One 5 page“reading response” essays onclass readingsthe student chooses(list of choices to be distributed). The aim is to identify the main argument of the theory with its key assumptions and causal

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Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Political Science Association and Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Political Science Review This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination: A Test of Three Explanations of Political Participation* LESTER M. SALAMON Duke University AND STEPHEN VAN EVERA University of California, Berkeley When The New York Times pointed out on June 5, 1969, that "voting apathy among blacks" was to blame for the defeat of all but one black candidate for Mayor in Mississippi's 1969 municipal elections, it was reflecting quite accurately the accepted political science wis- dom about voter participation. In a rare show of unanimity, political scientists have generally taken as given that nonparticipation in politics is a result of disinterest or apathy, and have fo- cused their research on specifying the exact so- cial, economic, and attitudinal correlates of such apathy. And even in this search for corre- lates of apathy, there is substantial agreement, for virtually every study of political participa- tion has concluded that participation is lowest (because apathy is highestyf D P R Q J W K H S R R r and the less well educated, whether in the United States or elsewhere. The only debate has been about why this should be so, with imagina- tive social scientists advancing explanations as diverse as "class differences in child rearing practices" and "differential political role expec- tations."' * This article is adapted from a chapter in a book on modernization in the American South by Lester M. Salamon, to be published this spring by Indiana Uni- versity Press. We are indebted to the Vanderbilt University Urban and Regional Development Center for financial as- sistance in the preparation of this article, and to Professors Richard Pride and Jorgen Rasmussen of Vanderbilt University for helpful advice. 'The literature on political participation is volumi- nous. Seymour Martin Lipset summarizes much of the empirical work linking nonparticipation to low in- come and education in "Who Votes and Who Doesn't?" in Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1963yf S S D Q d Robert Lane summarizes the theories purporting to explain this link in Political Life (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959yf S S 6 H H D O V R % H U Q D U d Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and William N. McPhee, Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954yf ; Philip K. Hastings, "The Voter and the Non-Voter," American Journal of Sociology, 62 (November, 1956yf , 303-04; Lester Milbrath, Political Participation (Chi- cago: Rand-McNally Co., 1965yf . For all its impressive empirical support, how- ever, the "income-education-apathy thesis" may have a potentially fatal flaw: It assumes that people fail to participate in politics chiefly be- cause they do not think it is worth the time or because they fail to understand what is at stake. It begins, in other words, with a conceptual framework attuned to political life in a modern democracy, where participation is truly open. But how appropriate is this framework for understanding political participation patterns where participation involves more than mere time and understanding-that is, where it in- volves serious risks as well? In such situations, the real explanation of variations in political participation rates may not be apathy at all, but fear-fear of violence, or more subtle forms of fear related to social and economic coercion. Significantly, however, most students of po- litical participation have neglected the impact of fear on participation, and have downplayed the coercive aspects of political life. Robert Lane, for example, identifies no less than eleven fac- tors that purport to account for lower-class nonparticipation in politics, but fear is not among them. Lipset and Milbrath develop their own catalogues of causes, but with the same result: virtually no mention of fear.3 Apa- thy, it seems, comes in 57 varieties, but fear in none. The one recent empirical analysis of political participation that even treats the subject of fear is the massive Matthews and Prothro analysis of Negro politics in the American South. But even Matthews and Prothro manage to dispense with fear in a hasty eleven pages out of 488, concluding, on the basis of measures of fear that we seriously question for reasons elabo- 2 The closest Lane comes to acknowledging a role for fear is in his discussion of the low sense of po- litical efficacy and limited self-confidence among the poor. Lane, Political Life, pp. 222-34. 'Lipset, "Who Votes?" in Political Man; and Milbrath, Political Participation, particularly pp. 48- 141. 1288 This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1289 rated below, that "intimidation and fear" are "not major causes" of Negro failure to partici- pate in politics as much as whites do.4 This finding is all the more surprising because it flies in the face of virtually every recent participant- observer account of southern black politics. According to one such study, voter registration workers in the South during the 1960s quickly discovered that "Apathy was too easy a catch- word"-it disguised more than it revealed, and thus misrepresented the underlying social real- ity. "To understand 'apathy' in its fullest mean- ing," Reese Cleghorn and Pat Watters therefore concluded: was to know that once all the South was totally resistant to the Negro vote, and that still none of the South was free of some form of resistance, and that just as the worst resistance of 1962-4 cast its shadow on areas where things were easier, so the memory and shadow of all the past re- sistance would be some part of "apathy" in 1962-4 and, probably, for some time to come ... violence and intimidation not just last year but twenty years ago take their toll.5 Clearly, it is time to reconsider empirically the role of fear in political participation. In addition to "apathy" and "fear," however, there is a third potential explanation of varia- tions in political participation. An impressive body of social science literature links protest and agitation to the degree of discrimination a disadvantaged group experiences. The greater the discrimination, this literature suggests, the greater the likelihood of protest, particularly when a period of relative improvement creates expectations that are then frustrated by a pe- riod of stagnation or decline.6 4 Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966yf S H P S K D - sis addedyf . I Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn, Climbing Jacob's Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967yf S S . 124-25 (emphasis addedyf . For other evidence from participant observers about the role of fear in southern black politics, see: Sally Belfrage, Freedom Summer (New York: Viking Press, 1965yf $ Q Q H 0 R R G \ & R P L Q J R I $ J H L Q 0 L V - sissippi (New York: The Dial Press, 1968yf 3 R O O y Greenberg, The Devil Has Slippery Shoes: A Biased Biography of the Child Development Group of Mis- sissippi (London: The Macmillan Company, 1969yf ; William McCord, Mississippi: The Long Hot Summer (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1965yf - D P H s Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963yf . 6 Tanter, for instance, found that domestic violence is greatest in countries where income inequality is greatest. Raymond Tanter, "Toward a Theory of Con- flict Behavior in Latin America," paper prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the International Political Science Association, 1967. Instead of a single "explanation" of political participation, in other words, there may be three: one based on fear, the second on dis- crimination, and the third on apathy. The pur- pose of this article is to evaluate these three po- tential explanations of political participation patterns by analyzing how well they account for the variations in political participation among blacks in the 29 black-majority counties of Mississippi during the first half-decade following the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This analysis will require the formulation of a suit- able measure of political participation or mobi- lization, the translation of each of the three "explanations" or models into "operational" terms, and the application of an appropriate "test" to measure the explanatory power of each. Before turning to these matters, however, we must look briefly at the overall record of black political participation in the Deep South since 1965, for this record poses the problem the remainder of this article seeks to unravel. The Problem: Variations in Black Voter Turnout When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, hopes ran high that the law would soon usher in a new day of democracy in the Deep South. With one surgical stroke, Congress cut away the elaborate legal growth that South- erners had nurtured for nearly a century to keep blacks from voting, and guaranteed that for five years the federal government would continue to root out any reappearances of the cancer.7 "They came in darkness and they This discrimination factor corresponds very closely to the concept of "relative deprivation" formulated by students of domestic violence. In its more refined forms, however, the "relative deprivation" notion focuses not simply on the actual distribution of re- sources between the lower classes and their "betters," but also on the perceptions of the lower classes about what they have a right to expect and on the relation- ship between these expectations and the possibility of fulfilling them. Most empirical tests of this notion to date, however, have had to measure these aspirations indirectly. See: James Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," American Sociological Review, 27 (Feb- ruary, 1962yf + D U U \ ( F N V W H L Q 2 Q W K H ( W L R O R J y of Internal Wars," History and Theory, 4 (1965yf , 133-63; Ted Gurr with Charles Ruttenburg, The Conditions of Civil Strife: First Tests of a Causal Model (Princeton, N.J.: Center of International Studies, April 1967yf 1 H L O - 6 P H O V H U 7 K H R U \ R I & R O - lective Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1963yf . For an opposite view, albeit on a slightly different point, see Crane Britton, The Anatomy of Revolu- tion, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1952yf , especially pp. 264-65. 7 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the culmination of extended efforts by civil rights forces to secure fed- eral assistance in their efforts to eliminate the bar- riers to black political participation in the South. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC 6 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1290 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 came in chains," President Johnson declared when he signed the law. "Today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and an- cient bonds."8 From afar, the record of the first half-decade under this law seems to confirm this euphoria. In the South as a whole, black registration rose from slightly more than 2 million in 1964 to 31/4 million by the end of the decade, and the number of black elected officials jumped from 72 to 473. In Mississippi, the results were even more dramatic: black voter registration soared from a mere 28,500 prior to the Voting Rights Act to 281,000 five years later, while the num- ber of black elected officials rose from zero to 72.9 Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a far less hopeful picture of black political progress. While the number of blacks registered to vote in the South rose by one million between 1964 and 1970, for example, the number of white registrants rose by two million, so that blacks ended the decade with little gain in relative power.'0 More important, black voter turnout has rarely exceeded 50 per cent of those eligi- ble, except in the more urban counties. As a result, although 85 southern counties had black voting age population majorities as of 1960, only four have elected black sheriffs and only four have elected black majorities on their gov- erning boards. In Mississippi alone, 29 counties have black majorities, yet none elected a black sheriff or a black majority on its governing board, and only one elected a black legislator in the first half decade under the Act."" Nor does The new law outlawed the literacy tests and other dis- criminatory voter registration procedures, authorized the Attorney General to appoint voting registrars in counties where less than half of the voting age blacks were registered, and created a procedure to review any changes in election law in five southern states, in- cluding Mississippi. Voting Rights Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 437, 42 U.S.C., 1973. The Act was extended in 1970 for another five years. 