David Lublin

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.

Quality, Not Quantity: Strategic Politicians in U.S. Senate Elections, 1952–1990

Analyzing senatorial elections between 1952 and 1990, I estimate the impact of challenger experience in various elected offices on vote for the incumbent. Controlling for other factors, U.S. representatives gain a higher proportion of the vote than other elected officials. Consistent with Jacobsons (1990b) theory that the increase in the importance of challenger quality over time in House elections explains the decline in the proportion of marginal House seats, the importance of challenger quality and the proportion of marginal seats remained stable over time in Senate elections. After developing a challenger quality scale based upon the estimated impact of having held different elected offices, I demonstrate that potential senatorial challengers strategically take into account both local and national political and economic conditions when making their candidacy decisions.

The Election of African Americans and Latinos To the U.S. House of Representatives, 1972-1994

Past studies have shown that racially polarized voting results in African American and Latino congressional candidates rarely winning election outside of majority-minority districts. Analyz ing U.S. House of Representatives elections from 1972 through 1994 confirms these findings and shows that race, rather than socioeconomic factors highly correlated with race, accounts for racial polarization in congressional elections. Nonracial district characteristics bear virtually no relationship to the race of a districts representative. Even if socioeconomic differences among African Americans, Latinos, and Whites decline substantially, race will continue to play an important role in American elections. If the Supreme Courts decisions in Shaw v. Reno and its progeny reduce the number of majority-minority districts, then the number of minority repre sentatives probably will decline as well.

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.

Minority rules : electoral systems, decentralization, and ethnoregional party success

Dedication Acknowledgements Chapter One: Introduction Part I: Electoral Systems Chapter Two: Majoritarian Electoral Systems Chapter Three: Proportional Electoral Systems Chapter Four: Ni-Ni Electoral Systems Part II: Electoral Provisions Designed to Assist or to Undermine Ethnoregional Parties Chapter Five: Communal Lists, Reserved Seats, and Lower Thresholds Chapter Six: Apportionment and Boundary Delimitation Chapter Seven: Electoral Provisions Designed to Limit Ethnoregional Parties Part III: Decentralization Chapter Eight: Decentralization and Ethnoregional Parties Chapter Nine: Ethnic Decentralization Chapter Ten: Non-Ethnic Decentralization and Multivariate Models Chapter Eleven: Conclusion

Has the Voting Rights Act Outlived its Usefulness? In a Word, 'No'

Race-conscious redistricting remains crucial to the election of an overwhelming share of African-American and Latino officials. We present descriptive evidence, easily interpretable by non-specialists, from recent elections at the state and federal levels to support our claims. The Voting Rights Act remains a valuable tool to protect the ability of minorities to elect their preferred candidates.

The Continuing Dominance of Traditional Gender Roles in Southern Elections

Studies of the election of women to public office have been increasingly encouraging about their prospects of female candidates. The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which gender roles continue to influence the election of women to local office and the pool of candidates for higher office. Copyright (c) 2003 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

Electoral Systems, Ethnic Heterogeneity and Party System Fragmentation

Taking into proper account the geographic distribution of ethnic groups and the operation of electoral systems within individual countries reveals that the impact of ethnic diversity and electoral systems on the number of parties has been underestimated. Contrary to earlier findings, this study reveals that ethnic diversity spurs party proliferation in countries with both majoritarian and proportional electoral systems, though the effect is stronger in the latter. The insights gained here provide a theoretically derived measure of ethnic diversity that is useful for estimating its effect on specifically political phenomena and generating an improved holistic measure of the impact of electoral systems. More crucially, the results indicate that electoral system designers have a greater capacity to structure electoral outcomes. The results rely on multivariate models created using a new database with election results from 1990 through 2011 in sixty-five free democracies.

Dispersing Authority or Deepening Divisions? Decentralization and Ethnoregional Party Success

Political scientists have fiercely debated the impact of decentralization on ethnic conflict; some see it as a panacea, while others contend that it sows the seeds of its own failure by stimulating ethnic divisions via ethnoregional parties. Using multiple methods—historical analysis, quantitative case studies, and multivariate models of the share of votes won by ethnoregional parties in 71 democracies—this article demonstrates that ethnoregional parties derive no benefit from decentralization in nonethnically decentralized countries. Even in ethnically decentralized countries, much ethnoregional party success is explained by the continuation of parties that originally pressed for decentralization. Any impact of decentralization on ethnoregional parties can be minimized through the careful construction of institutions to enhance regional autonomy but not statewide influence. Consequently, institutional designers should retain decentralization as an option when crafting political institutions even in countries with ethnic divisions.

The Strengthening of Party and Decline of Religion in Explaining Congressional Voting Behavior on Gay and Lesbian Issues

The battle over lesbian and gay rights has gained increased prominence in the political arena. Discrimination against homosexuals may have been widely accepted in the past, but today such discrimination is strongly debated. In 2004, the presidential candidates as well as members of Congress squared off on whether to enshrine a ban on gay marriage into the Constitution. Analyzing the 106th–108th Congresses reveals that member and district characteristics greatly influence the level of support for gay and lesbian rights. Democrats are far more supportive of pro-gay and -lesbian initiatives than Republicans. Region similarly plays a key role. Southerners are more tepid in their support for gay and lesbian rights than their northern colleagues. At the same time, New England representatives are even more liberal than other northerners. Despite strong opposition to gay marriage within the churches of their communities, African-American and Latino representatives are especially likely to support gay and lesbian rights. Church membership also guides representative behavior, though not always as conventional wisdom might indicate. Catholic representatives are not more hostile to gay and lesbian rights than other representatives. Moreover, the influence of religious affiliation on congressional voting behavior is declining. Constituency characteristics, such as urbanicity and education, also shape representative behavior but play a secondary role.