Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, Maya Sen (review)

By any measure, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics is an impressive scholarly achievement. The book revolves around a big, bold thesis. Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, three rising stars in the field of political science, argue that local variations in political and racial attitudes in the white South today derive from variations in the prevalence of slavery in the nineteenth century. White people imposed the harshest post-emancipation racial policies in those areas of the U.S. South that had most heavily relied on slave labor, and today—via intergenerational transmission of practices and attitudes, a complex dynamic that the authors carefully dissect—white southerners in these same areas tend to display more hostility toward African Americans and more skepticism toward policies designed to benefit racial minorities when compared with white people elsewhere in the South.

In support of their thesis, Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen unleash an arsenal of analytical tools. The authors build and support their central argument from quantitative data, particularly public opinion surveys, economic indicators, and demographic statistics. They supplement these sources with qualitative materials drawn from works in political science, history, economics, and sociology.

To explain the resilience of racial attitudes over time, the authors offer an explanatory theory of their own creation: “behavioral path dependence,” an adaptation of a venerable concept in political science literature that has been used to explain the durability of institutions (p. 5). Rather than focusing on institutional structures and practices, their concept centers on the intergenerational transmission of political culture, of “partisanship, political attitudes, concepts of morality, and individual-level cognitions” (p. 44).

The “mechanisms of reproduction” for behavior path dependence include “intergenerational socialization” (such as the passing of attitudes and norms from one generation to the next), “institutional reinforcement,” and laws (p. 26). Over time, the authors note, path dependency can weaken, particularly when political or economic incentives develop that challenge entrenched attitudes. In the mid-twentieth century, reformist interventions—civil rights activism, the passage of antidiscrimination laws, and the growth of African American political power—changed institutional practices and reduced racial inequalities. In the authors’ terminology, these interventions also produced some “decay” in white southerners’ racial attitudes, thus “attenuating” the effects of slavery (p. 39).

Yet, the authors conclude, the effects of slavery persisted, and persist today, particularly within white political and racial attitudes. This remarkable durability is the central theme of the work: “History matters and shapes our politics, beliefs, and attitudes” (p. 23).

Historians can learn much from this ambitious book. For those unfamiliar with political science literature, Deep Roots provides an accessible, engaging gateway to a field that has much to offer, particularly for historians interested in drawing on quantitative methods and pursuing broad-scale, synthetic projects. The book offers an impressive demonstration of the rigor and precision with which skilled, creative, mixed-method social scientists tackle many of the same questions of historical causation that occupy the historical profession. For anyone not up to speed on the lingo of “path dependency” and “critical junctures,” one of this book’s many virtues is the clarity with which the authors explain the relevant concepts. For those who rely on archival research and narrative technique to explain historical developments, spending time with scholars who explain history in a very different way is a valuable experience.

Historians, however, are not necessarily the target audience for this book. The authors define their primary interest as “theoretical and empirical”; “history informs our story, but it is not the story itself,” they write (pp. 21, 22). Some of the book’s claimed insights from political science literature will strike historians as elaborate ways to describe commonplace assumptions, even truisms, among historians. “[T]he most compelling explanation” for present-day differences in racial attitudes across the white South, write the authors, “lies in the history...