8 Quoted in James Sundquist. Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Years (Wash- ington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1968yf S . 274. a Voter Education Project, Black Elected Officials in the Southern States, mimeo (1969yf S L L 9 ( 3 . News, Vol. 3, No. 7, July 1969. p. 1; V.E.P. News, Vol. 4, Nos. 1 & 2, January-February 1970, p. 3. 10 V.E.P. News, Vol. 4, Nos. 1 & 2, January-February 1970, p. 3. In Mississippi, the black registration gain was more substantial: 242,500 black registrants were added compared to 147,000 whites. "This information comes from the Voter Education Project, Atlanta, Georgia. The four counties with black sheriffs as of July 1972 were Greene, Lowndes, Macon, and Bullock-all in Alabama. The four counties with black majorities on their governing boards were Greene in Alabama, Hancock in Georgia, and Surrey and Charles City in Virginia. In addition, at this writing, this situation seem to be changing. In the recent November 1971 elections in Mississippi, 309 blacks ran for public office at either the state or county level. Of these, 259 lost, including 28 out of 29 candidates for state legislature, 10 out of 10 candidates for Chancery Clerk (county executiveyf R X W R I F D Q G L G D W H V I R r Sheriff, 10 out of 10 candidates for county School Superintendent, and 67 out of 74 candi- dates for county Boards of Supervisors, even though virtually all of these candidates were running in districts with black majorities. The only victories, in fact, were in the least conse- quential offices-Justice of the Peace, Con- stable, etc.-while blacks running for more sig- nificant posts went down to defeat almost with- out exception.'2 Apparently, something other than the legal barriers removed by the Voting Rights Act is keeping blacks from participating fully in the southern political process. Even more puzzling than the weakness of this overall performance, however, have been the variations in black political participation among counties. Consider the case of Holmes and Humphreys counties in Mississippi, for ex- ample. On November 6, 1967, the newly en- franchised black voters of Holmes County elected the first black in this century to the Mississippi House of Representatives in the first local elections after the Voting Rights Act. On the same day, blacks in adjoining Humphreys County did not even bother to run a candidate for political office, even though they comprised 70 per cent of the county's population, and even though the white candidates running were no more popular among blacks than those in neighboring Holmes County. Nor can this con- trast be explained by any obvious difference be- tween the two counties; for the two appear, on the surface, to be virtual twins. A visitor would notice that Holmes to the east is a bit more hilly, but both are overwhelmingly rural; nei- ther contains a town exceeding 3,000 persons; both grow primarily cotton and soybeans on their fields; and in both the visitor would en- counter black and white faces in almost exactly the same proportions (about 2/2 :1yf 5 H V L G H Q W s in both counties, moreover, are exceedingly poor (the median income was $1580 in Hum- phreys and $1453 in Holmes in 1960yf D Q G L O O - educated (the median adult education was 6.2 blacks have a majority on the Election Commission in Holmes County, Mississippi. 2 Millsaps College, The Institute of Politics in Mis- sissippi, "General Election 1971: Some Notes on Elec- tions Involving Black Candidates." mimeographed. For an analysis of this election, see: Lester M. Salamon, "Mississippi Post-Mortem: The 1971 Elections," New South, 27 (Winter 1972yf . This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1291 years in Humphreys and 6.9 years in Holmes in 1960yf ) L Q D O O \ W K H Z K L W H F R P P X Q L W L H V R I E R W h counties have been equally unfriendly to black political aspirations. In both, blacks were to- tally excluded from the political process before 1965. And in one test of white racial feeling, the 1964 presidential election, an identical 96 per cent of the white voters in both counties bolted from the Democratic party and from the first southern candidate for president in mem- ory in order to support a candidate who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.'3 Were this contrast between Holmes and Humphreys counties unique, it would naturally attract little interest. But it is not unique. The same puzzling contrasts occur between other seemingly identical counties in Mississippi- like Marshall and DeSoto, or Issaquena and Sunflower-as well as between similar counties elsewhere in the Deep South. While in some areas blacks have been able to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the Voting Rights Act to build significant bases of political power, in others they have not, and the reasons for the difference are not immediately appar- ent. These baffling variations in black political participation may, of course, be purely acciden- tal. On the other hand, however, they may hold important clues about the surviving barriers to full black political participation in the Deep South, and, by implication, about the barriers to the participation of disadvantaged groups in politically underdeveloped areas elsewhere in the world. The remainder of this article seeks to determine which of these alternatives is cor- rect by systematically examining the variations in black political participation rates in Missis- sippi in the light of the three models outlined above. Methodology and Data Two methods are potentially available to an- alyze political participation patterns: survey re- search and aggregate analysis. Survey research has the important advantage of avoiding the so- called "ecological fallacy," the problem of in- ferring individual behavior from aggregate data,14 because it permits a researcher to ex- 13 Demographic data is from U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1960 Census of Population: General Social and Economic Character- istics, PC (1 yf & : D V K L Q J W R Q ' & 8 6 * R Y H U Q - ment Printing Office, 1960yf . Voting statistics are from F. Glenn Abney, Missis- sippi Election Statistics, 1900-1967 (University, Mis- sissippi: The University of Mississippi Bureau of Gov- ernmental Research, 1968yf S . 14 The classic statement of this problem can be found in W. S. Robinson, "Ecological Correlations and plain individual-level decisions to participate or not to participate in terms of individual-level data. For the purposes of this research, how- ever, the survey method had serious drawbacks that argued against its use. Not only would a questionnaire have been prohibitively costly, but also there was serious reason to doubt the trustworthiness of the data it would generate. One of the hypotheses we proposed to test, af- ter all, was that nonparticipation is a result of fear. But using a questionnaire to measure the degree of fear experienced by blacks in rural Mississippi is like using an electron microscope to examine an electron: in both cases, the mea- suring instrument knocks the object to be mea- sured out of sight. What is more, questionnaire data could not provide an answer to the ques- tion of why black political action was more successful in some places than others, at least not without an extremely large sample. Because of these serious inadequacies of the survey method for our purposes, and in view of the recent literature refuting earlier criticisms of the aggregate approach,'5 we adopted the ag- the Behavior of Individuals," American Sociological Review, 15 (June, 1950yf 6 H H D O V R $ X V W L n Ranney, "The Utility and Limitations of Aggregate Data in the Study of Electoral Behavior," in Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics, ed. Austin Ranney (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1962yf S S . 91-102. 15 The literature on "ecological inference" has come virtually full circle since Robinson's statement of the problem in 1950. In a recent volume on ecological analysis, for example, Erik Allardt argues that pre- occupation with the question of faulty inference has distracted attention from the more important question of the fruitfulness of various hypotheses. And in Al- lardt's view, the ecological approach may "facilitate fruitful causal interpretations better than the corre- sponding individual data, if such are available." Erik Allardt, "Aggregate Analysis: The Problem of its In- formative Value," in Quantitative Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. Mattei Dogan and Stein Rokkan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1969yf S . Even more important, several scholars have identi- fied ways to minimize the dangers of ecological infer- ence without sacrificing the entire approach. These methodological clues have been incorporated in the research reported here. In a 1967 article in this Re- view, for example, W. Phillips Shively pointed out that the dangers of "ecological inference" can be mini- mized so long as "individuals have been grouped in such a way that their scores on the dependent variable are unrelated to the aggregation in which they fall, except indirectly through their scores on the indepen- dent variable." As will become clear below, the ex- planatory models used here meet this condition. See W. Phillips Shively, "'Ecological' Inference: The Use of Aggregate Data to Study Individuals," American Political Science Review, 63 (December 1969yf ; and Hubert M. Blalock, Jr., Causal Inferences in Non- experimental Research (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965yf S S . The dangers of "ecological inference" have been This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1292 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 gregate approach here, using "ecological regres- sion" analysis. Instead of focusing on the indi- vidual potential black voter as the unit of anal- ysis, therefore, we focused on the potential black electorate in an entire county. The re- search task, then, was to explain variations in black political participation among Mississippi's 29 black majority counties in terms of the char- acteristics of the potential black electorates in these counties.16 The first step, naturally, was to devise an in- dex of black participation for each county (the dependent variableyf 8 Q W L O U H F H Q W O \ V W X G H Q W V R f black politics in the South have used voter reg- istration as the basic participation measure be- cause registration figures were the only ones kept by race.'7 In Mississippi, however, regis- tration figures are not kept by race. What is more, the real power lies in the vote, so that registration figures can be seriously misleading. Registering without voting is an empty gesture at best: it gives the outward appearance of ac- tivity but leaves the distribution of power es- sentially unchanged. In the present study, therefore, an effort was made to measure voting power directly. In par- reduced even further here by adopting the suggestion made recently by Dogan and Rokkan to "develop statistical models for the exploration of alternative linkages between individual distributions and higher unit characteristics" as a way to avoid the "ecological fallacy." In this article, three "alternative linkages" are explored. See Mattei Dogan and Stein Rokkan, "In- troduction," Quantitative Ecological Analysis, ed. Dogan and Rokkan, p. 8 (emphasis addedyf . 