Racial and Ethnic Descriptive Representation in the United States and its Impact

Abstract

The study of racial and ethnic descriptive representation burgeoned over the last several decades as both the extension of voting rights occurred following passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) and with the United States’ diversifying demographic context. The sequence of academic research roughly follows from the subsequent increase in black and Latino representatives in all levels of government, their incorporation into legislative bodies, and the effects on both policy and constituent behavior and attitudes. Scholarship on the effects of the VRA and the electoral contexts that increase descriptive representation was the first to emerge. Researchers continue to focus on the degree to which the VRA enhances descriptive representation, the effect of electoral institutions, such as at-large versus ward-based elections, and the degree to which racial redistricting is necessary for the election of descriptive representatives, as well as its effects on the level of substantive representation. Recently, attention has been paid to candidate emergence and attempts to understand how the necessary condition for minority office holding, minority candidates, comes about. The increase in descriptive representation allows for studies of the degree to which descriptive representatives’ behavior departs from those of non-minority office holders. A bulk of this research relies on roll call voting and the conditions that affect dyadic substantive representation, such as party affiliation and the degree to which voting decisions relate to minority interests. A broader conception of substantive representation focuses on a range of legislative activities from committee work to bill sponsorship and constituent services. Topics of study expanded beyond these key formal roles as scholars evaluated a variety of less formal behaviors well documented in more general congressional scholarship. While the scholarship is more parallel than sequential, a natural extension is to ask what effect racial and ethnic diversification exerts on public policy. This literature almost exclusively examines local and state-level policies with significant effects demonstrated at both. An additional line of research encompasses descriptive representatives’ impacts on constituents’ behavior and attitudes, from voter mobilization to affect and trust. Thus, we may conceive of the literature as reflecting four distinct avenues of understanding: the election of descriptive representatives, the varied types of substantive representation of co-racial/ethnic group preferences, descriptive representative’s impact on policy, and finally, the impact of descriptive representatives on the attitudes and behaviors of their constituents.