Compensatory Ideology to Maintain Dominance: Mobilization around the “Lost Cause” during Jim Crow
Among the tools dominant groups use to sustain hierarchy, ideology -- defined here as systems of rhetoric, ideas, and symbols -- has received less attention from political scientists. Ideological constructs derive meaning from their evolving context. I propose that one context when elites turn to ideology is when they face competing needs and constraints: tolerating some human capital gains among subordinate out-groups and facing potential in-group discontent, while needing to guard against future threats and sustain elite dominance. The case of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) exemplifies this through their mobilization around spreading the “Lost Cause” ideology to legitimate elite white dominance, psychologically compensate poor whites, and sustain prejudice against Blacks. Using original data on local UDC chapter formation (1900-1920), I show that chapters emerged where Black human capital progressed, and inter-group economic competition and intra-white inequality was high. Qualitative evidence demonstrates how elites thought about their ideological mobilization.
She is an IDEAL Provostial Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, in the Department of Political Science, and an alumni affiliate of the Identities & Ideologies project. She received her Ph.D. in Politics from New York University in 2024.
Her scholarly interests mainly lie in American political behavior, race and ethnic politics, and gender and politics in both historical and contemporary contexts. Her research primarily examines the conditions under which dominant groups mobilize around ideology and symbolic politics as tools to uphold their status and hierarchy, who the primary agents of these tools are, and their social and political consequences. Her work is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics.
She holds an S.M. in Technology and Policy from MIT and a B.A./B.S. in Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a researcher in DEC at the World Bank Group. Outside of her academic life, she enjoys running, curating playlists, and am avid enthusiast and dabbler in photography and collage art.