Excited to see my paper “Do Black Politicians Matter? Evidence from Reconstruction” out in the Journal of Economic History. This paper shows the impact (and possible alternative future) if blacks has been granted full citizenship. 1/N bit.ly/38SAsgk
The main issue— we know very little about the quantitative effect of black politicians during Reconstruction. Did they influence policy? This question goes all the way back to Dunning and DuBois. 2/N 
This issue is complicated. I take the politicians in Foner’s “Freedom’s Lawmakers” and match them to their county of service. I find that black politicians are positively related to county tax revenue. This is consistent with DuBois’ argument in Black Reconstruction. 3/N
It’s important to note that this is an important correlation. This is the first evidence that black politicians were related in any way to local public finance during Reconstruction. And this is after controlling for voting demographics and preferences (median voter controls) 4/N
There’s a (potential) problem with the correlation. Black politicians could be endogenous to local preferences for redistribution. I therefore use free blacks in 1860 as an instrument for black politicians. Why? Because free blacks were much more likely to hold office 5/N
The biggest issue is whether free blacks are related to *white* political preferences. The answer is “not in any way I can see”. They aren’t related to voting patterns, black officials time in office, nor black voting in state constitutional conventions. 6/N
This makes a great deal of sense since free blacks could not vote in the South in 1860. (A BIG regret is that this argument is quite nuanced and articles don’t allow more space. See the excellent “Birthright Citizens” by @marthasjones_ for a terrific history of this.) 7/N
With this IV I find that black politicians had a large, economically significant impact on local taxes. They increased per capita tax revenue by about a hour’s wage at the time. That’s a huge impact. 8/N
The sad part is that all of this was undone very, very quickly. By 1880 redemption was enforced and these political gains were gone. The places where black politicians served reverted back to the level of other locations in the South. 9/N
I also find that black political goals did influence black human capital and the likelihood that you were a tenant farmer as opposed to a sharecropper. These are material gains from black leadership. DuBois is shown to be right (again) 10/N
This also tells us that stories of the persistence of antebellum institutions need to account for the disruptive effects of Reconstruction. It took extreme violence to change this. And we must account for this. This was a potential future that white supremacy stole from us 11/11
