J. Morgan Kousser

Turnout and Rural Corruption: New York as a Test Case

In 1974 Philip Converse and Jerrold Rusk offered an institutional, and Walter Dean Burnham, a behavioral explanation of the decline in voter turnout in the northern United States around the turn of the century. An examination of turnout figures for New York State from 1870 to 1916 demonstrates that election statistics lend some support to both explanations, and that the elections around 1890 provide the strongest evidence in favor of the Converse-Rusk hypothesis. A systematic analysis of election-related stories in contemporary newspapers allows a test of Converses assertion that the introduction of the secret ballot decreased reported turnout by damping down what he alleges was widespread rural corruption. Concluding that neither previous theory stands up well when confronted with the detailed voting figures and newspaper evidence, we propose an alternative explanation which melds the institutional and behavioral hypotheses.

Ecological Inference from Goodman to King

Since it was introduced to historians nearly three decades ago, a statistical technique known as ecological regression has been widely used to analyze aggregate election returns and similar data in history, political science, and law, and methodologists have discussed problems with, extensions of, and alternatives to the technique. The literature has become so vast and complicated, and recent contributions to it are of such importance, that it is time for a comprehensive review. This article provides that review, starting at an elementary level, sorting through the major arguments and evidence, and explaining the nature of the most complicated as well as the simplest methods. Taking an intuitive, rather than a statistically rigorous approach, the article is aimed at historians and political scientists, particularly graduate students, who already have some statistical knowledge. Lawyers and expert witnesses in voting-rights cases may also find the article useful.

The State of Social Science History in the Late 1980s

Is social science history a dated fad, or has it been so fully accepted as to have become uncontroversial? Is it more or less popular with professors and graduate students today than in the recent past? Is its status higher at the most prestigious universities, or among their graduates, than at less highly ranked colleges? What do historians and other social scientists see as the strengths and weaknesses, the achievements and deficiencies of social science history (ssh)? To what degree do more traditional historians agree or disagree with social scientific historians and historically oriented social scientists about these matters? How widespread is the teaching of statistics and theory in history departments, and how sophisticated is it, compared with the offerings in social science departments? Has the field become truly interdisciplinary? To gauge opinion and gather facts on these and other topics, I sent out 456 questionnaires in May 1987 to individuals in three groups: historians who were members of the Social Science History Association (SSHA), nonhistorian SSHA members, and one non-SSHA member at each of the universities listed in the American Historical Associations Guide to Departments of History that claimed to offer Ph.D. programs. The response, partially stimulated by a reminder to those who did not reply within six weeks, was gratifyingly high: 105 SSHA historians, 101 SSHA members whose self-described primary departmental affiliation was not with a history department, and 98 non-SSHA historians returned at least partially completed questionnaires. Not only was the overall response rate of two-thirds respectable for a mail survey, but many people wrote useful and interesting comments in the margins, as I had invited them to, while others enclosed innovative syllabi or reflections on the subject. A copy of the questionnaire with the responses of the three groups to each question indicated appears as an appendix to this paper, and readers may wish to refer to it for the exact wording of questions and the precise numbers who answered each way. The non-SSHA group received only Part I of the survey, while the SSHA sample got both parts.

The Agenda for "Social Science History"

I want to take as my texts today statements made to me in correspondence and conversation by two senior quantitative historians. Each statement illustrates what I believe to be misjudgments about the proper methodological priorities for quantitative historians in America today. To spare these historians from publicity which their casual statements were not intended to invite, but mostly to protect myself against reprisal, I shall not name them here.

A Historian's Guide to Computing

Designed explicitly for the computer non-literate, this comprehensive guide for historians and other scholars offers clear advice on using the computer for information management and research. The author gives information on electronic mail, on-line data services and bibliographies, and discusses database management, statistics, graphs and text analysis, using real historical problems and data sets. He provides numerous signposts to readers in search of help with specific techniques and software.

Toward "Total Political History": A Rational-Choice Research Program

Political history is at an impasse. As the subjects of history expanded in the 1960s and 1970s, and as the prospects of societal change through political means dimmed in the 1980s, the study of war, diplomacy, and the writings and sayings of statemen--the principal raw materials of the old political history--lost favor with students and young professors alike. The organizing frameworks of politically centered history--Charles Beards class analysis, Frederick Jackson Turners stress on sectional splits, Louis Hartzs Lockeian consensus, Lee Bensons ethnoculturalism, and Walter Dean Burnhams critical-elections theory--have come under telling attack.

