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Protecting the Right to Discriminate: The Second Great Migration and Racial Threat in the American West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

TYLER T. RENY  and
BENJAMIN J. NEWMAN
TYLER T. RENY*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
BENJAMIN J. NEWMAN*
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
*
Tyler T. Reny is a PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles ([email protected]).
Benjamin J. Newman is an Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside ([email protected]).
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Abstract

Taking advantage of a unique event in American history, the Second Great Migration, we explore whether the rapid entry of African Americans into nearly exclusively White contexts triggered “racial threat” in White voting behavior in the state of California. Utilizing historical administrative data, we find that increasing proximity to previously White areas experiencing drastic Black population growth between 1940 to 1960 is associated with significant increases in aggregate White voter support for a highly racially-charged ballot measure, Proposition 14, which legally protected racial discrimination in housing. Importantly, we find that this result holds when restricting the analysis to all-White areas with high rates of residential tenure and low rates of White population growth. These latter findings indicate that this relationship materializes in contexts where a larger share of White voters were present during the treatment and exercised residential-choice before the treatment commenced, which is suggestive of a causal effect.

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 112 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 1104 - 1110
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

We thank Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta, Matt A. Barreto, APSR's anonymous reviewers, and participants, panelists, and discussants at the 2018 Western Political Science Association Conference, the Midwest Political Science Association conference, and the UCLA Racial and Ethnic Politics Research Lab for helpful feedback and discussion. We thank Steven Melendez for his assistance with data preparation and processing. Finally, we are grateful for the research support from the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. Replication files can be found on the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UAQZRO.

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