CONFIGURING POLITICAL REPRESSION: ANTI-CIVIL RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT IN MISSISSIPPI*
Dominant approaches to political repression, which rely on linear analytic models and focus on discrete state agencies or repressive forms, obscure the complex organization and impacts of enforcement networks. Building on recent investigations of collective action fields and arenas of political contention, we develop a relational approach to political repression emphasizing joint actions to suppress challenges to the political status quo. We use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine enforcement networks that mobilized against challenges to segregation in early-1960s Mississippi, identifying four distinct enforcement configurations which maintained segregation across the state's eighty-two counties. We then analyze the processes that undergird these configurations of enforcement using archival data associated with representative counties. Our approach demonstrates the emergent logic of enforcement— i.e., how particular enforcement activities developed jointly, rather than only in parallel, with those initiated by other authorities.
Contributor Notes
* David Cunningham is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Geoff Ward is an associate professor of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Peter Owens is a project manager in the Center for Economic Development at California State University, Chico.
† This research was supported by a pilot grand from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and the National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Grant #1024396. The authors acknowledge the helpful feedback on earlier versions provided by Dan Kryder, Edward Walker, Andy Andrews, Larry Griffin, Charles Ragin, anonymous reviewers, and the interlocutors at the 2014 Southern Sociological Society's Thematic Session on Political Economy, Social Movements, and the South, the 2015 ASA CBSM Section Workshop, and a 2016 Washington University Sociology colloquium. Research contributions from Clare Hammonds, Ashley Rondini, Elena Lewis, and Robby Luckett, along with our students in Brandeis University's 2009 Applied Research Methods course and a 2011 Justice Brandeis Semester program on “Civil Rights and Racial Justice in Mississippi,” hosted by the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, were instrumental for accessing data and conceptualizing measures used in our analysis.