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==Empirical Questions==
===What's the author's research question and hypothesis?===
The null hypothesis of the empirical section author is that studying the effect of disenfranchisement of Southern blacks (through poll taxes and literacy tests) had no effect on :
* (a) Voter turnout,
* (b) The Democratic party vote share,
* (f) Migration of blacks.
... in the counties/states where this disenfranchisement was implemented. For the statistical tests, the null hypothesis is that the effects were zero. The author does not give a sense of his priors, but he does say that his findings (all null hypotheses rejected except for (d)) are "[C]onsistent with historical evidence that these disenfranchisement laws independently lowered black political participation."
In particular, the author notes that the fall in black educational inputs (ie, the teacher/student ratio) is consistent with theoretical political economy models including the one developed later in this paper.