1a The county was chosen as the unit of analysis be- cause it is the smallest unit for which political, eco- nomic, and social statistics are readily available. Only the counties with black majorities were used because they are, by and large, the only ones where black candidates have run for countywide office and where civil rights activity has occurred, both of which are important in measuring the dependent variable, as will become clear below. Only the black majority counties in one state are used to eliminate the effects of different state voting laws and political histories. Mississippi was chosen because it is the state with which we are most familiar and because, except for Georgia, it is the only one with a large enough num- ber of black majority counties to permit a statistically significant test. The "explanations" developed here were tested using correlation and multiple regression analysis, two stan- dard statistical measures of relationship. The data analysis was performed on the Vanderbilt University Sigma-7 computer using standard Product Moment Correlation and Multiple Regression programs. We are indebted to Laird Heal of the Vanderbilt Univer- sity Computer Center for assistance with these pro- grams. 17 See, for example, Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, "Social and Economic Factors and Negro Voter Registration in the South," American Political Science Review, 57 (March, 1963yf H V S H F L D O O y p. 26. ticular, two measures of black voter participa- tion were developed. First, statistics were col- lected on the votes received by all black candi- dates who ran for countywide elected office (either in the primaries or in the general electionsyf G X U L Q J W K H I L U V W K D O I G H F D G H D I W H U W K e passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.18 The votes of the top two black vote-getters in each county were then averaged, in order to reduce the influence of special circumstances or un- usual personalities, and the average was divided by the black voting age population in the county to give an overall mobilization index. Counties without two black candidates for countywide office were assigned indices on the basis of the assumption that had black candi- dates run in these counties, they would have done no better, but also no worse, than the weakest candidate who did run in another county.'9 Strictly speaking, of course, this "mobiliza- tion" index may not be a precise measure of total black voter turnout since some blacks un- doubtedly voted for the white candidates. In the context of Mississippi in the latter 1960s, however, those black voters who did so were effectively voting against the Civil Rights Movement, since all but a handful of the white candidates were outspoken opponents of the Movement. In fact, in the few cases where white candidates indicated their support for black suffrage and solicited black votes, black candidates did not run against them.20 If not a precise measure of black turnout, therefore, the vote totals of the black candidates nevertheless constitute an excellent index of black political mobilization, of black electoral turnout in sup- port of the Civil Rights Movement. This is par- ticularly true, moreover, because the tense cli- mate of Mississippi racial politics in the 1960s made it highly unlikely that very many white votes escaped to these black candidates, except by accident. The votes for these black candi- dates thus probably reflect quite well the num- ber of blacks in each county who turned out to vote for a change in the status quo. As a check on this mobilization index, how- "8 Countywide offices were at stake in two Missis- sippi elections during this period-in 1967 and 1968. The posts for which candidates ran county-wide in 1967 were: Sheriff. Chancery Clerk, State Senator, and School Superintendent. In 1968, they were: Elec- tion Commission (five members per countyyf D Q d School Board (five members per countyyf . 1' Four of the 29 counties analyzed here had only one black candidate for countywide office, and nine had none. 20 This was the case, for example, with regard to the white candidate for Chancery Clerk in Wilkinson County, and the white candidate for State Senator in Holmes County. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1293 Table 1. Index of Black Voter Mobilization by County, Twenty-Nine Mississippi Counties Black Voter Black Voter County Mobilization County Mobilization Index Index Jefferson 53yb / H I O R U H \b Claiborne 50 Sharkey 29 Wilkinson 49 Washington 25 Holmes 43 Bolivar 26 Issaquena 43 DeSoto 21 Jefferson Davis 43 Humphreys 20 Marshall 43 Jasper 19 Amite 42 Noxubee 19 Madison 40 Quitman 19 Copiah 39 Tate 19 Panola 34 Yazoo 18 Coahoma 30 Tallahatchie 17 Clay 30 Kemper 16 Carroll 30 Sunflower 15 Tunica 15 ever, a second one was constructed on the basis of the votes in the 1968 presidential election, for which uniform returns are available for all counties. From the point of view of measuring black political participation, the 1968 presiden- tial election provided an unusual opportunity. Where the 1964 presidential election had re- quired southern whites to leave the Democratic party and vote for an arch-conservative non- southerner over a semi-Populist southern Dem- ocrat in order to register their opposition to civil rights, the 1968 election afforded them a greater array of more palatable alternatives. Both Nixon and Wallace appealed to the south- ern white vote. The Democratic candidate, on the other hand, was the very northerner whose civil rights stand at the 1948 Democratic election prompted the southerners to storm out in protest. If Lyndon Baines Johnson was able to attract no more than 5 or 6 per cent of the white votes in these black-belt counties in 1964, therefore, it seems likely that Hubert H. Hum- phrey received far fewer in 1968. As a result, the Humphrey vote totals very probably repre- sent the clearest possible approximation of the black voter turnout in this election, or at least of the turnout of blacks who support the strug- gle for civil rights. Since these two indices of black voter mobili- zation turned out to be very closely related (correlation = +.924yf D V L Q J O H F R P E L Q H G L Q - dex was computed by taking an average of the two.21 The results, noted in Table 1 above, 21 In mathematical terms, this participation index was computed as follows: demonstrate the wide variation in black politi- cal mobilization among Mississippi counties. The task now is to try to explain these varia- tions, using the three models of participation mentioned earlier. To do so, it is necessary to translate each model into operational terms and test it against the data on black political partici- pation. The following three sections treat the fear, discrimination and apathy models in turn, showing how each model was measured and what proportion of the variation in black par- ticipation rates it is able to account for. In each case, the Humphrey vote, the black candidate vote, and the combined black mobilization in- dex were all tested separately. Since the results were virtually identical, however, only the re- sults using the combined index are reported. Fear and Black Political Participation Fear is an exceptionally difficult phenome- non to measure, which helps to explain why students of political participation have gener- ally ignored it. It may also help to explain why Matthews and Prothro, the only recent stu- dents of political participation who have ana- lyzed the role of fear, reached a conclusion that differs so fundamentally from virtually all the first-hand, participant-observer reports avail- able about black politics in the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s.22 Matthews and Prothro measured the impact of fear in two ways: first, by comparing partici- pation rates to the incidence of overt racial vio- 22See note 5, supra. Humphrey Vote Vote for top two black candidates for countywide offlce/2 Country Black Participation Rate =County Black VAP County Black VAP 2This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1294 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 lence in southern counties (as measured by the Tuskegee lynching statistics and the more re- cent Southern Regional Council's statistics on civil rights violenceyf D Q G V H F R Q G E \ U H O D W L Q g participation rates to questionnaire responses from blacks who were asked if they "had ever heard of anything happening to Negroes around here who have voted or taken some part in politics or public affairs."23 In both cases, they hypothesized that participation would be low where the incidence of violence, or the perception of violence, was high. Both of these measures have serious draw- backs, however-so serious, in fact, that they throw into question Matthews's and Prothro's whole conclusion that "intimidation and fear" are "not major causes" of Negroes' failure to participate in politics as much as whites.24 In the first place, by hypothesizing an inverse rela- tionship between violence and participation, Matthews and Prothro misread seriously the role of violence in southern society, and the re- lationship between violence and fear. In partic- ular, they assume that the absence of violence signifies the absence of fear. In the rural Deep South, however, the opposite seems closer to the truth. As the United States Civil rights Commission pointed out as late as 1968, a "generalized atmosphere of intimidation" pre- vailed in many areas of the Deep South "even in the absence of specific threats or reprisals."25 Historically, violence in the Deep South has been the instrument-in-reserve-perpetually available, but not always used. Violence, after all, is an expensive form of social control, and those in positions of influence have every in- centive to restrict its use.26 The Southern caste system was most successful, therefore, when it was least violent-i.e., when the fear of vio- lence made the use of violence unnecessary. To equate the nonoccurrence of violence with the absence of fear, as Matthews and Prothro do, is thus to misinterpret badly the underlying social reality. Indeed, far from expecting the most vi- olent places to be the least active politically, there is reason to expect them to be the most 23 Matthews and Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics, pp. 166 and 303. 24 Matthews and Prothro, p. 308. 25 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Political Partici- pation: A Study of the Participation by Negroes in the Electoral and Political Processes in Ten Southern States Since the Passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968yf S . 26 For a revealing discussion of the role of violence and intimidation of blacks in the southern caste sys- tem, see: Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropo- logical Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941yf S S . active; for violence in the rural South has his- torically not been unleashed without a cause, and that cause has usually been black unrest and agitation. Matthews and Prothro, in other words, may be confusing cause and effect. Fear may be the cause of low participation; but the presence of overt violence may really signify the breakdown of fear. A second problem with Matthews and Prothro's treatment of fear is that by focusing exclusively on overt violence, it ignores some of the more important, day-to-day sources of fear. Most ubiquitous of these is economic coercion. While violence, or the fear of violence, may have created the desired climate of apprehen- sion, economic intimidation has usually pro- vided the more reliable and economical instru- ment of control. In the rural and small town setting of the Deep South, most blacks could be controlled through the simple expedient of eco- nomic pressure without resort to physical vio- lence. This was so because virtually all blacks were dependent to some extent on local whites for their income, and because the small-town setting facilitated intimate social control. If a black became "uppity" and began demanding his "rights," it was easy to organize a compre- hensive program of coercion: to have him fired, deprived of a loan at the bank or store, barred from receiving welfare, and harassed by the authorities. Violence could therefore be re- served for the unusual cases, while economic pressure did its job day by day. When one na- tional civil rights group developed a standard- ized form for checking off the excuses local Negroes gave for refusing to register to vote, therefore, it discovered that "economic pres- sure" easily led the list of items checked.27 And this was so not only for the poverty-stricken plantation laborers and maids, but also for the better-off teachers and professionals who worked for white-dominated county School Boards. A study commissioned by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1964 to determine why so few black teachers registered to vote in Mississippi thus discovered that "fear of loss of job was the most common response," outdis- tancing even "fear of violence."28 On the basis 2 Watters and Cleghorn, Climbing Jacob's Ladder. Watters and Cleghorn report (p. 129yf W K D W 0 L V V L V V L S S i bankers used to tell black loan applicants in the 1960s that: "If you can afford to vote, you don't need a loan." " U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings, Jack- son, Mississippi, February 16-20, 1965 (Washing- ton. D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965yf , , 209. Interestingly, this study was done by James Pro- thro, yet Prothro neglected to mention it in his book on Negro politics in the South published two years later. