The conventional wisdom is that for a democracy to be consolidated, all groups must have a chance to attain power. If they do not, then they will subvert democracy and choose to fight for power. In this article, the authors show that this wisdom is seriously incomplete because it considers...

The failure of Reconstruction is widely seen as a key factor in the social and economic status of African Americans today. Despite the imposed extension of the franchise to the formerly enslaved, Southern elites used violence and other extralegal means to regain power and ultimately remove these...

How important is the enforcement of political rights in new democracies? We use the enfranchisement of the emancipated slaves following the American Civil War to study this question. Critical to our strategy, black suffrage was externally enforced by the U.S. Army in ten Southern states during...