Brian D. Feinstein

Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered

Few transformations have been more significant in American politics in recent decades than the Democratic Party’s embrace of racial liberalism and Republicans’ adoption of a more conservative stance towards civil rights related policies. We hypothesize that pressure to embrace a liberal position on civil rights was much stronger among northern Democrats and their coalitional partners than among northern Republicans and their affiliated groups by the mid-1940s, as the Democrats became firmly identified as the party of economic liberalism and labor unions. To test this hypothesis and develop a more fine-grained understanding of the dynamics of party positioning on civil rights, we collect and analyze a new data source: state political party platforms published between 1920 and 1968. These unique data suggest that Democrats had generally become the more liberal party on civil rights by the mid-to-late 1940s across a wide range of states. Our findings - which contradict Carmines and Stimson’s prevailing issue evolution model of partisan change - suggest that there were strong coalitional and ideological pressures that led the Democrats to embrace racial liberalism. This finding not only leads to a revised perspective on the civil rights revolution, but also to new insights into the dynamics of partisan realignment more generally.

Congressional Parties and Civil Rights Politics from 1933 to 1972

The reversal in the Democratic and Republican parties’ positions on civil rights is widely viewed as one of the most important political transformations in the last century. Drawing upon new indicators of members’ support for civil rights - which more effectively gauge preferences than do the roll-call based measures analyzed in previous studies - we show that northern Democrats displaced northern Republicans as the leading advocates of civil rights in the House beginning in the mid-1940s, and that the gap gradually increased thereafter. Rather than a relatively sudden change driven by national party elites, we argue that the civil rights realignment was a response to the two parties’ coalitional partners.

The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections

Political dynasties, families in which multiple members have held elected office, commonly feature in the U.S. Congress. I explored the electoral origins of this phenomenon and determined that members of political dynasties have a significant advantage over first-generation politicians in open-seat House elections. Using an original dataset containing candidate- and district-level covariates for all candidates in open-seat House contests between 1994 and 2006, I found that dynastic politicians enjoy “brand name advantages,” giving them a significant edge over comparable nondynastic opponents. In contrast, hypotheses concerning potential advantages stemming from past political experience and fundraising ability yield null results.

Judging Judicial Foreclosure

For the third time in the last several decades, policymakers are contemplating an overhaul of mortgage-finance regulations. Despite the considerable attention paid to how ex ante regulations affect the availability of credit and the appropriateness of the mortgage products that lenders offer, our understanding of how the legal framework governing foreclosures — a form of ex post borrower protection — impacts mortgage lending is incomplete. Leveraging data on loan applicants that are geographically proximate and subject to the same federal mortgage-finance regulations and nearly identical state foreclosure regimes — but for the presence or absence of a judicial foreclosure requirement — this analysis enables the identification of the independent effects of judicial-foreclosure requirements on loan approval decisions and the share of approved applicants that are offered subprime loans. I find that lenders adopt a more conservative posture in evaluating loan applications in jurisdictions where they must haul delinquent borrowers into court. All else equal, loan applications are less likely to be approved and approved borrowers are less likely to be offered subprime loans in judicial-foreclosure states. Further, some models indicate that these results may be amplified for borrowers with lower socio-economic status, suggesting that judicial supervision of foreclosures may have tempered one of the more flagrant practices of the subprime era: providing high-rate mortgages with a greater likelihood of default to lower-income and minority borrowers. These results suggest that, in contemplating changes to the regulation of mortgage lenders, policymakers should consider state foreclosure law to be among the tools in their regulatory toolkit.