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Race, Political Empowerment, and Constituency Service: Descriptive Representation and the Hiring of African-American Congressional Staff

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Polity

Abstract

Do democratic legislators, African-American legislators, and/or legislators from black-majority districts hire a higher proportion of district staff that are African-American? Legal experts and policymakers are engaged in discussions over the efficacy of districts with significant African-American populations in the wake of the extension of portions of the Voting Rights Act. With the Act's extension, critics have planned to file suit against districts likely to elect African-American legislators, alleging that these districts may harm African-American constituents. In contrast, we argue that these districts may be useful in enhancing African-American political empowerment and that the presence of African-American staff in legislative district offices is an indicator of this empowerment. Based on interviews with staff in 41 congressional district offices, and on quantitative analysis, we find that African-American-majority districts and the presence of African-American and Democratic legislators lead to a higher proportion of African-American district staff. The results suggest that contrary to the conventional wisdom of some voting rights scholars, in the aggregate the election of African-American legislators (and thus the drawing of African-American-majority or influence districts) enhances the empowerment of African-American constituents when based on an examination of African-American district staff and constituency service.

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Notes

  1. Edward Blum and Roger Clegg, “Color Inside the Lines: The Voting Rights Act Is One of the Best Laws Ever Passed: It Should Be Scrapped,” Legal Affairs, November–December 2003; Anita Earls, “Equal Effects,” Legal Affairs, November–December 2003; Todd J. Gillman, “Texans, Others Stall Voting Rights Renewal,” Dallas Morning News, 18 May 2006.

  2. Charles Cameron, David Epstein, and Sharyn O'Halloran, “Do Majority–Minority Districts Maximize Substantive Black Representation in Congress?” American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 794–812; David I. Lublin, The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); L. Marvin Overby and Kenneth Cosgrove, “Unintended Consequences? Racial Redistricting and the Representation of Minority Interests,” Journal of Politics 58 (1996): 540–50; Carol M. Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African-Americans in Congress, enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible? Race in Modern America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

  3. David T. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Christian R. Grose, “Disentangling Constituency and Legislator Effects in Legislative Representation: Black Legislators or Black Districts?” Social Science Quarterly 86 (2005): 427–43; Kenny J. Whitby, The Color of Representation: Congressional Behavior and Black Interests (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

  4. See Vincent L. Hutchings, Harwood K. McClerking, and Guy-Uriel Charles, “Congressional Representation of Black Interests: Recognizing the Importance of Stability,” Journal of Politics 66 (2004): 450–68; John R. Petrocik and Scott W. Desposato, “The Partisan Consequences of Majority–Minority Redistricting in the South, 1992 and 1994,” Journal of Politics 60 (1998): 613–33; Kenneth W. Shotts, “The Effect of Majority–Minority Mandates on Partisan Gerrymandering,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2001): 120–35; Kenneth W. Shotts, “Gerrymandering, Legislative Composition, and National Policy Outcomes,” American Journal of Political Science 46 (2002): 398–414; Kenneth Shotts, “Does Racial Redistricting Cause Conservative Policy Outcomes? Policy Preferences of Southern Representatives in the 1980s and 1990s,” Journal of Politics 65 (2003): 216–26.

  5. In Miller v. Johnson and subsequent cases, the Supreme Court has ruled that race as a “predominant” factor cannot be used to draw legislative districts. However, this does not necessarily preclude drawing district lines that are majority–minority if other considerations are also accounted for (e.g., compactness, contiguity, partisan considerations, keeping communities of interest intact, and so on).

  6. Lublin, Paradox of Representation, Ch. 3.

  7. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation; Claudine Gay, “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 589–602; Claudine Gay, “Spirals of Trust? The Effect of Descriptive Representation on the Relationship Between Citizens and Their Government,” American Journal of Political Science 46 (2002): 717–33; Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests; Katherine Tate, Black Faces in the Mirror: African Americans and Their Representatives in the U.S. Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

  8. Bruce Cain, John Ferejohn, and Morris Fiorina, The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978).

  9. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation; Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Going Home: Black Representatives and Their Constituents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests.

  10. Later in the article, we present direct, quantitative measures of political empowerment based on the hiring of African-American staff. Unfortunately, it is difficult to conceive a quantitative measure that would get at empowerment of African-American constituents generally in terms of assessing the extent of strong connections between African-American staff (relative to white staff) and African-American constituents. However, in our empirical analyses, we did conduct additional questions during our interviews with staff where our direct measure of hiring African-American district staff seemed to qualitatively correspond with other forms of African-American empowerment. Thus, our measure of direct political empowerment is the percentage of African-American staff hired. However, we qualitatively argue that this political empowerment extends to African-American constituents more broadly, because most African-American staff we interviewed had much stronger connections in their districts' African-American communities than did white staff members.

