One goal of the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) is to broaden representation in largely White-controlled city councils state-wide by incentivizing cities to shift council electoral jurisdictions from at-large to single-member districts. However, little research has investigated whether the CVRA helped contribute to increased minority representation at the city level. This article employs matching and difference-in-difference methods to determine whether cities that switched to district elections as a result of the CVRA enhanced city council diversification. By comparing matched treatment and control group’s racial composition of city councils before and after fully switching from at-large to district election jurisdictions, we estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) of city switching on minority city council representation at 10% to 12%. Further analysis reveals treatment effects are larger among cities with larger shares of Latinos (21%). Thus, states seeking to increase local-level minority representation should consider policies similar to those found in the CVRA.
The year 2018 has been dubbed the Year of the Woman because of the increased number of women who ran for office. What helps explain the dramatic increase in the number of women running for office? This paper examines how the political environment shapes white women’s emotional reactions to politics and in turn their political ambition. We focus on major aspects of the 2016 election: Trump’s treatment of women, Clinton’s historic run for office, the Women’s March, and the #MeToo movement. We argue that each of these factors leads to distinct emotional reactions, and that some of these reactions can increase political ambition. We explore support for these arguments with an experiment conducted with a sample of highly educated white women, an experiment fielded on the 2019 CCES, and with in-depth interviews conducted with first-time women candidates in 2018. We find that Trump’s treatment of women and Clinton’s historic run for office inspired political ambition, but through different emotional pathways. Trump’s treatment of women increased anger and in turn political ambition, while Clinton’s historic run increased ambition through enthusiasm. We find more muted effects for the Women’s Marches and the #MeToo movement.
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