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1295 of this and other evidence, the Civil Rights Commission concluded that "the economic de- pendence of Negroes in the South inhibits them from engaging freely in political activity and voting for candidates of their choice."29 By fo- cusing exclusively on physical violence and ig- noring the relationship between economic in- timidation and fear, Matthews and Prothro leave themselves open to serious questions about the credibility of their conclusion that fear is not a cause of black nonparticipation in politics. Since violence is a poor index of fear, some other measure had to be found. The discussion above, and the general literature on southern society, suggested a solution to this problem by making it clear that fear in the rural South is not so much a result of specific incidents of re- pression as it is a result of a general condition of vulnerability. To the extent that the level of fear among blacks varies from place to place, therefore, it should vary in relation to the de- gree of black vulnerability to white coercion- whatever the form of that coercion. The search for a suitable measure of fear thus resolved it- self into a search for suitable measures of black vulnerability. Two such measures seemed most promising, moreover-one reflecting the degree of black economic dependence, and the other the level of black organizational development in a county. Economic Dependence and Participation: The "Simple Fear Model." So far as economic dependence is concerned, the discussion above, and the general literature on the southern caste system, suggest quite strongly that blacks in the Deep South are likely to be less fearful to the extent that they are not economically de- pendent on local whites and are therefore able to withstand at least a modicum of economic pressure. Economic dependence, however, does not seem to be merely a function of income. After all, the wealthiest class of blacks, the school teachers, are commonly acknowledged to be among the most dependent, for their in- come is controlled by white school officials who have not hesitated to keep the threat of ex- pulsion constantly before potentially "uppity" black educators.30 By contrast, black farm 29 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Political Par- ticipation, p. 127. :The most systematic evidence on the point is the four-county survey of black Mississippi school teachers conducted for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Commissioner Rankin summarized this study well when he asked the primary investigator if low teacher voter participation could not be attributed to "the advice of the superintendents and principals that 'you be careful or you might lose your job. The owners, although generally far poorer, at least enjoy a modicum of economic independence. Not the amount of income, but the source therefore seems most crucial. Thus, the larger the proportion of blacks in a county who re- ceive their incomes from sources relatively independent of local white control, presumably the greater the black political participation rate. To test this idea, the U.S. Census' occupa- tional classifications were divded into two ba- sic groups according to how vulnerable the blacks holding these occupations would be to white economic coercion. Black farm owners and businessmen, for example, were placed in the "least vulnerable" category, and plantation laborers and maids in the "most vulnerable." (See Table 2 on the next page.yf 7 K H Q X P E H U R f blacks in each category was then computed as a percentage of the black voting-age population for each country. This figure became the basic index of vulnerability and formed the basis of what we will call the "simple fear model" of black participation.31 As a check on this occupation-related eco- nomic dependence figure, however, data were collected on another measure of black eco- nomic vulnerability-home ownership. The frequent stories of civil rights activists who were evicted from their homes in retaliation for registering to vote suggested quite strongly that black families who own their homes will feel less vulnerable, and hence less fearful, than answer was an unequivocal yes. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mississippi Hearings, 1965, I, pp. 207- 215, especially p. 214. 3"It is important to note here that Matthews and Prothro, in their study of Southern black political par- ticipation, found little relationship between black oc- cupational level and black political participation. How- ever, Matthews and Prothro were content to divide occupations simply into the standard white-collar vs. blue-collar categories commonly used by sociologists and political scientists. In doing so, however, they were implicitly accepting a conceptual framework we have argued is inadequate to bring the key features of black politics in the South into focus. Matthews and Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics, pp. 12-13. Dividing the black labor force into "most vulner- able" and "least vulnerable" categories, however, is not a simple task. The Census classifications of occu- pations do not correspond very precisely to the distinc- tion of interest to us here. For example, the occupa- tions grouped together in the Census classification "Operatives and Kindred Workers" include highly vulnerable plantation tractor drivers and far less vul- nerable railroad employees. The Census classification "Farmers and Farm Managers" includes both farm- owners and sharecroppers. To compile Table 2, there- fore, it was necessary to make a number of difficult decisions, reflected in the Table notes. These decisions were based on the existing sociological literature on southern society, and on numerous interviews with civil rights activists in Mississippi. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1296 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 Table 2. Occupations of Nonwhite Labor Force Arranged According to Vulnerability to White Economic Pressure Least Vulnerable Most Vulnerable Uncertain Farmownersa Farm Laborers Clerical Workers Manufacturing Workersb Sharecroppers and Tenants Sales Workers Non-Farm Proprietors Household Service Workers Craftsmen Workers Employed Outside County of Unemployed Operatives Residences Service Workers, Except Private Professionalsd Household a Instead of using the Census of Population classification "Farmers and Farm Managers," which includes tenants and sharecroppers, the number of black farmowners was taken from the U. S. Census of Agriculture, 1964. This created some incomparability in the figures, but not enough to make a difference. Farmowners were considered relatively invulnerable because they could at least not be fired, and because they normally grew some of their own food, thus making them able to resist at least some economic pressures. b Instead of trying to cull the number of manufacturing workers from the occupation classifications of "Crafts- man," "Operatives," and "Non-Farm Laborers," the industry classification "Manufacturing Workers" was used instead of the occupation classifications. The decision to include manufacturing workers among the Least Dependent reflected the assumption that it is difficult to impose sanctions in an industrial enterprise because of the scale of the operation and the problem of training replacements. Manufacturing employers, moreover, were likely to be outsiders who would be less likely to impose economic sanctions on black employees who might vote. c The decision to include "Workers Employed Outside their County of Residence" in the Least Vulnerable category reflected the testimony of civil rights activists that whites have greater difficulty coercing blacks who have Jobs in other counties. Nevertheless, the inclusion of this factor caused some unavoidable overlap. Many of those who worked out- side their county of residence were probably manufacturing workers, but there is no way to determine how many. d Inclusion of the "professionals" in the Least Vulnerable category was perhaps the most difficult decision of all. The largest group of professionals, the public school teachers, are hardly among the "least dependent." But other professionals, including doctors, lawyers, embalmers, federal government employees, and some preach- ers enjoy relatively great independence. The inclusion of the "Professionals" in the Least Vulnerable group rested on the assumption that the percentage of the nonwhite labor force employed as public school teachers would be roughly the same in each county so that any variations in the percentage of professionals in the county's nonwhite labor force could be attributed to the presence of professionals other than public school teachers. those who are renting or occupying plantation shacks at the sufferance of the planter.32 These measures of economic dependence were then tested against the data on black polit- ical mobilization. The results, depicted in Table 3, give ample support to the hypothesis that black voter turnout would be lower in counties where blacks are most vulnerable to economic intimidation. The correlation be- tween dependence and voter turnout was high, statistically significant, and in the expected di- rection, no matter which index of dependence was used. As Figure 1 illustrates, voter turn- out tended to be highest in those counties with the largest percentage of blacks in the least dependent',occupations, precisely the pat- tern hypothesized. This "simple fear model," in fact, accounts for 25-30 per cent of the varia- 3-Homeownership figures came from the U.S. Cen- sus of Housing, 1960, Vol. I: States and Small Areas, Part 26, Mississippi (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern- ment Printing Office, 1963yf S S 6 L J Q L I L F D Q W O \ , these two measures of black economic dependence were closely related. The correlation between the per- centage of a county's black electorate in the Most Vulnerable occupations, and the percentage of blacks in owner-occupied homes in a county was -0.863. tion in black political participation among Mis- sissippi counties.3 Without a sizable cadre of blacks with relatively secure sources of income, the evidence seems to confirm, a county is un- likely to enjoy a high rate of black support for the Movement, despite the legal safeguards of the Voting Rights Act. The right to vote in the rural South, in other words, still carries a rather substantial price for blacks. Organization, Economic Dependence, and Black Participation: The "Expanded Fear Model." Critical as economic independence seems to be in explaining black voter turnout, however, it hardly tells the whole story. As Figure 1 illustrates, Jasper and Kemper Coun- ties, with the same proportion of blacks in de- pendent occupations as Amite and Jefferson 3The probability that this result might have hap- pened purely by chance was a mere 0.0029, or only 3 in 1000. Using a 5 per cent level of significance, this result is therefore clearly significant. Strictly speaking, the significance level or prob- ability measure is not really applicable here because these counties are not perceived as a random sample from a larger population. Nevertheless, the signifi- cance level is still interesting as a benchmark. