The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) fundamentally changed the distribution of electoral power in the US South. We examine the consequences of this mass enfranchisement of Black people for the use of the carceral state—police, the courts, and the prison system. We study the extent to which white communities in the US South responded to the end of Jim Crow by increasing the incarceration of Black people. We test this with new historical data on state and county prison intake data by race (~1940–1985) in a series of difference-in-differences designs. We find that states covered by Section 5 of the VRA experienced a differential increase in Black prison admissions relative to those that were not covered and that incarceration varied systematically in proportion to the electoral threat posed by Black voters. Our findings indicate the potentially perverse consequences of enfranchisement when establishment power seeks—and finds—other outlets of social and political control.

We introduce a fine-grained measure of the extent to which electoral districts combine and split local communities of co-partisans in unnatural ways. Our indicator—which we term Partisan Dislocation—is a measure of the difference between the partisan composition of a voter’s geographic nearest neighbors and that of her assigned district. We show that our measure is a good local and global indicator of district manipulation, easily identifying instances in which districts carve up clusters of co-partisans (cracking) or combine them in unnatural ways (packing). We demonstrate that our measure is related to but distinct from other approaches to the measurement of gerrymandering, and has some clear advantages, above all as a complement to simulation-based approaches, and as a way to identify the specific neighborhoods most affected by gerrymandering. It can also be used prospectively by district-drawers who wish to create maps that reflect voter geography, but according to our analysis, that goal will sometimes be in conflict with the goal of partisan fairness.

To allow researchers to investigate not only whether a paper’s methods are theoretically sound but also whether they have been properly implemented and are robust to alternative specifications, it is necessary that published papers be accompanied by their underlying data and code. This article describes experiences and lessons learned at the Quarterly Journal of Political Science since it began requiring authors to provide this type of replication code in 2005. It finds that of the 24 empirical papers subjected to in-house replication review since September 2012, only four packages did not require any modifications. Most troubling, 14 packages (58%) had results in the paper that differed from those generated by the author’s own code. Based on these experiences, this article presents a set of guidelines for authors and journals for improving the reliability and usability of replication packages.