At-large Elections Research Articles

The changing impact of electoral structure on black representation in the South, 1970-1996

For many years voting rights litigation has focused on elimination of at-large elections and the creation of "majority-minority" districts - election districts where a majority of the electorate are racial/ethnic minorities. Numerous studies have analyzed the impact of district elections on minority representation, particularly the election of blacks in the South. Most of these studies have focused on a single time period, comparing the ratio of black representatives to black population across cities with different electoral schemes. The present study combines data from six different data sets to produce a panel of data covering five distinct time periods over a 26 year span. Cross-sectional estimates of the effect of district elections in each time period are compared to determine how the efficacy of district elections has changed over time. To control for possible selection bias, inter-temporal models of the impact of changes in election structure on changes in representation are also estimated.

The impact of at-large elections: vote dilution or choice dilution?

Multi-member, at-large legislative elections result in election outcomes different from outcomes in single-member district elections for two reasons: they cancel out the voting strength of geographically concentrated groups of voters (e.g., party groups, racial groups), and they make it difficult for a voter to vote for an individual candidate, rather than for one of the competing lists of candidates. An electoral setting in Long Island, New York, presents an opportunity to test which of these two aspects of at-large elections—vote dilution or choice dilution—accounts for the usual pattern of one party (or group) winning all the legislative seats at stake.

Changing the Form of County Government: Effects on Revenue and Expenditure Policy

The past few decades have brought an enormous increase in county government reorganization. Even though the traditional form of commission government is still most prevalent, over 1,100 counties across the country now operate under some version of an appointed administrator or elected chief executive form of government (Jeffery, et al., 1989, 120). In 1960, only about 83 counties had such chief executives (Governmental Research Institute, 1980, 12). Most of these so-called reform counties are populous enough that a majority of Americans now live in reorganized counties. Yet almost nothing is known in any comparative or systematic sense about the consequences of this far-reaching change in local government structure. Perhaps 30 years ago this lack of knowledge might have been understandable. But today, many counties enjoy a large measure of governmental autonomy, and urban counties in particular have taken on a wide range of optional services previously reserved to city governments. A sizable literature has analyzed the effects of the urban reform movement on city governments, but we have little understanding of the policy consequences of changes in governmental structure among American counties. A frequently tested hypothesis in the urban policy literature is that reform governments should tax and spend less than nonreformed municipalities. Yet, the results of such research have been mixed. As discussed below, some studies confirm the basic thesis that reformers were largely successful in immunizing city government from the big spending preferences of lower-income ethnic and minority voters. Others find that changing the form of municipal government has little if any effect on taxing and spending policy. Regardless of the lack of definitive findings in the urban policy literature, we should profit from a brief discussion of the theoretical literature on the policy impact of reform at the city level. We will follow that discussion with a consideration of some of the special characteristics of counties that might cause them to behave differently from municipal jurisdictions under conditions of reorganization. To assess the effects of a change in county structure, we employ an interrupted time-series design. Our analysis covers the period from 1974 to 1992. It will include 10 counties that changed their form and 10 control counties that have operated continuously under the commission form. Can County Modernization Affect Public Policy? The literature in urban politics has long suggested that the form of city government should have policy consequences. Soon after the turn of the century, the good government movement sought various ways to free the nation's large cities from the clutches of corrupt political machines. In addition to eliminating graft and corruption, the reformers sought local governments that were efficient, businesslike, and more responsive to the popular will. To accomplish these goals, reform groups promoted such institutional devices as the civil service, non-partisan ballots, at-large elections, and the city manager form of government. Implementing civil service and creating new electoral arrangements (including the direct primary and the initiative and referendum) represented the main assault on machine rule and its dishonest practices. But for greater economy, efficiency, and rational decision making, reformers eventually embraced the council-manager plan. The municipal reform movement quickly picked up substantial support from the business and professional community. In fact, some observers contended that the underlying purpose of the reform agenda was to foster a local government commitment to efficiency and scientific management that would help promote a climate for private profit-making (Judd, 1988, 108). Not coincidentally, an emphasis on businesslike practices and efficient service delivery would also presumably deflect the objectives of particularistic interests. …

Minority Representation under Cumulative and Limited Voting

We examine minority representation resulting from modified at-large elections (cumulative and limited voting) used in U.S. localities in the 1990s. Hypotheses about the relative proportionality of descriptive representation under various local election systems are presented and tested. We find that CV/LV elections produced descriptive representation of African-Americans at levels similar to those in larger single-member district places, and at levels that exceed those from some small, southern SMD places. Results for Latino representation are more qualified. Our results offer encouragement for those interested in facilitating minority representation without using the acrimonious process of drawing districts on the basis of races.

Constitutions As Relational Contracts: Explaining Procedural Safeguards in Municipal Charters

Theory: According to transaction resource theory, constitutions are relational contracts that facilitate long-term relationships. Transaction resource theory identifies 1) three types of risk in cooperation: coordination, division, and defection; 2) contextual factors, such as increasing population size and heterogeneity, that hinder the ability of the primary parties to mitigate these risks; and 3) the ability of third-party governance to facilitate cooperation. Procedural safeguards in a constitution create incentives -- albeit at a cost -- that mitigate the risks of third-party governance in the relationship between a governor and the governed. In that relationship, the three risks take the form of instability, unresponsiveness, and inefficiency. The theory draws upon collective choice theory, bargaining theory, and the economics of information. Hypothesis: As contextual constraints increase the three risks of governance, constitutions are more likely to contain safeguards crafted to mitigate them: allocations of authority across the branches of government, as in the veto, safeguard against instability; electoral rules, as in district versus at-large elections, safeguard against unresponsiveness; and provisions for direct democracy, as in initiatives, referenda and recalls, safeguard against inefficiency. Method: Factor analysis, logistic and multiple linear regression are applied to a sample of 145 municipal charters in 1970 for cities with populations of at least 25,000 in 1960. Results: Factor analysis discriminates among procedural safeguards in municipal charters consistent with their predicted purposes in mitigating the three risks. Regression analysis reveals the interdependence of the safeguards and their heightened likelihood under conditions where contextual factors heighten the risks. Significant contextual factors include constraints on municipal competition under state laws and increasing population size and income inequality.