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1297 Table 3. Correlations Between Indices of Black Economic Dependence and Black Political Participation, Twenty-Nine Mississippi Counties Index of Vulnerability Correlation Coefficient Percentage of NW labor force in most dependent occupations, -0.538* Percentage of NW labor force in least dependent occupations + .518* Black homeowners as percentage of black families + .414* a NW = Nonwhite. * Significant at the .05 level. Counties, nevertheless have black participation rates that are not even half as great. Blacks in Issaquena are more vulnerable economically than their brothers in Noxubee and Yazoo, yet support the Movement twice as much. In fact, it is possible to divide most of the twenty-nine counties into two groups, as indicated in Fig- ure 1. Group A counties perform as expected in our hypothesis: participation increases as the percentage of persons in relatively independent occupations increases. Group B counties, how- ever, fail to conform to this pattern. For them, changes in the degree of dependence seem to make little difference in voter turnout rates. Obviously some other factors are at work. Eco- nomic independence may be a necessary con- dition for black participation, but it is not sufficient. While variations in the degree of black economic dependence account for 25- 30 per cent of the variation in black voter turnout, they still leave 70-75 per cent un- accounted for. How can we account for this remaining variation? And does it discredit the view that "fear" is the cause of black non- participation? A glance at the recent history of just one of the counties represented in Figure 1, Holmes County, suggests a possible answer to these questions. Blacks in Holmes County were no less economically dependent on local whites in 1967, when they elected the first black man in a century to the Mississippi Legislature, than they were in 1962, when fewer than a handful of blacks were willing to try to register to vote. What transpired between these dates, moreover, was not a change in white attitudes, but the emergence of a grass-roots, black political orga- 55 -- 55 or JEFFERSON # 50 / CLAIBORNE-/ WILKINSON /,/ A ,, / it 45-/ HOLMES / JEFF DAVIS w / ISSAQUENA MARSHALL /MADISON AMITE 4 / //OPIAH F ~ ~~/ / 0 35 / PANOLA / z z // / 30, / COAHOMA / CARROLL CLAY 30 SHARKEYo / *LEFLORE / I- ~~BOLIVAR/~ o 2 /WASHINGTON > 25/ m 20 QUITHAt * NOXUBEE DESOTO JASPER YAZOO TIT TALLAHtATCHIE * TATE KEMPER B TUNCA SUNFLOWER 10 _jI . I I I I I 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 PERCENTAGE OF NONWHITES IN LEAST DEPENDENT OCCUPATIONS Figure 1. Comparison of Black Voter Turnout and Percentage of Non-White Voting Age Population in the "Least" Dependent Occupations in 29 Mississippi Counties. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1298 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 nization. According to the two civil rights orga- nizers who worked in the county during this pe- riod, the major consequence of this organiza- tional development was to enable individuals to "manage their fear" through group solidarity.34 What this suggests is that fear, at least fear of violence, can be mitigated by organization, by the creation of explicit bonds of trust that enable sizeable groups of individuals to coordi- nate their action and thus spread whatever risks flow from political involvement. Given the conventional explanation that links organization to political participation by reference to the effect political organization has on reducing apathy and stimulating interest,35 it is important to inquire why this might be so, why organization should be linked to participa- tion through the medium of fear as well. The answer, we hypothesize, lies in the cost-benefit logic that confronts any individual contemplat- ing political action in a context that has tradi- tionally rewarded such action with violent re- prisal. In the absence of organization, there is no way to share risks by orchestrating coordi- nated action by many. As a consequence, no one wishes to act, since the individual risks are too great. Furthermore, the very process of building an organization which would permit mass action will probably never develop spon- taneously, because to begin it would require a very risky initiative on someone's part. So ev- eryone is paralyzed-no one dares to move. But if organizations can be forged, some of this fear-induced paralysis can be relieved. If a thousand people march through the county seat one morning, the risk run by each marcher is only one in 1,000, while it would be closer to one in one for the first solitary picket or voter registrant in an unorganized context. As the number of people taking action grows, the risk being run by each individual falls until a point 34 Sue and Henry Lorenzi, "Managing Fear by a Community-Holmes County, Mississippi," mimeo. The Lorenzi paper suggests that blacks in the rural South never lose their fear. Rather, they learn to manage it by participating in group activity that threatens the two-caste system. For a fuller analysis of the dynamics of black organizational development in three Mississippi counties in the 1960s, see Lester M. Salamon, Backwardness and Change in the Ameri- can South: Mississippi as a Developing Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 1974yf F K D S W H U . 35 William J. Crotty, "Party Effort and Its Impact on the Vote," American Political Science Review, 65 (June 1971yf - R K Q & % O \ G H Q E X U J K $ & R Q - trolled Experiment to Measure the Effects of Personal Contact Campaigning," Midwest Journal of Political Science, 15 (May 1971yf ' D Y L G ( 3 U L F H D Q d Michael Lupter, "Volunteers for Gore: The Impact of a Precinct-Level Canvass in Three Tennessee Cities," The Journal of Politics; 35 (May 1973yf . is reached where the risk is acceptable, people will run it, and the paralysis is broken. This hypothesized inverse relationship be- tween the deterrent effect of reprisals and the amount of organization in the victim commu- nity has limits, of course. It assumes, first, that reprisals are in fact accurately directed at indi- vidual political activists or at least believed to be in the victim community. But it also assumes that there is some relatively low ceiling on the scope of these reprisals such that acts of vio- lence cannot in practice be extended to all members of an organization as it grows. Both of these conditions seem to have been met in Mississippi during the 1960s, where violence was normally aimed at the blacks who first ven- tured into political action, and where the poten- tial presence of the national news media and the FBI kept the absolute level of violence in check. Even so, there is no suggestion here that organization can be as effective an antidote to fear of economic coercion as it can be to fear of physical violence. Unlike physical violence, economic coercion is more readily hidden from national attention and hence has no practical ceiling on its use. Organization cannot cure all fear, therefore, particularly in the absence of economic independence. Finally, by suggesting that organization affects participation by lessen- ing fear, we do not intend to suggest that it does not also have its other, more traditional kinds of impacts as well. However, the experi- ence of Holmes County and two other counties studied intensively by one of the authors (LMSyf D V Z H O O D V Q X P H U R X V L Q W H U Y L H Z V Z L W h civil rights activists in the South suggest quite strongly that the major consequence of organi- zation was to relieve fear, particularly fear of violence. Our hypothesis, then, is that the level of fear in a county, and hence the level of black political participation, should vary with the degree of black organization, other things being equal. To test this hypothesized relationship be- tween organization, fear, and political partici- pation, it was necessary to develop a measure of black organizational development for each county. Since intensive organizational analysis of all 29 counties was practically impossible, however, we measured organizational develop- ment indirectly, by determining the extent to which certain crucial noneconomic facilitators of black organizational development were pres- ent in each county. (This approach had the added advantage of making it possible to avoid tautologies by making it unnecessary to mea- sure the extent of organizational development in terms of the presumed effects of the organi- zations.yf $ G H W D L O H G H [ D P L Q D W L R Q R I 0 R Y H P H Q t This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1299 development in several Mississippi counties by one of the present authors (LMSyf D Q G G L V F X V - sions with numerous Movement leaders identi- fied three such noneconomic facilitators of black organizational development: (1yf W K H D E - solute size of the county's black population; (2yf W K H S H U F H Q W D J H R I W K H F R X Q W U \ V Y R W L Q J D J e population that is black; and (3yf W K H H [ W H Q W R f assistance from "outside organizers" to help communities take the first steps in managing their fear. The first two of these facilitators of fear management and organization are relatively straightforward. Because organization is essen- tially a matter of trust and communication, it is naturally easier to organize a county if there are fewer people to reach. Similarly, it is easier to inspire confidence and induce people to take risks when you have a 4:1 voting majority than when you have a slim 3:2 majority. Moreover, both of these factors are easy to measure from readily available Census materials. The role of outside organizers, however, is much more complex and much more contro- versial. Between 1961 and 1965, hundreds of young blacks and whites trooped to Mississippi under the sponsorship of SNCC and the Coun- cil of Federated Organizations (COFOyf D Q d fanned out into the interior of the state to help local people organize themselves for political action. In addition, throughout this period the NAACP maintained in Mississippi a "field di- rector" who attempted to organize black com- munities throughout the state.37 In the wake of the "black power" movement of the mid-1960s, the contribution these "out- side organizers" made to the development of black political organizations in Mississippi has been seriously questioned. Yet these "outsiders" had certain unique strengths that made it possi- ble for them to play an important role in getting organizational development started. For example, the outsiders had connections with the national press that insulated them in part from the more violent forms of repression. They did not have to worry about economic reprisals 3 COFO was the coalition of civil rights groups formed in 1963 to sponsor voter education projects throughout Mississippi and to coordinate the black political battle in the state. At the height of COFO activity, in the historic summer of 1964, some 500 out- side workers, mostly white students from the North, were in the state. "COFO files," Delta Ministry Office, Mt. Beulah, Edwards, Mississippi. See Watters and Cleghorn, Climbing Jacob's Ladder, pp. 63-68; Bel- frage, Freedom Summer. I Until his murder in 1963, the NAACP Field Direc- tor in Mississippi was Medgar Evers. Soon after this, Medgar Evers's brother, Charles Evers, took over this job and served until 1969, when he was elected Mayor of Fayette, Mississippi. since they had no families in the area and were not dependent on local whites for their liveli- hood. They could therefore take greater risks than could local blacks. They were able to act as catalysts, taking the first critical steps to get organization started and absorbing the blame for the earliest, and most dangerous, Movement activity. What is more, they possessed a certain amount of "technical information" about how to conduct a meeting, about what other