Two leading political scientists from Harvard University, Matthew Blackwell and Maya Sen, show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than 150 years ago. These local differences in racially conservative political attitudes have been passed down across generations, and continue to leave a legacy on politics today. At the Rockefeller Center, they will discuss their novel findings on the mechanism of how contemporary political attitudes in the South are explained by the historical persistence of racial attitudes.

 

Matthew Blackwell is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University and an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He studies political methodology with a focus on dynamic causal inference, missing data, panel data, and social network analysis. His substantive interests include American politics, negative advertising, and historical political economy.

 

Maya Sen is a political scientist and an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. Sen writes on issues involving the political economy of U.S. race relations, law and politics, and statistical methods. Her research has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets, and has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Judicature, the Du Bois Review, and the Journal of Legal Studies.

 

Join us on June 1 at 4:30pm for “Southern Slavery and Its Political Legacy: How American’s Peculiar Institution Continues to Affect American Politics Today,” in Rocky 003.

 

For more information, please visit http://rockefeller.dartmouth.edu/events/programs.html or blitz [log in to unmask]