“The Onward March of Right Principles”: State Legislative Actions on Racial Discrimination in Schools in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract C. Vann Woodward transformed the history of race relations by focusing on the development of southern state segregation laws and practices. Anchoring his arguments in social science research, Woodward considered such laws to be both indicators and shapers of interpersonal attitudes and behavior. Neither historians nor political scientists have pursued Woodwards larger project of explaining the course of race relations in America, confining themselves largely to descriptive case studies of individual states or short periods of time or delving into vaguely defined cultures of racial customs and rhetoric. After showing how social scientific models of attitudes might illuminate not only Woodwards Jim Crow thesis but also other facets of the history of race relations, the author turns to the analysis of school racial-integration laws considered in 15 northern states and actually passed in 13 of them from 1855 through 1887. Developing gradually, the northern school integration laws amounted, in effect, to mirror images of the southern Jim Crow laws that Woodward highlighted. What social and political factors explain the dates at which each state, beginning with Massachusetts in 1855 and ending with Ohio in 1887, passed such laws, and how could those factors reflect the models of attitudes sketched earlier? As might be expected, surges in support for the Republican or allied parties speeded the passage of integration laws. More surprising, an index of the convenience of segregated schools bore no relation to the date of passage, and the presence of a relatively large percentage of foreign-born people in a state, particularly the Irish or Canadian, actually made the enactment of school integration for African Americans easier than in more homogeneously native-born white states. In the last section, both methodological and substantive implications are laid out. Systematically studying policies in a number of states over a substantial period of time might further invigorate the political science subfield of American Political Development and help revive the subject of government in American political history. Finally, the conflicts and progressive change sketched here make it difficult to believe in a solid white-supremacist consensus in late-nineteenth-century America, the study of such conflicts promises to restore African Americans to a role as shapers of the countrys race relations, and the events of the First Post-Reconstruction period suggest parallels with the post-1965 era in American race relations, which might be termed the Second Post-Reconstruction.

Post-Reconstruction Suffrage Restrictions in Tennessee: A New Look at the V.O. Key Thesis

Most contemporary observers accorded Mississippi primacy in the enactment of legal suffrage restrictions in the South. Delegates to its nationally watched 1890 constitutional convention broached most of the important arguments and proposals for disfranchisement, drafted the first comprehensive and permanent limitations on suffrage in the late nineteenth century South, and advanced the initial rhetorical and legal defenses of franchise contraction. Six other ex-Confederate states frequently adverted to Mississippis experience as they passed similarly sweeping revisions in their fundamental voting requirements in the dozen years after 1890. Scholars have almost universally followed the contemporary pattern by concentrating on these seven states in their analyses of I suffrage restriction. They have paid considerably less attention to the four Southern states which adopted simpler, mainly statutory limits on the electorate-Arkansas, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Yet the restrictive devices which Florida and Tennessee employed actually preceded the Mississippi convention, and although not as complex, were almost as effective as the Magnolia States regulations in curtailing Negro voting. More obviously partisan and seemingly less racist in its goals than the seven more familiar movements, the drive for restriction in Tennessee was typical of the largely neglected, but extremely significant acts of legislative suffrage contraction.

Evaluating Ecological Inference: An Introduction

The articles in this theme issue-separated into Part 1 (Summer) and Part 2 (Fall) - consider a wide range of data, comparing results produced by Gary King’s recently developed ecological inference (EI) technique with those of Leo Goodman’s older ecological regression (ER) method, sometimes benefiting from more direct evidence of individual behavior against which to match findings from both procedures. The conclusions are interesting, suggestive, even surprising.

Ignoble Intentions and Noble Dreams: On Relativism and History with a Purpose

In 1980, immediately after the Southern Historical Association Convention at the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta, historian Peyton McCrary and a bevy of voting-rights lawyers gathered together a group of historians to try to engage them as expert witnesses in voting-rights litigation. Earlier in 1980 in the case of Mobile v. Bolden, a plurality of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court had decided that to sustain a claim of vote dilution under the Voting Rights Act or the Fifteenth Amendment, members of minority groups had to prove that the relevant law had been passed with a racially discriminatory purpose, not merely that it had a current racially discriminatory effect. Since the ordinance requiring that the Mobile City Commission was to be elected at-large, rather than by single-member districts, had been passed (everyone thought at the time) in 1911, lawyers for the plaintiffs had no choice but to bring in the historians. Because McCrary lived in Mobile and knew the lawyers who had filed the Bolden case, he took over the principal organizing task. Most of the historians present at the Biltmore seemed to respond favorably, and some ended up working in a few cases. Others, probably better advised, went back to their usual research and teaching.