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Commentary

Tough Institutions in Colorblind Injustice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Bradley Palmquist
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Extract

It is no small task to provide an account of voting rights in both the First and Second Reconstructions. It is hard to think of many with the combined expertise in both fields who could have pulled it off as well as J. Morgan Kousser has in Colorblind Injustice (1999).

Kousser has long been a historian and a social scientist. In his earlier work , such as The Shaping of Southern Politics (1974), Kousser was clearly one of the leading proponents and artful innovators in the use of quantitative methods in historical analysis: he did not merely import old ideas from quantitative social scientists. Now, in Colorblind Injustice, we see Kousser again combining his thorough and deft historian’s touch with insights from social scientific approaches.

The key explanatory theme in Colorblind Injustice, I believe, is captured in two terse sentences: “Culture is fragile. Institutions are tough” (366). From these premises come Kousser’s central ideas about how to explain the progress and retrogression of minority voting rights and why we should care so much about the set of Supreme Court rulings beginning with Shaw v.Reno in 1993.

Information

Type
Symposium on J. Morgan Kousser’s Colorblind In justice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction
Information
Social Science History , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , summer 2000 , pp. 435 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2000 

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