Between 1963 and 1967, American public opinion and policy on issues of race whipsawed from a spike in concern about civil rights to a widespread call for “law and order.” Current scholarship points to the role of elite actors and feelings of group threat but these factors cannot adequately explain temporal and geographic variation in attitudes and voting behavior. Using finer grained and geocoded data, I find that black-led protest movements and the types of tactics employed are also critical to explaining white support or opposition to African American interests.
In the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections, proximity to black-led nonviolent protests was associated with increased county-level Democratic vote-share. By contrast, proximity to black-led violent protests caused a substantively significant decline in Democratic vote-share. These results suggest that feelings of cross-race commonality as well as threat are dynamic, contextual and amenable to manipulation by both elites and masses. CONT. (pdf)
Omar Wasow, Princeton U.