groups were doing, about what the laws said. Finally, they frequently provided a "shortcut" for indi- viduals who wavered between commitment to the Movement and fearful inactivity. The mere presence of white students in particular created a dilemma for local blacks because of the sharp conflict between the rural norm of hospitality and the caste proscriptions on social contact with whites. When a cherubic white student "dropped by" to talk about voter registration, few black families could deny their heritage enough to treat the student inhospitably. The result was to induce many people to "cross the line," to defy the caste code, but to do so rela- tively effortlessly. Significantly, outside organizer assistance was not distributed evenly among Mississippi counties. Some counties received heavy doses, particularly during the famous "Mississippi Summer" of 1964, while others were virtually ignored. To determine what level of organizer assistance each county received, eight persons with long experience in the Movement in Mis- sissippi were asked to assign a score from 1-5 to each of the twenty-nine black majority coun- ties in the state according to the amount of "outside organizer" assistance the county had received during the years 1960-68. The scores from each interviewer were then added to give an overall "organizer score" for each county.38 Together with the measures of population size and the proportion of blacks in a county, this "outside organizer" score provides a way to as- sess the likelihood that a county has succeeded in managing its fear through organization. To- gether with the measure of economic dependence examined earlier, these three measures of organ- ,"The eight interviewees were: the Reverend Harry Bowie, originally a SNCC volunteer, who works now for the Delta Ministry in McComb, Mississippi; Law- rence Guyot, former state chairman of the Freedom Democratic Party; Aaron Henry, President of the Mississippi NAACP and co-director' of COFO; Jan Hillegas, Editor of the Freedom Information Service Newsletter, a Movement publication; Charles Horo- witz, Delta Ministry staff member; the Reverend Edwin King, former chaplain at Tougaloo College and Movement candidate for Lieutenant Governor in 1963; William F. Minor, Jackson correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1300 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 Table 4. Test of the "Expanded Fear Model:" Impact of Four Fear-Related Factors on Black Political Participation in Twenty-Nine Mississippi Counties yb R I 9 D U L D W L R Q \b of Variation in Black in Black Turnout Turnout Factor Accounted for Accounted for by Addition by this Factor of this Factor and All Above it (Partial r2yf 0 X O W L S O H 5 \f Black Economic Dependence 28.9 yb R Z \b** NW Voting Age Population 0. 6** 29.5** Percentage of VAP Nonwhitea 17.0** 46.5** Outside Assistance 22. 1** 68.6** a VAP =Voting Age Population. * Significant at the .01 level. izational potential provide an overall index of vulnerability and fear for each county. The com- bination of these four, fear-related factors con- stitutes what we call the "expanded fear model" of black participation. When this model is tested against the data on black political participation using multiple re- gression analysis, the results are striking. As Table 4 above indicates, variations in the abso- lute size of the nonwhite population in a county seem to add little to the explanation of varia- tions in black participation already achieved by the "simple fear model" (partial r2 = 0.6 per centyf E X W W K H R W K H U W Z R P H D V X U H V R I R U J D Q L ] D - tional potential-and hence of fear mitigation contribute substantially indeed. In fact, taken together, these four, fear-related factors that comprise the "expanded fear model" account for almost 70 per cent of the variation in black participation rates. The probability that this re- sult could have happened purely by chance, moreover, was so slight that it could not be computed. (See Table 4.yf Here, then, is powerful support for the argu- ment that fear plays a vital role in black poli- tics in Mississippi. This finding directly chal- lenges the euphoric hope that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated, in President Johnson's words, the "last major shackles" impeding black political liberty in the South. The evi- dence suggests quite powerfully that the heri- tage of exploitation and repression, sustained by persistent economic dependence and coer- cion, may be doing to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 what it did to the Emancipation Procla- mation a century before: transforming it into a legal form lacking social content. Before we rest content with this conclusion, however, it is necessary to consider one further matter. To attribute variations in black political participation to variations in the degree of vul- nerability of black communities is to assume that counties do not vary greatly in their treat- ment of blacks, or at least that these variations do not significantly affect turnout. The mea- sures of fear used so far, after all, related only to the black communities themselves. Is it not possible that variations in the way whites treat blacks might affect turnout rates also? To answer this question, it was necessary to develop an index of white hostility. The mea- sures selected relied chiefly on voting statistics, since these statistics are most reliable and are available uniformly for all counties. In particu- lar, white hostility to black power in a county was measured by the extent to which the county preferred Goldwater over Johnson in the 1964 presidential election, and the extent to which its voters turned out to support Wallace in the 1968 presidential election. Although in- direct, these two measures do tap the degree of active white opposition to change in each of the 29 counties.39 When these measures of hostility were tested against the data on black participation, the re- sults suggested that variations in the degree of white hostility from county to county do not significantly affect black political participation. The correlations between support for Goldwa- ter and for Wallace, the two indices of white hostility, and black voter turnout were too small to be significant. Indeed, what little rela- tionship there was between white hostility and black political participation was in the wrong direction: instead of decreasing, black partici- pation tended to increase with increases in white hostility to black rights. (See Table 5.yf Moreover, adding these hostility factors to the "'expanded fear model" presented above con- 39 The Goldwater vote was computed as a percentage of the two-party vote, instead of as a percentage of the potential white electorate, because, in 1964, no real threat to white political dominance existed and whites therefore felt little need to turn out for the election. A measure of white turnout, therefore, would have been meaningless, whereas a measure of county preference for Goldwater over Johnson had social relevance in view of Johnson's support for social wel- fare and civil rights legislation. By 1968, the presence of a real black challenge at the polls put a premium on white turnout. Not sur- prisingly, therefore, white turnout increased sharply. In 1964, both presidential candidates together re- ceived 409,146 votes; in 1968, Nixon and Wallace alone received 502,146 while Humphrey, drawing mainly on black voters, received an additional 149,419. In the 1968 election, therefore, the best measure of white hostility to black rights was the turnout of voters for Wallace as a percentage of the potential white electorate, for this measure permits us to de- termine the extent to which the white community in a particular county mobilized itself to express its conservative opinion. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1301 tributes less than one-tenth of one per cent to the amount of variation accounted for. These findings are consistent with the Mat- thews and Prothro findings that white violence -another measure of hostility-does not signifi- cantly influence black participation.40 As al- ready noted, however, the conclusion to be drawn from these findings is not that fear is not a key determinant of black participation, but rather that fear has a long half-life, that it per- sists even in the absence of specific incidents of violence or expressions of hostility. The varia- tions in white hostility from county to county in the Mississippi black belt are simply not sa- lient enough to give local blacks confidence that they are safer in some areas than others. Not the intensity of local white hostility, but the strength of the local black community is thus the key to dissipating fear and hence en- couraging political participation.41 Altogether, then, these findings establish a prima facie case that fear is the cause of low turnout among black voters in Mississippi. They do not yet demonstrate, however, that the alternative models developed above, based on "relative deprivation" and "apathy," are incor- rect. Indeed, it is even possible that our pre- sumed measures of vulnerability and fear are really disguised measures of relative depriva- 40 Matthews and Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics, p. 308. 4' The fact that we discover a positive, if slight, correlation between white turnout and black mobiliza- tion suggests that what we are really witnessing here is a white response to the threat of black mobilization. The more blacks become mobilized, the more whites turn out to vote. This pattern is consistent with find- ings dating back to V. 0. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation, particularly pp. 513-516. It also conforms to the finding of Matthews and Prothro that there is a slight positive correlation between the in- cidence of violence and the level of black participation (Matthews and Prothro, Negroes and the New South- ern Politics, p. 308yf , Q E R W K F D V H V W K H H [ S U H V V L R Q R f white hostility is a response to black mobilization, not a cause of it. Table 5. Correlations Between Two Measures of White Hostility and Black Participation Rates in Twenty- Nine Mississippi Counties Correlation Measure of White Hostility with Black Participation Goldwater Vote as yb R I 7 R W D l Presidential Vote, 1964 + . 202 (n.s.yf a Wallace Vote as yb R I : K L W H 9 R W L Q g Age Population +.240 (n.s.yf a a n.s. =not significant at the .05 level. Table 6. Correlations Between Two Measures of Dis- crimination Against Blacks and Black Political Participation in Twenty-Nine Mississippi Counties Correlation Measures of Discrimination with Black Participation Nonwhite Median Family Income as a Percentage of White -.102 (n.s.yf Nonwhite Median Education as a Percentage of White + .362 (n.s.yf tion and apathy. Before we can have real confi- dence in the "expanded fear model" of non- participation, therefore, it is necessary to see how well the other two "models" explain the observed variations in black voter turnout among Mississippi counties. Discrimination and Black Political Participation The "discrimination" model contends that variations in black political participation are the result of variations in the degree of discrim- ination blacks experience locally. The greater the discrimination, the model suggests, the greater the political participation. Two measures of inequality were developed to test this model, one focusing on income and the other on educational opportunity. In partic- ular, for each county, the black median family income and the black median education level were computed as percentages of the corre- sponding white figures for 1960. These indices provided a direct measure of the degree of de- privation a county's black citizens experience vis-at-vis the white citizens of the same county. According to the "discrimination model," black participation should be highest in those counties where discrimination is greatest (i.e., where income and education levels of blacks are lowest relative to those of local whitesyf , n fact, however, discrimination accounts for very little of the variation in black participation rates, whether discrimination is measured in terms of relative income levels or relative edu- cational