The House as a Stepping Stone to the Senate: Why Do So Few African American House Members Run?

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Why are politicians more likely to advance the interests of those of their race? I present a field experiment demonstrating that black politicians are more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests than are their counterparts. Guided by elite interviews, I emailed 6,928 U.S. state legislators from a putatively black alias asking for help signing up for state unemployment benefits. Crucially, I varied the legislators' political incentive to respond by randomizing whether the sender purported to live within or far from each legislator's district. While nonblack legislators were markedly less likely to respond when their political incentives to do so were diminished, black legislators typically continued to respond even when doing so promised little political reward. Black legislators thus appear substantially more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests. As political decision making is often difficult for voters to observe, intrinsically motivated descriptive representatives play a crucial role in advancing minorities' political interests.

Section: Evaluating Alternative Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black Politicians Are More Intrinsically Motivated to Advance Blacks’ Interests: A Field Experiment Manipulating Political Incentives

Broockman

2013

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179

“…The political context also incentivizes strategic minority candidates to run in elections where they can put their limited resources to more efficient and effective use. One of these environments is when minority voters are concentrated into districts where they achieve influence status for a particular seat (Canon, Schousen, and Sellers ; Johnson, Oppenheimer, and Selin ). Canon, Schousen, and Sellers show that African American elites were deeply involved in the battle over the creation of new majority‐minority districts in North Carolina, in part because of the consequent substantive effects, but also because of the potential effects for latent black candidates (Canon , 116–18).…”

Section: Descriptive Representation: Minority Votes Equal Minority Seatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ignorance Is Bias: The Effect of Latino Losers on Models of Latino Representation

Juenke

2014

Nearly every aggregate study of minority legislative representation has observed outcomes of elections (officeholders), rather than the supply of minority candidates. Because of this, scholars have left a large amount of important data, the election losers, out of their models of minority representation. The evidence presented in this article demonstrates that voters in the United States cannot choose minority officeholders because there are rarely minority candidates on the ballot. I use state legislative candidate data from Carsey et al. (2008) and Klarner et al. (2012) to test models of Latino representation that correct for first-stage selection bias. Once candidate self-selection is taken into account, the probability of electing a Latino increases enormously. I then use data from 2010 to make out-of-sample predictions, which clearly favor the conditional model. Thus, our current understanding of Latino representation is significantly biased by ignoring the first stage of an election, a candidate's decision to run.T he two questions that motivate most of the minority representation research in the United States are "When and why do minority candidates get elected to office?" Although they are not always given explicit or foremost attention, they remain fundamental to understanding the processes of descriptive and substantive representation, legislative redistricting, co-ethnic voting, and related political phenomena. While scholars appear to have some good answers to the first question, we have fairly muddled answers to the second. This is because it is unclear to what extent the anti-minority prejudice found in some experimental settings and on some surveys hurts minority candidates in actual elections. Perhaps instead, partisanship, incumbency, and other electoral factors mitigate voters' negative "affect." If it turns out that minority candidates often get elected in white districts when they run, then our understanding of minority representation requires revision.Traditionally, minority representation research examines the "population-seats" relationship in order to

“…Recent scholarship has therefore focused instead on the question of candidate emergence (Lawless and Fox ). The decision of whether to run comes down to a variety of considerations, including incumbent characteristics (Stone and Maisel ), the potential candidate's current position (Johnson, Oppenheimer, and Selin ), outside recruitment (Fox and Lawless ), district magnitude (Matland and Brown ), party politics (Matland and Studlar ), or political efficacy and ambition (Campbell and Wolbrecht ; Fox and Lawless ; Maestas et al. ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Women Don't Run? Election Aversion and Candidate Entry

Kanthak

Woon

2014

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173

L egislatures in the United States and around the world are becoming increasingly diverse yet remain unrepresentative. From 1945 to 2012, the number of minority members of Congress rose from 3 to 90, and the number of women rose from 11 to 102. Nevertheless, Congress remains 83% white and 83% male. In the states, 89% of legislators are white and 86% are male. Similarly, the number of women in legislatures around the globe has increased fourfold since 1945, but men still hold 88% of worldwide legislative seats.The lack of diversity in contemporary legislatures is a significant problem not only from the perspective of descriptive representation and identity politics, but also for democratic decision making in general. Diverse groups can make better decisions than homogeneous ones because diverse perspectives offer the potential for creative decisions (Page 2007). For example, groups with more women tend to work together more effectively Kristin Kanthak is Associate Professor,