Tyranny of the White Majority? Minority Representation in American Democracy

Abstract

Critics have long feared that America's winner-take-all system, it's clear white majority, and it's sharp racial divisions would combine to undermine the interests of racial and ethnic minorities. Unfortunately, we have few means of assessing minority representation in American democracy. Descriptive representation misses most of the potential influence of minorities and studies of substantive representation generally have to focus on a particular locale or policy with little hope of a more general assessment. I introduce a new measure of representation. For any election, I simply count up how many voters from each racial and ethnic group vote for the side that wins. Using this new measure and data from the series of Voter News Service exit polls and a sample of mayoral elections, I find that across the range of American elections, blacks are consistently more likely than other groups to end up losers. I then show why blacks are uniquely disadvantaged.