levels. Although the correlation coeffi- cient in the case of educational deprivation was sizable, it was not in the expected direction. (See Table 6yf 3 D U W L F L S D W L R Q Z D V K L J K H U L n counties where relative educational depriva- tion was lowest. Finally, neither of these dis- crimination factors added significantly to the explanation of black political participation al- ready achieved by the four fear-related factors This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1302 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 included in the "expanded fear model."42 Clearly, discrimination, at least as measured by these two factors, adds little to our understand- ing of the reasons for variations in black politi- cal participation among Mississippi counties. Because this finding seems to fly in the face of so much social science research into the causes of lower-class protest, however, it may give rise to the suspicion that the measures of discrimination used here are faulty. Some re- flection on the dynamics of southern rural soci- ety may dissipate these suspicions and make sense of these findings. Most students of protest movements acknowledge that deprivation has to be perceived to be politically relevant. In the case of rural blacks in Mississippi, however, the variations in degree of discrimination among counties are simply too small to notice, and they pale in comparison to the absolute differ- ences between white and black income and ed- ucation levels within each county. Moreover, the relevant reference groups for Mississippi blacks since the advent of radio and television include northern whites and blacks in addition to blacks in other Mississippi counties. Com- pared to these northern reference groups, Mis- sissippi blacks must feel so deprived that they can hardly perceive any difference between their own condition and that of blacks in other Mississippi counties. For all of these reasons, it is not very surprising to discover that differ- ences among Mississippi counties in the amount of black relative deprivation have no noticeable effects on black political behavior. Like the var- iations in hostility, the variations in discrimina- tion against blacks among Mississippi counties are too insignificant to have a political impact. Apathy and Black Political Participation That variations in black vulnerability, and not variations in white hostility or discrimination, seem to account for variations in local black political participation still does not resolve all the doubts surrounding our explanation of black participation in terms of fear, however. The possibility still exists that what we have identified as measures of vulnerability may really be measures of something else entirely. Common sense, moreover, lends credence to such a possibility: it seems reasonable, after all, to expect that the degree of independence of a 4Addition of the income discrimination variable to the "expanded fear model" boosts the explained varia- tion by only 1.5 per cent, and the likelihood that any chance factor could have produced the same result was an unacceptable 30 per cent. Addition of the education discrimination factor contributes only 2.3 per cent to the explained variation, but with a proba- bility of 20 per cent that the same result could have been produced by chance. black community would correspond rather closely to its level of education, income, and social status-the three factors normally identi- fied with the dominant "apathy model" of polit- ical participation. Such a finding would not necessarily discredit the view that fear, and not these other variables, was really the causal fac- tor. After all, a correlation or regression coeffi- cient is only a measure of statistical relation- ship and cannot establish which of two interre- lated factors is the cause. Nevertheless, the case for the contention that fear of economic ha- rassment and intimidation is the real cause of low black political participation in Mississippi would clearly be stronger if it were possible to demonstrate that income, education, and social status-the three factors that comprise the "ap- athy model" of participation-were not also significantly related to black participation. To test these notions, five different measures of income, four different measures of educa- tion, and one measure of social status were em- ployed. The alternative measures of income and education, all derived from the 1960 Cen- sus of Population, are listed below: Income NW* Median Family Income NW Median Individual Income Percentage of NW families with Incomes Under $1000 Percentage of NW families with Incomes Under $2000 Percentage of NW families with Incomes Over $4000 Education Percentage of NW Population with No School Percentage of NW Population with 0-4 Years School Percentage of NW Population with Some College *NW = nonwhite Each of these measures permits us to focus on a slightly different dimension of the phenome- non. For example, the "percentage of nonwhite families with incomes less than $2,000" mea- sures the poverty population, while the "per-. centage of nonwhite families with incomes greater than $4,000" measures the size of the black middle class. Social status was measured by means of the Socio-Economic Status Index, a standard socio- logical measure combining measures of income, education, and occupation into a single index by means of a simple weighing formula devel- This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1303 oped by the Population Division of the U. S. Census Bureau. This index thus has the virtue of providing a standardized measure of status, and therefore permits us to determine how rele- vant standard notions of status are to the par- ticular situation of blacks in Mississippi.43 Income and Participation. Of all the "apathy- related" correlates of political participation, income is probably the most important. In his comprehensive study of political participation in Political Life, for example, Robert Lane con- cluded that income affects voting turnout even more than does education.44 In addition, the impact of income variations on black turnout is particularly important because of the impli- cations it may have for the real meaning be- hind the "fear model." If economic indepen- dence, a prime component of the "fear model," turns out to be only a surrogate measure of income level, and if the level of income of a county's black population turns out to be a good predictor of its participation rate, then the whole interpretation of the dynamics at work presented above may be thrown into question. In fact, however, neither of these relation- ships holds. In the first place, there is no signifi- cant correlation between a black community's income level and its degree of economic depen- dence as measured by occupation (r= -.200yf . Not surprisingly, therefore, there is no signifi- cant correlation between the income level of 43The nonwhite SES Index for Mississippi counties was taken from: Mississippi State College, "Socio- Economic Status Indexes for Mississippi Counties," by Ellen S. Bryant, Bulletin 724 (State College, Missis- sippi: Mississippi State University Agricultural Experi- ment Station, April 1966yf . 44 As Lane points out: "Perhaps, for a simple con- ventional act such as voting, income is more important, while more complex forms of participation are more dependent upon qualities associated with education." Robert Lane, Political Life, p. 222. Table 7. Correlations Between Five Measures of Income and Black Political Participation in Twenty-Nine Mississippi Counties Measure of Income Coefficient Nonwhite (NWyf 0 H G L D Q ) D P L O y Income +.011 (n.s.yf NW Median Individual Income ? 274 (n.s.yf Per cent of NW Families with In- come Less than $1000 +.055 (n.s.yf Per cent of NW Families with In- come Less than $2000 -.191 (n.s.yf Per cent of NW Families with In- come Greater than $4000 +.152 (n.s.yf Table 8. Correlations Between Four Measures of Black Education and Black Political Participation in Twenty-Nine Mississippi Counties Measures of Education Correlation Coefficient Per cent of NW Population with No School -. 331 Per cent of NW Population with 0-4 Years School - .414* Per cent of NW Population with Some College + .332 NW Median Education Level +.401* * Significant at the .05 level. a county's black population and its rate of political participation-no matter which mea- sure of income we use. (See Table 7.yf ( Y L - dently, poverty is not the real cause of black nonparticipation in politics: fear is, and fear born of economic peonage. The source of in- come, not simply the amount, is the crucial de- terminant of political liberty, as we suspected. Education and Participation. Unlike variations in black income levels, variations in black edu- cational levels among Mississippi counties do seem to have a significant impact on black par- ticipation rates. In particular, as Table 8 above suggests, black voter turnout tends to be high- est in counties with relatively high educational levels, and lowest in counties with low educa- tional levels. What is more, because a county's black educational level turns out to be closely related to the degree of black economic vul- nerability,45 this finding raises the possibility that the effect we have ascribed so far to eco- nomic invulnerability should really be ascribed to educational attainment. Whether this finding discredits the view that fear, and not apathy, really accounts for varia- tions in black political participation rates among Mississippi's 29 black majority counties, however, depends on the interpretation at- tached to these educational variations. A corre- lation, after all, is simply a measure of relation- ship and cannot by itself "explain" the relation- ship. Rather, explanation can come only from careful analysis of the dynamics of the particu- lar social situation. In most of the literature on political partici- pation, to be sure, the link between education and participation is explained in terms of inter- 45The correlation between nonwhite median educa- tion and the percentage of a county's labor force in Vulnerable Occupations is -.773, an extremely high figure. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1304 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 est and understanding, both of them aspects of apathy. Campbell, Converse, et al., for example, argue that educated people participate in poli- tics more than the uneducated people do be- cause the educated command more "facts about politics" and have more sophisticated concepts with which to "maintain a sense of or- der and meaning amid the flood of informa- tion. ..46 In the context of Mississippi society, how- ever, this interpretation of the social meaning of the education figures is open to serious ques- tion. In the first place, it is questionable whether the number of years that blacks spend in local public schools has any relation at all to the amount of politically relevant knowledge they have acquired. Mississippi black public schools are notoriously bad places to learn about politics, for discussion of politics has long been verboten in these citadels of conserv- atism. In the study of the reasons for the fail- ure of black schoolteachers to register to vote in Mississippi cited earlier, for example, Prothro discovered that even social science teachers neglected to discuss politics in class for fear of losing their jobs.47 In the second place, while the public schools failed as providers of politically relevant infor- mation, other sources filled the gap; but these sources were available to the educated and the uneducated alike. Television, which is now widely available in rural Mississippi, permitted even the poorly educated to learn their consti- tutional rights from the lips of Dr. Martin Lu- ther King at Montgomery, and Selma, and Washington, D.C. The evening news on radio and television provided nightly lessons in politi- cal participation that were unavailable in the classroom. To assume, in short, that formal ed- ucation signifies greater political comprehen- sion may be to misread the facts. But how, then, are we to explain the clear statistical link between the level of nonwhite formal education and the rate of black political participation? One answer, it seems, lies in an alternative explanation of the meaning of education in Mississippi's "closed society."48 Rather than measuring the amount of understanding of pol- 4 Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter: An Abridgment (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1964yf S . 