  11. Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Tate, Black Faces in the Mirror.

  12. Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran, “Do Majority–Minority Districts Maximize?”; Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: Free Press, 1994); Lublin, The Paradox of Representation; Overby and Cosgrove, “Unintended Consequences?”; Christine LeVeaux Sharpe and James C. Garand, “Race, Roll Calls, and Redistricting,” Political Research Quarterly 54 (2001): 31–51; Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White; Whitby, The Color of Representation.

  13. Hutchings et al., “Congressional Representation of Black Interests”; Shotts, “The Effect of Majority–Minority Mandates”; Shotts, “Gerrymandering”; Shotts, “Does Racial Redistricting”.

  14. Fenno, Home Style; Fenno, Going Home; Susan Webb Hammond, “Recent Research on Legislative Staff,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 21 (1996): 543–76; David L. Leal and Frederick M. Hess, “Who Chooses Experience? Examining the Use of Veteran Staff by House Freshmen,” Polity 36 (2004): 651–64; Robert H. Salisbury and Kenneth A. Shepsle, “U.S. Congressman as Enterprise,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 6 (1981): 559–75.

  15. Tate, Black Faces in the Mirror, Ch. 6.

  16. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation; Grose, “Disentangling Constituency and Legislator Effects”; Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, “Symbols and Substance” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2002); Tate, Black Faces in the Mirror; Whitby, The Color of Representation.

  17. Scholars have found a relationship between legislator race/ethnicity and legislative outcomes by examining roll-call voting, bill introductions, committee assignments, and similar activities. See Kathleen A. Bratton and Kerry L. Haynie, “Agenda Setting and Legislative Success in State Legislatures: The Effects of Gender and Race,” Journal of Politics 61 (1999): 658–79; Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation; Jason Casellas, “Latino Representation in Congress and State Legislatures” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2006); Rodolfo Espino, “Minority Interests, Majority Rules: Representation of Latinos in the U.S. Congress” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2004); Sally Friedman, “House Committee Assignments of Women and Minority Newcomers, 1965–1994,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 21 (1996): 73–82; Christian R. Grose, “Black Legislators and White Districts, White Legislators and Black Districts: The Effect of Court-Ordered Redistricting on Congressional Voting Records in the South, 1993–2000,” American Review of Politics 22 (2001): 195–215; Grose, “Disentangling Constituency and Legislator Effects;” Kerry L. Haynie, African American Legislators in the American States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Kerry L. Haynie, “African Americans and the New Politics of Inclusion: A Representational Dilemma?” in Congress Reconsidered, ed. Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, 8th edition, (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005); Robert R. Preuhs, “The Conditional Effects of Minority Descriptive Representation: Black Legislators and Policy Influence in the American States,” Journal of Politics 68 (2006): 585–99; Tate, Black Faces in the Mirror; Whitby, The Color of Representation. However, also see Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests and Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White, for an opposing argument.

  18. Peter K. Eisinger, The Politics of Displacement (New York: Academic Press, 1980); David L. Leal, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, and Kenneth J. Meier, “The Politics of Latino Education: The Biases of At-Large Elections,” Journal of Politics 66 (2004): 1224–44; Paula D. McClain, “The Changing Dynamics of Urban Politics: Black and Hispanic Municipal Employment—Is There Competition?” Journal of Politics 55 (1993): 399–414; Kenneth J. Meier, Eric Gonzalez Juenke, Robert D. Wrinkle, J. L. Polinard, “Structural Choices and Representational Biases: The Post-Election Color of Representation,” American Journal of Political Science 49 (2005): 758–68; J. L. Polinard, Robert D. Wrinkle, Tomas Longoria, and Norman Binder, Electoral Structure and Urban Policy: the Impact on Mexican American Communities (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

  19. Susan A. Banducci, Todd Donovan, and Jeffrey A. Karp, “Minority Representation, Empowerment, and Participation,” Journal of Politics 66 (2004): 534–56.

