An Urban Study of Vote Power on City Councils: The Political Incorporation of Minorities in Miami-Dade and Los Angeles Counties

Abstract

This study analyzes voting power on city councils in Miami-Dade and Los Angeles counties. The theory extends our understanding of how minority voters are represented on local governing councils, through the analysis of political incorporation in two diverse metropolitan communities. In the greater Miami-Dade County area, the study sample covers thirty-five cities and the Dade County Commission, from municipal incorporation (for each city), where Miami-Dade County is an example of a community that has had an active municipal incorporation movement since 1991 which has resulted in the formation of new cities. For purposes of comparison, data for eighty-eight cities and the Board of Supervisors of Los Angeles County are also included in the analysis, beginning with the current (2000) redistricting. Even though most of the cities in both counties have at-large elections for city councils, the findings are presented by types of council elections and executive plans. Starting from the models of vote power, such as the Banzhaf and Shapley indices, the basic results generate the combinatorics in each of the one hundred and twenty four-local governments under study. This empirical analysis applies and extends existing measures of political incorporation, describing not only the value of council coalitions, but the actual coalition structures and changes to these coalition structures over both the long-run (in Miami-Dade County) and the short-run (in Los Angeles County). By defining local political regimes in terms of coalitions structures, this study provides a theoretical understanding of forming, maintaining, and changing coalitions in local politics. Furthermore, the results summarize the degree of (and trends in) political incorporation for racial and ethnic communities by municipality, by the value of the election districts, under mayor-council and council-manager forms of government. The study also finds greater Latino representation in Miami-Dade County and in the older, general law cities in Los Angeles County. Measures of the degree of political incorporation are shown to be uncorrelated with population per-constituency (or population seat values) or the control of the tax base (in the form of per-person tax revenues).