| Description |
Do minority voters respond to co-racial or co-ethnic candidates? That is does the increased chance of substantive representation translate into increased participation? Here, we focus on this question among African American voters. While much of the empirical literature on this question has produced conflicting answers, recent studies suggest that minority candidates can significantly increase minority turnout. We argue that past work on this topic does not adequately account for the fact that minority voters in places with minority candidates may systematically differ in their level of participation than minority voters in places without minority candidates. In this study we address the weakness of previous research designs and offer a new design that exploits the redistricting process to gain additional leverage over this question. The redistricting process allows us to correctly model the selection process and ensure that voters who were moved to districts with African American candidates through the redistricting process are comparable to voters that remained in existing districts with white candidates. We find little evidence that African American voter turnout increases when voters are moved to African America candidates. We find some evidence that white voters, however, tend to vote at lower rates when they are represented by African American candidates.
|
ICAR Research Data Repository for Knowledge Management