This paper explores the political economy of anti-discrimination legislation during the ascendancy of the Civil Rights Movement. It traces the diffusion of state-level fair employment legislation and evaluates the relative importance of various demographic, political and economic factors in promoting such legislation. The empirics indicate that non-southern states with higher proportions of union members, Jews, Catholics, and NAACP members tended to adopt fair employment legislation earlier than other states. There is also some evidence that the likelihood of passage was higher in states with more competitive political systems and in states with neighbors which had already passed a law. Predicted times of fair employment policy adoption for the southern states underscore the importance of federal intervention.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University in its series Working Papers with number
0104.