D. Stephen Voss

BLACK INCUMBENTS, WHITE DISTRICTS An Appraisal of the 1996 Congressional Elections

This article explores the controversial 1996 success of three African American incumbents (Sanford Bishop and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and Corrine Brown of Florida) who lost their majority-Black southern congressional districts to Supreme Court decisions. Using aggregate electoral data and Gary Kings solution to the ecological inference problem, we gauge (a) the extent of bias against Black candidates, (b) the extent of backlash against Black voters, and (c) the extent to which incumbency explains away the Georgia victories. The findings are compatible with neither a full attack on racial redistricting nor a defense of it. Southern Whites do not exhibit either consistent bias against Black candidates or backlash against Black voters, but racial polarization is nonetheless evident and dispersed in a geographically systematic manner. Barriers against Black representation are still strong, but they are not the electoral barriers that civil rights activists assume when they embrace majority-minority districts.

The Missing Middle: Why Median-Voter Theory Can't Save Democrats from Singing the Boll-Weevil Blues

Racial redistricting decimated the southern congressional districts once represented by centrist Democrats. Electoral maps drawn in the 1990s instead helped polarize the Souths congressional delegation into a mixture of minority Democrats and right-wing Republicans, creating a more favorable environment for conservative legislation. The median-voter approach offered by Ken Shotts misses this phenomenon, primarily because neither his statistical model nor his formal model incorporates the sharp rightward shift in the House median that followed the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. As a result, his models completely discount gains made by hard-right Republicans at the expense of moderate Democrats.

Following a False Trail: The Hunt for White Backlash in Kentucky's 1996 Desegregation Vote

We test the “white backlash” hypothesis—that white racial conservatism grows as black population density increases—using methods and data parallel to those upon which the concept was originally developed. A 1996 Kentucky referendum vote to strike school segregation from the state constitution serves as a rare measure of “old-fashioned racism.” We estimate the white vote for segregation using ecological inference techniques, and show that the county-level pattern of white segregationist support for this referendum actually runs in the opposite direction from that predicted by the backlash hypothesis. Precinct-level Kentucky analysis and county-level analysis of a related South Carolina referendum validate our finding against the white backlash hypothesis. We conclude that the frequent failure of recent research to find white backlash, especially among urban voters, therefore cannot be explained away by the absence of measures of old-fashioned racism. Rather, the geographical pattern of American racial conservatism seems to have changed since the successes of the Civil Rights movement.

Context and Francophone Support for the Sovereignty of Quebec: An Ecological Analysis

New techniques of ecological inference are utilized to estimate with confidence intervals francophone support in each federal electoral district in Quebec for the pro-sovereignty side in the 1993 and 1997 Canadian general elections and the 1992 and 1995 referenda. Analyzing the link between demographic and political contextual variables and support for the sovereignty of Quebec suggests that demographic factors, such as the proportion of farmers and government workers, influence francophone voting behaviour more often than political factors such as incumbency. Unlike in many other countries with ethnically based movements, francophone support for sovereignty actually rises as the francophone portion of the population rises. This finding indicates that the contact hypothesis probably applies to the Quebec sovereignty movement.

Familiarity Doesn't Breed Contempt: A Rejoinder to "Comment"

1. A high concentration ofAfrican Americans in a white voters parish did not, on average, increase the probability the voter would support Duke. 2. An urban white s probability of voting for Duke decreased, on average, as proximity to African Americans increased. 3. The bulk of David Duke s support came from urbanized areas, especially suburbs, that were once thought to have little interest in such candidates.

The role of ethnic divisions in people’s attitudes toward the death penalty: The case of the Albanians

Are there specific ethnocultural features that make people support the death penalty, or does support of capital punishment simply reflect people’s position vis-à-vis power? Much of the existing research on this topic has been developed in the absence of an appropriate control group. However, this question can be answered only if ethnonational culture remains constant across different political and socioeconomic settings. In order to achieve such a goal, we focus our research on the Balkans where several social settings fit such a research design; we chose ethnic Albanians as our ethnonational culture of focus. We built a research design that would allow our key independent variable, people’s position in country’s power structure, to vary across three countries: Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. In each of these three countries, ethnic Albanians are situated in different positions of the sociopolitical power structure, from the absolutely dominant ethnic group in Albania proper; to an embattled ethnic minority in Macedonia; to a tiny, compact, but peaceful ethnic minority in Montenegro. By analyzing data collected via public opinion surveys, we conclude that, indeed, whether respondents belong to a dominant ethnic group or an ethnic minority affects their attitudes toward the death penalty.

The New Electoral Politics of Race

udice, or political ideology. Haney López is convinced Chicano Movement activists were correct about the tight link between race, culture, and social oppression. Although he recognizes many of its concrete achievements, Haney López argues that the Chicano Movement’s most important legacy is its racial identity, a resource that Mexican Americans can utilize to challenge the “cultural drumbeat of common sense racism that constantly pounds out the message of their inferiority” (239).