Stolen Representation

In the decades after Reconstruction, African Americans were systematically removed from the electorate in the American South using tools such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Stolen Representation draws on significant amounts of new historical data to explore how these tools of Black disfranchisement shaped state legislative politics in the American South.

The book draws on contemporary scholarship to develop theoretical arguments for how disfranchisement plausibly affected roll-call voting, committee assignments, and policymaking activity in southern state legislatures, and uses rich data on each of these areas to demonstrate disfranchisement's profound effects.

By analysing state legislative data and drawing on historical sources to help characterise the nature of politics in each state in the period around disfranchisement, Olson offers a nuanced, context-driven exploration of disfranchisement's effects, making a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between racial discrimination at the ballot box and public policymaking in the United States.