  20. Fredrick C. Harris, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, and Brian D. McKenzie, Countervailing Forces in African-American Civic Activism, 1973–1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  21. Banducci, Donovan, and Karp, “Minority Representation”; Lawrence Bobo and Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” American Political Science Review 84 (1990): 377–93; Kimball Brace, Lisa Handley, Richard G. Niemi, and Harold W. Stanley, “Minority Turnout and the Creation of Majority-minority Districts,” American Politics Quarterly 23 (1995):190–203; Suzanne Dovi, “Preferable Descriptive Representatives: Will Just Any Woman, Black, or Latino Do?” American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 729–43; Eisinger, The Politics of Displacement; Gay, “Spirals of Trust”; Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., “Exploring Minority Empowerment: Symbolic Politics, Governing Coalitions, and Traces of Political Style in Los Angeles,” American Journal of Political Science 40 (1996): 56–81; Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. and Karen M. Kaufman, “Is There an Empowerment Life Cycle? Long-term Black Empowerment and Its Influence on Voter Participation,” Urban Affairs Review 33 (1998): 741–66; Patricia Gurin, Shirley Hatchett, and James S. Jackson, Hope and Independence: Blacks' Response to Electoral and Party Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1989); Harris, Chapman, and McKenzie, Counervailing Forces; Haynie, “African Americans and the New Politics of Inclusion”; Susan E. Howell and Deborah Fagan, “Race and Trust in Government: Testing the Political Reality Model,” Public Opinion Quarterly 52 (1988): 343–50; Albert K. Karnig, Black Representation and Urban Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Richard A. Keiser, “Explaining African-American Political Empowerment: Windy City Politics from 1900 to 1983,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 29 (1993): 84–116; Leal, Martinez-Ebers, and Meier, “The Politics of Latino Education”; Maruice Mangum, “Psychological Involvement and Black Voter Turnout,” Political Research Quarterly 56 (2003): 41–48; Jane Mansbridge, “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent ‘Yes’,” Journal of Politics 61 (1999): 628–57; Meier, et al., “Structural Choices”; Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Pitkin, Concept of Representation; Katherine Tate, “Black Political Participation in the 1984 and 1988 Presidential Elections,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 1159–76; Tate, Black Faces in the Mirror; James Vanderleeuw and Glenn Utter, “Voter Roll-off and the Electoral Context: A Test of Two Theses,” Social Science Quarterly 74 (1993): 664–73; Melissa Williams, Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). However, also see Gay, “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation” and David Lublin and Katherine Tate, “Racial Group Competition in Urban Elections,” in Classifying by Race, ed. Paul E. Peterson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

  22. This link between descriptive representation and political empowerment may also sometimes result in indirect substantive outcomes that favor African-Americans, though we are unable to test this contention explicitly.

  23. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation.

  24. Regarding diversity's effect on group-based decision-making, also see Lu Hong and Scott Page, “Diversity and Optimality” (Manuscript, University of Michigan, 1998).

  25. Claudine Gay, “Spirals of Trust?”; Katherine Tate, “The Political Representation of Blacks in Congress: Does Race Matter?,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 26 (2001): 623–38.

  26. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation, 206.

  27. James W. Endersby and Charles E. Menifeld, “Representation, Ethnicity, and Congress: Black and Hispanic Representatives and Constituencies,” in Black and Multiracial Politics in America, ed. Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh and Lawrence J. Hanks (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Vincent L. Hutchings, “Issue Salience and Support for Civil Rights Legislation among Southern Democrats,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 23 (1998): 521–44; Lublin, The Paradox of Representation; Sharpe and Garand, “Race, Roll Calls, and Redistricting.”

  28. It was not feasible to conduct surveys as district offices generally do not respond to questions regarding race unless trust between interviewer and respondent has been established. We initially tried by simply mailing surveys to staff, but only two were returned. Thus, we decided the interview route was the only possibility.

  29. See Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation; and Sinclair-Chapman, “Symbols and Substance.” We also conducted our analysis with 2000 census demographic data on redrawn districts from the 108th Congress (2003–04), as some district lines had changed and the African-American population had shifted in some districts. Thus, legislators may have made hires based upon the new racial demographics of their districts that would be in place for the 2002 elections/108th Congress and not the demographics of the 107th Congress (2001–02). However, the results presented later in the paper were consistent whether we used data based on the 107th or 108th district lines.

  30. By successful interviews, we mean only those interviews that were completed, and not those that started, but where the staff were not willing to discuss the racial nature of constituency service and the racial backgrounds of their district staff.

  31. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation; Fenno, Home Style; Fenno, Going Home; Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests.

  32. Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests; Fenno, Going Home.

  33. Having said this, later in the manuscript, we estimate a selection model with the percentage of African-American district staff as the dependent variable and party, race, and district black population as the independent variables in the outcome equation.

  34. We also use this measure with the aforementioned difference of means tests for party, race, and African-American population of the district.

  35. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation, Ch. 5.

  36. We examine “overhiring” and “underhiring” not because overhiring is somehow normatively preferred for African-Americans, but simply because it is a way to control for the effect of the district black population. The potential African-American workforce in a district is going to be driven substantially by the African-American population percentage in the district, so we want to control for this possibility.

  37. We also compared white Democratic legislators to black Democratic legislators only (though do not display these results in tables). Black Democratic legislators hired substantially more black staff than did white Democratic legislators. White Democrats had a mean African-American staff percentage of 30.1, while black Democrats had a 65.6 mean African-American district staff percentage. All African-American legislators in the sample are Democrats.

