%0 Journal Article
%T Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States
%A Daniel A. Smith
%A David Cottrell
%A Javier M. Rodriguez
%A Michael C. Herron
%J American Politics Research
%@ 1552-3373
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1532673X18754555
%X On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally ¡°missing¡± from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country¡¯s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity
%K disenfranchisement
%K race
%K voting rights
%K demography
%K mortality
%K imprisonment
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532673X18754555