Working Papers

Email me at susanneschwarz(at)princeton.edu if you want a copy of the working papers listed below.

“Statebuilding, Fiscal Capacity, and the Carceral State: Evidence from the Jim Crow South (1880-1910)”

Abstract: How do states build fiscal capacity when conventional levers of public finance are politically contested? Focusing on the decades following the American Civil War, I investigate whether and to what extent ex-Confederate states strategically used penal institutions to consolidate their post-war finances when faced with a political environment vehemently opposed to conventional taxation regimes. After the Civil War, almost all Southern states introduced convict lease systems and started to rent out their prisoners, the majority of them African American, to private contractors in exchange for a fee. In this paper, I argue that convict leasing was used strategically, by way of incarcerating more individuals, to offset year-to-year fluctuations in revenue—a fiscal practice I call revenue smoothing. Using evidence from both historical primary sources and an original dataset on Postbellum Incarceration in the American South (PIAS), I show that Southern states responded to decreases in revenue growth with increases in incarceration. However, the states' ability to use leasing revenue in this way depended on the operational set-up of their leasing systems. Overall, my findings stress how state governments in the “New South” re-purposed antebellum institutions of racial oppression and coerced labor to serve their nascent statebuilding efforts.

Black Political Empowerment and Incarceration: Evidence from the Reconstruction South

Abstract: In this project, I seek to understand how black political empowerment during the brief period of Congressional Reconstruction (1867-1877) affected incarceration in the postbellum American South. To do so, I combine a novel measure of incarceration based on archival records on individual-level convictions in eight Southern states with county-level data on black officeholders in these states. To isolate the effect of black political power on incarceration, I employ a variety of identification strategies, including an instrumental variable approach that uses the number of antebellum free blacks in a given county as an instrument for the number of black political officeholders after the Civil War. I find that incarceration rates are lower in counties with more black officeholders during Congressional Reconstruction.

“Welfare State Experiences and Political Participation: Evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study”

Abstract: How do individuals’ experiences in the US welfare state shape political and civic engagement? As a growing number of Americans rely on government social services at some point over the course of their lives, scholars have taken an interest in understanding how enrollment in these welfare programs may affect mass politics. Yet, the political consequences of individuals’ experiences within welfare policy regimes, rather than specific welfare policies, remain understudied. In this paper, I distinguish between two welfare policy regimes—poverty relief and public insurance—to highlight how differences in welfare state experiences across regimes may yield positive or negative consequences for political life. In this paper, I use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to show that enrollment in poverty relief programs is associated with a lowered propensity for political participation and voting—a finding I replicated with both multivariate regression models as well as an analysis based on coarsened exact matching. I also find some evidence for the compounding effects of welfare state experiences: the more poverty relief programs individuals are enrolled in, and the longer they benefit from them, the more politically disengaged they seem to become. Conversely, enrollment in programs associated with the public insurance regime seems to have little to no effect on political participation and voting.