4 U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings, Jackson, Mississippi, 1965, I, 211-12. 48 The term "closed society" was used by historian James Silver to characterize the lack of political lib- erty in Mississippi in the late 1950s and early 1960s. See: James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1963yf , especially p. xvi. itics, formal education for blacks in Mississippi may in reality be another measure of "sense of security." The relevant social fact buried in the education statistics may really be the level of literacy in a county, not the level of political sophistication and understanding. And literacy is more properly an index of vulnerability than of comprehension. A person who can read may know little more about politics than one who cannot in rural Mississippi, but he probably has some confidence that his ability to read will save him from at least some dangers. The illit- erate lacks even this meager sense of security. Feeling more vulnerable as a result, he natu- rally experiences greater fear. What is more, the illiterate voter does not even enjoy the "se- cret ballot" in elections. To vote, he must enlist the assistance of a polling official (who is virtu- ally always a local whiteyf D Q G P X V W Y R W H D O R X G . In an already frightening situation, the prospect of voting out loud for the Movement's candi- dates must deter many illiterate blacks from voting, or else induce them to vote against the black candidates.49 The observed correlation between education and participation, therefore, may really reinforce, not contradict, the argu- ment that fear is the cause of nonparticipation. This conclusion finds support, moreover, in the data reported in Table 8 above. The mea- sure of educational attainment that was most powerfully related to black participation was none other than the one measuring the extent of illiteracy in each county (namely, the per- centage of blacks more than 25 years old with 4 years or less of educationyf 3 H U K D S V W K H Q H G - ucation in these counties affects participation through the mechanism of fear, not through the mechanism of political comprehension and apa- thy. Further support for this conclusion can be found in the fact that adding the education fac- tor to the factors already measuring vulnerabil- ity in the "expanded fear model" produces only a marginal addition to the amount of variation in black participation rates accounted for. Social Status and Participation. The only other major apathy-related factor that could be hid- ing in the data on black dependence and vul- nerability is "social status." Numerous scholars have discovered that higher-status individuals participate in politics more regularly than do those of lower status, and have explained this phenomenon in the now familiar terms of apathy: higher-status individuals have greater self-esteem, a greater sense of personal effi- cacy, and therefore a greater interest in poli- 49 For an example of how these pressures worked, see: Salamon, "Mississippi Post-Mortem," pp. 45-7. This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1973 Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination in Political Participation 1305 tics. If what we have earlier taken to be mea- sures of dependence and vulnerability turn out to be surrogates for measures of social status, the whole argument developed above would again be thrown into question. At first glance, the data seem to confirm this impression. The correlation between nonwhite socioeconomic status indexes and black voter turnout was a significant +.440, suggesting that the social status of a county's black population is a fairly good predictor of its political partici- pation rate. The problem, however, is that much of this result reflects the influence of the education component of the SES index, not the income or occupational components. To separate out these influences, the three components of the "apathy model" were tested together using multiple regression analysis to assess the explanatory power of the model as a whole. The results, reported in Table 9 below, indicate that even if we interpret income, edu- cation, and social status the way exponents of the "apathy" theory of political participation suggest, "apathy" can still account for only 23 per cent of the variation in black participation rates, compared to the 69 per cent accounted for by "fear." Conclusions and Implications Of the three possible explanations of varia- tions in black political fortunes in Mississippi's 29 black majority counties formulated earlier, therefore, the explanation based on "fear" is clearly the one that finds most support in the evidence, as Table 10 indicates. Taken to- gether, the four measures of vulnerability em- braced in the "expanded fear model" account for 69 per cent of the variation in black politi- cal participation rates, with a probability ap- proaching zero that this result could have oc- Table 9. Test of the "Apathy Model": Impact of Three Apathy-Related Factors on Black Political Participation in Twenty-Nine Mississippi Counties Percentage of Variation in Black Participation Factor Accounted for by this Factor and All Above It (Multiple R2yf Median NW Education 16.0yb * Median Family Income 16.1 Socioeconomic Status Index 23.4 * Significant at the .05 level. Table 10. Comparison of Three Models of Black Political Participation in Twenty-Nine Mississippi Counties Percentage of Varia- tion in Black Model Participation Rates Accounted For (Multiple R2yf "Expanded Fear Model" 68 .6yb * "Discrimination Model" 10.3 "Apathy Model" 23.4 ** Significant at the .01 level. curred by chance. The nearest competitor is the "apathy model," but it explains only 23 per cent of the observed variation, and this result could have happened purely by chance more than 5 per cent of the time, rendering this model statistically insignificant. While these findings do not formally "prove" that fear is the real explanation of black voting patterns, they certainly create a strong presumptive case for this conclusion. The evidence presented here thus squarely challenges the hopeful assumption embodied in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the assumption that the elimination of the formal, legal barriers to black voting in the Deep South would, by itself, unleash latent "forces of democracy" presumably lying dormant in the southern hin- terlands. This assumption has been sustained over the past half-decade only by seizing on ev- ery black political victory as proof of its valid- ity while ignoring the bleak record of defeat or attributing it to black apathy or contentment. By contrast, the data analyzed here call for a more thorough rethinking of the preconditions for democracy in the Deep South. If economic dependence and fear of intimidation frustrate political participation for blacks in the Deep South, as the evidence here suggests, then de- mocracy can not be achieved simply by formal legal manipulations of the sort embodied in the Voting Rights Act, important as those manipu- lations are as a first step. Nor, significantly, will it be achieved simply by raising black living standards. Income, we found, was a singularly poor predictor of black political mobilization. So long as increases in income do not liberate blacks from direct economic dependence on local powers-that-be, and thus leave blacks vul- nerable to intimidation or fear of intimidation (as has been the case, for example, with the teachersyf L P S U R Y H P H Q W V L Q L Q F R P H S H U V H Z L O l have little impact on political participation. In other words, not the amount of income, but the This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1306 The American Political Science Review Vol. 67 source is the crucial factor in determining par- ticipation. The same is true, moreover, with regard to education. Education, we suggested, affects par- ticipation mainly to the extent that it relieves feelings of insecurity and vulnerability. But its ability to do so is severely circumscribed by the social and economic relationships in the society at large, and particularly by the persistent fear of coercion carried over from the past, and re- inforced frequently enough in the present to survive into the foreseeable future. The pursuit of democracy in the Deep South, therefore, must acknowledge the continued im- pact of economic vulnerability and fear on po- litical action. Democracy will emerge only to the extent that these conditions-and not just the formal, legal barriers-are eliminated. This conclusion not only has analytical im- plications, however; it has policy implica- tions as well. In particular, in our view, it throws new light on the potential importance of a truly nationally administered welfare pro- gram such as the Nixon Administration's origi- nal Family Assistance Plan hinted at. Whatever its specifically economic impact, the analysis presented here suggests that such a scheme could have an even more important political impact. By taking control of welfare payments away from local powers-that-be, it could liber- ate a sizable army of "welfare serfs" from the fear of losing their sole source of income if they support black candidates for political office. No single program under serious consid- eration today, we believe, could protect so large a segment of southern blacks from the fear of economic intimidation and thus open the way for expanded black political participation.50 5? For further discussion of this point, see: Lester M. Salamon, "Family Assistance: The Stakes in the Rural South," The New Republic (February 20, 1971yf S S . 17-18; and Stephen Van Evera, "Welfare Reform: Bonanza for Dixie's Blacks," Progressive, June 1972, p. 27. Recent versions of this idea, by eliminating the The findings presented here may have broader implications as well, however, for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 falls squarely into the same tradition as the one that has guided American foreign policy in the "developing na- tions" for decades. With its stress on the poli- tico-legal barriers to democracy in the Deep South, the Voting Rights Act reflects what Rob- ert Tucker has termed America's "instrumen- talist bias," its preoccupation with the outward trappings of democratic government in the "de- veloping societies" and its neglect of the sub- stantive underpinnings of democracy.51 Ameri- cans, political theorist Louis Hartz has noted, characteristically ignore the "deeper social struggles" under way in the developing nations and concentrate instead on the more pragmatic question of procedure. "We fail," Hartz notes, "to appreciate non-political -definitions of free- dom and hence are baffled by their use."52 By demonstrating the limitations of this poli- tico-legal approach to democracy even in the Deep South, where it receives constant suste- nance from dominant national norms and plen- tiful national economic resources, the findings presented here thus raise even more serious questions about its prospects abroad. These findings suggest that the accepted wisdom among political scientists about the causes of nonparticipation in politics may be seriously in error, at least as it applies to disadvantaged populations in politically underdeveloped areas. Apathy, it seems, has carried too large a part of the explanatory burden for too long. It is time to acknowledge as well the role of fear. provision for national administration, threaten to de- stroy the potential liberating impact of the plan. 51Robert C. Tucker, "Russia, the West, and World Order," in Robert Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind (New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1963yf S S - 82. 52 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, A Harvest Book (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1955yf S . This content downloaded from 150.210.226.99 on Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:30:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms