Traci Burch

Trading democracy for justice : criminal convictions and the decline of neighborhood political participation

The United States imprisons far more people, total and per capita, than any other country in the world. Among the more than 1.5 million Americans currently incarcerated, minorities and the poor are disproportionately represented. Whats more, they tend to come from just a few of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. While the political costs of this phenomenon remain poorly understood, its become increasingly clear that the effects of this mass incarceration are much more pervasive than previously thought, extending beyond those imprisoned to the neighbors, family, and friends left behind. For Trading Democracy for Justice, Traci Burch has drawn on data from neighborhoods with imprisonment rates up to fourteen times the national average to chart demographic features that include information about imprisonment, probation, and parole, as well as voter turnout and volunteerism. She presents powerful evidence that living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood significantly decreases political participation. Similarly, people living in these neighborhoods are less likely to engage with their communities through volunteer work. What results is the demobilization of entire neighborhoods and the creation of vast inequalities-even among those not directly affected by the criminal justice system. The first book to demonstrate the ways in which the institutional effects of imprisonment undermine already disadvantaged communities, Trading Democracy for Justice speaks to issues at the heart of democracy.

Effects of Imprisonment and Community Supervision on Neighborhood Political Participation in North Carolina

This article considers the effect of prison, probation, and parole on neighborhood political participation in North Carolina. I analyze data from state boards of elections, departments of corrections, departments of public health, the Census Bureau, and market research firms for 2000 and 2008. Multivariate regressions reveal a complex relationship between criminal justice supervision and voter turnout. The evidence suggests that at the individual level and in the aggregate, the criminal justice system shapes neighborhood political participation.

Destabilizing the American Racial Order

Are racial disparities in the United States just as deep-rooted as they were before the 2008 presidential election, largely eliminated, or persistent but on the decline? One can easily find all of these pronouncements; rather than trying to adjudicate among them, this essay seeks to identify what is changing in the American racial order, what persists or is becoming even more entrenched, and what is likely to affect the balance between change and continuity. The authors focus on young American adults, who were raised in a distinctive racial context and who think about and practice race differently than their older counterparts. For many young Americans, racial attitudes are converging across groups and social networks are becoming more intertwined. Most important, although group-based hierarchy has not disappeared, race or ethnicity does less to predict a young adults life chances than ever before in American history.

Organizations and the Democratic Representation of Interests: What Does It Mean When Those Organizations Have No Members?

This article documents the prevalence in organized interest politics in the United States of organizations—for example, corporations, think tanks, universities, or hospitals—that have no members in the ordinary sense and analyzes the consequences of that dominance for the democratic representation of citizen interests. We use data from the Washington Representatives Study, a longitudinal data base containing more than 33,000 organizations active in national politics in 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, and 2011. The share of membership associations active in Washington has eroded over time until, in 2011, barely a quarter of the more than 14,000 organizations active in Washington in 2011 were membership associations, and less than half of those were membership association with individuals as members. In contrast, a majority of the politically involved organizations were memberless organizations, of which nearly two-thirds were corporations. The dominance of memberless organizations in pressure politics raises important questions about democratic representation. Studies of political representation by interest groups raise several concerns about democratic inequalities: the extent to which representation of interests by groups is unequal, the extent to which groups fail to represent their members equally, and the extent to which group members are unable to control their leaders. All of the dilemmas that arise when membership associations advocate in politics become even more intractable when organizations do not have members.

Louder Chorus — Same Accent: The Representation of Interests in Pressure Politics, 1981–2011

What kinds of interests are represented by organizations in Washington? A half century ago, E.E. Schattschneider warned famously that “the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with an upper-class accent.” In particular, he argued that organizations on behalf of both broad publics and those who lack resources are relatively rare. Subsequent empirical investigations have confirmed Schattschneider’s observation. In this paper, we examine how the growth and changing composition of the pressure system have affected the extent to which it is representative of the American public. This paper draws upon an extensive data base assembled by our research team and used in our recent book, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2012). Since the completion of that project we have added data about 2011 so that the data base includes nearly 35,000 organizations, comprising all the organizations listed at least once in the Washington Representatives directories (Columbia Books) published in 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, and 2011 as having been active in Washington politics. We have categorized these organizations into 96 categories based on their organizational structure and the nature of the interest being represented (for example, business, an occupation, a blue-collar union, a foreign government, a group of universities, a religious or ethnic group, or a conservative think tank). In addition, for each organization, we have collected information about such matters as its founding date and its spending on lobbying.These data permit us to shed light on the fundamental aspect of democratic equality, the question of who has voice in national politics. Tracing organizations active in Washington politics over a thirty-year period, we are able to ascertain how the Washington pressure system has grown over the decades and to determine whether that growth represents newly founded organizations or the entry into politics of previously existing organizations. Furthermore, by asking whether that growth has been uniform across sectors we are able to trace the changing distribution of both the kinds of organized interests and spending on lobbying. In particular, we are able to inquire whether the much-noticed increase in the number of citizen organizations has been matched by equivalent growth in the kinds of organizations -- for example, corporations, trade associations, professional associations, and unions -- that have traditionally formed the backbone of the pressure system, thus, leaving the overall distribution of organizations, and the distribution of lobbying spending, fundamentally unchanged.

The Old Jim Crow: Racial Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Imprisonment

This article examines the impact of racial residential segregation on imprisonment rates at the neighborhood level. Key to the strength of this enterprise is block‐group level data on imprisonment, crime, and other demographic factors for about 5,000 neighborhoods in North Carolina. These data also include information on county racial residential segregation from the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Hierarchical linear models that control for neighborhood characteristics, such as racial diversity, crime, poverty, unemployment, median income, homeownership, and other factors, show that neighborhoods in more segregated counties have higher imprisonment rates than neighborhoods in less segregated counties. On average, neighborhoods in counties with segregation levels at the minimum of 41.4 are expected to have imprisonment rates of 0.186 percent, while neighborhoods in counties with segregation levels at the maximum of 95.6 are expected to have imprisonment rates more than twice as high, or about 0.494 percent.