Did the Civil Rights Movement Have a Direct Impact on Public Policy? Evidence from the Passage of State Fair Housing Laws, 1959-1965*

Abstract: Sociologists have begun to systematically investigate the outcomes of social movements, but it remains unclear whether social movements directly and independently impact the adoption of public policy. In the case of the U.S. civil rights movement, sociological research has been inconclusive. The main barrier is the focus on national politics and federal policy-making, which yields only a limited number of observations for analysis. This paper exploits variation in the timing of state-level fair housing laws and analyzes a new source of data to assess the effect of the civil rights movement on policy adoption. Utilizing discrete-time, event-history methods, we find that NAACP mobilization is directly and positively related to the passage of fair housing laws in northern states, even when controlling for public opinion and other potentially confounding variables. In contrast to Downsian models, our findings suggest that social movements shape policy outcomes by signaling to legislators the policy preferences of specific segments of the electorate. In particular, legislators saw NAACP mobilization as a proxy for the mobilization of the black electorate as well as a signal of the electoral reward for supporting fair housing and the penalty for opposing it. The implications of these findings fo