et al. (2014) and Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson (2014) newspaper political affiliations	Partisan affiliation coding for Southern newspapers during the sample period	no page yet
Kestenbaum (2023) Political Graveyard	Partisan composition of local officeholders (mayors, postmasters) matched to counties	no page yet
Logan (2020) racial composition data	County racial composition of elected officials	no page yet

Sample: 11 former Confederate states; presidential elections 1880-1900 (6 elections); lynching window through approximately 1904; newspaper panel annually 1880-1900; downstream electoral analysis through 1912.

When to read the full paper

Read the original if you are: studying the political economy of racial violence, ethnic conflict, or elite-fomented social antagonism; working on the causal effects of electoral outcomes on social behavior beyond officeholding; extending the close-elections RD design to new social outcomes; or examining the historical origins of Jim Crow and Black disenfranchisement. The online appendix contains the McCrary density test, robustness tables (B1-E5), causal mediation details, and congressional-election extensions. Replication data are at doi.org/10.7910/DVN/08YUBP.

Attribution and rights

Source: peer-reviewed, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2026), 733-794. This distillation was extracted by an LLM on 2026-06-28 and is not human-verified or independently reproduced. The paper is paywalled; the verbatim PDF is not hosted here.

Testa, Patrick A., and Jhacova Williams. “Political Foundations of Racial Violence in the Post-Reconstruction South.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2026), 733-794. DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjaf045. © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Reproduced here as a brief extract for research purposes only.