  38. For more details on selection models, see: Christopher H. Achen, The Statistical Analysis of Quasi Experiments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); James J. Heckman, “Sample Selection Bias as a Specification Error,” Econometrica 47 (1979): 153–62.

  39. See http://www.vote-smart.org/npat_about.php for more details.

  40. For instance, the following are examples of research using the NPAT: Stephen Ansolabehere, James M. Snyder, Jr., and Charles Stewart III, “Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2001): 136–59; Robert S. Erikson and Gerald C. Wright, “Voters, Candidates, and Issues in Congressional Elections,” in Dodd and Oppenheimer, Congress Reconsidered; Evan J. Ringquist and Carl Dasse, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Campaign Promises? Environmental Legislation in the 105th Congress,” Social Science Quarterly 85 (2004): 400–19.

  41. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation.

  42. The commonality members in our district staff analysis were as follows: Sanford Bishop (D-GA); Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN); Earl Hilliard (D-AL); Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL); Donald Payne (D-NJ); Bobby Rush (D-IL); Diane Watson (D-CA); and Mel Watt (D-NC). The difference members in our analysis were as follows: Lacy Clay, Jr. (D-MO); Danny Davis (D-IL); Alcee Hastings (D-FL); Maxine Waters (D-CA). See Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation, 137–38, where Canon identifies Bishop, Hilliard, Rush, Watt, and Hastings in these respective categories. See Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation, 208, for his staff results by commonality versus difference.

  43. Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation, Ch. 3. Canon only coded newly elected African-Americans (in 1992) as commonality or difference members. We included all black legislators who responded to our query about the racial backgrounds of district staff. As noted in the text, those not in Canon's analysis were determined by reading about their racial coalitions in their initial elections and their personal styles of presentations to constituents in media accounts and other outlets.

  44. For example, Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN) ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006. However, his higher ambitions for the Senate have been well known for a while. A LEXIS-NEXIS search of “Harold Ford” and “Senate” in the past 5 years yields more than 1000 newspaper articles just from southeast news sources alone.

  45. For example, see “But Don't Call It Affirmative,” Washington Post, 30 January 2003. It would be fruitful to conduct a similar study to the one we have presented here in a number of years, tracking whether Republican legislators have increased the number of African-American district staff.

  46. Critics may suggest that simply hiring any African-American staffer does not always lead to increased empowerment via better constituency service for African-American constituents generally. As Guinier has noted, “authentic” African-American representation is needed for the link between descriptive representation and beneficial outcomes for African-Americans to exist. African-American staffers with roots and connections to the African-American community would need to be hired in this case, though it is clearly impossible to empirically determine the extent to which African-American staff are substantively connected to African-American constituents. Thus, we will assume that African-American staff generally (descriptive representation) can be equated with “authentic” representation in most cases in congressional district offices (strong constituency service delivery to African-Americans).

  47. Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests.

  48. Fenno, Home Style; Hammond, “Recent Research”; Salisbury and Shepsle, “U.S. Congressman and Enterprise.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vanderbilt University,

    Christian R Grose

  2. Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

    Maruice Mangum

  3. Ohio University,

    Christopher Martin

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  1. Christian R Grose
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  2. Maruice Mangum
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  3. Christopher Martin
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Additional information

The authors thank Bob Albritton, Miles Cooper, and Charles Turner for comments on previous drafts of this paper. Portions of this article are based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 0001808 (awarded to Grose). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Interview conducted by authors in Birmingham, Alabama, May 2002. Other interviews referred to later in text were also conducted in 2002.

Appendix: Question Template Used in Semi-Structured Interviews with District Congressional Staff to Gather Dependent Variable Data on Race of Staff

Appendix: Question Template Used in Semi-Structured Interviews with District Congressional Staff to Gather Dependent Variable Data on Race of Staff

  1. 1)

    What are the three most common requests for constituency service in your office?

  2. 2)

    How do you decide which staffers deal with requests? Are requests dealt with by issue area or by region?

  3. 3)

    How many district offices do you have?

  4. 4)

    What city or cities are the office(s) located in?

  5. 5)

    How many full-time staff are currently employed in the district office or offices? (Note: I am not interested in the number of staff in the Washington office, just the district staff.)

  6. 6)

    How many of the full-time district staff are men and how many are women?

  7. 7)

    How many of the full-time district staff are African-American, Asian American, Caucasian/White, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian?

  8. 8)

    Just by estimating or guessing, what is percentage of the district staff that were born in the district, have lived there for most of their life, or that have strong roots in the local community?

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Grose, C., Mangum, M. & Martin, C. Race, Political Empowerment, and Constituency Service: Descriptive Representation and the Hiring of African-American Congressional Staff. Polity 39, 449–478 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300081

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