Demographic influences on Latinos political empowerment: comparative local illustrations.

How do Latinos gain local political power, given their demographic proportions and characteristics in a community's population? This paper examines the influences of population structure, socioeconomic factors, and residential patterns on the process by which Latinos have translated their numbers into an effective political presence in five California cities. The distinctive routes to empowerment evidenced in these cities reveal the varied possibilities local demographic settings may offer and the sensitivity of different election systems to those settings. Two alternatives are considered: (1) a change from election at large to election by single-member district, or (2) augmentation of Latinos' citywide voting strength in deciding the second- or third-place winner in a multi-member at-large election format. The findings can inform local districting efforts planned around the 2000 census. Their implications extend more broadly to courts applying laws intended to safeguard minority voting rights; and to public policies aimed at balancing interests that unify a community and those that may divide its members.

Right Turn: William Bradford Reynolds, the Reagan Administration, and Black Civil Rights.

In the spirit of the time, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 called for nondiscrimination for American citizens, seeking equality without regard for race, color, or creed. After the mid-1960s, to make amends for wrongs of the past, some called for benign discrimination to give blacks a special boost. In business and government this could be accomplished through racial preferences or quotas; in public education, by considering race when assigning students to schools. By 1980 this course reached a crossroads. Raymond Wolters maintains that Ronald Reagan and William Bradford Reynolds made the right when they questioned and limited the use of racial considerations in drawing electoral boundaries. He also documents the Reagan administration's considerable success in reinforcing within the country, and reviving within the judiciary, the conviction that every person black or white should be considered an individual with unique talents and inalienable rights. This book begins with a biographical chapter on William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General who was the principal architect of Reagan's civil rights policies. It then analyzes three main civil rights issues: voting rights, affirmative action, and school desegregation. Wolters describes specific cases: at-large elections and minority vote dilutions; congressional districting in New Orleans; legislative districting in North Carolina; the debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964; social science critiques of affirmative action; the question of quotas; and school desegregation and forced busing. Because Ronald Reagan and William Bradford Reynolds were men of the right, and because most journalists and historians are on the left, Wolters feels the people of words have dealt harshly with the Reagan administration. In writing this book, he hopes to correct the record on a subject that has been badly represented. Wolters points out that, beginning in the 1980s and continuing in the 1990s, the Supreme Court endorsed the legal arguments that Reagan's lawyers developed in the fields of voting rights, affirmative action, and school desegregation. In Right Turn, Wolters responds to those who claimed that Reagan and Reynolds were racists who wanted to turn back the clock on civil rights, and he describes civil rights cases and controversies in a way that is comprehensible to general readers as well as to lawyers and historians.

Rethinking ward and at-large elections in cities: Total spending, the number of locations of selected city services, and policy types

This study shows why the conventional wisdom that cities with ward elections will spend more than cities with at-large elections is too simple and explains why the empirical findings have been so mixed. Ward vs. at-large elections will only affect the policy choices of city councils when the policy choice is one that is decided by the median legislator. When the policy is one that is decided by the rule of universalism, the relevant institutional determinant of choice is the number of legislators, and not whether they are elected at-large or by wards. Universalism is politically rational for divisible policies that all constituents deisre (“pork”); the majority rule equilibrium (at the median) is more rational for divisible policies that are generally desired, but only when they are not located too close to any one constituent's home (“LULUs”). The expectation then is that larger city councils will provide more parks than smaller ones, and that election by wards or at-large will be irrelevant for these policy choices. By contrast, community centers and libraries are thought to be generally desireable, but not when they are in one's backyard. The size of the council is not predicted to be relevant for these decisions, but councils elected by wards are more likely to have a median legislator who represents geographically concentrated constituents, such as the minority poor; their preferences will have a bigger impact on councils elected by wards than on councils elected at large. Data from a sample of council-manager cities with weak mayors who have no veto uphold these hypotheses.

The Voting Rights Act, District Elections, and the Success of Black Candidates in Municipal Elections

Over the last 20 years blacks and other minority groups have used the Voting Rights Act to challenge the legality of at-large election systems and promote the election of representatives by district. In this article we compare electoral outcomes over time in order to determine the effects of district elections on the success of black city council candidates in municipal elections. Consistent with previous cross-sectional analyses, we find that district elections aided black candidates in the early 1980s. However, our results also show that blacks have achieved substantially greater success in at-large elections over the last 10 years, thereby reducing the difference in representation among cities with different election systems. Our results are robust when interracial demographic differences and possible selection biases are taken into account. We conclude that the diminished efficacy of district elections is likely due to a reduction in the racial polarization of voters.

District elections and the power of municipal employee unions

Very little prior research has been devoted to the effects of the institutional structure of local government on public sector labor markets. This study addresses the differential effects of the two main systems used to elect city council members — district versus citywide (at-large) elections. The study hypothesizes that, in district-election cities, municipal employees, especially those who are unionized, face a lower cost of influencing city council candidates and, consequently, will have greater power to influence employment conditions. To test this hypothesis, data on U.S. cities over 25,000 population are used to estimate both reduced form and structural wage and employment equations. The results are consistent with the basic hypothesis: district elections provide a more fertile ground for municipal employees, especially those organized in unions, to affect their employment conditions.

Black and Hispanic Council Representation

The authors use black and Hispanic representation on city councils to address the proposition that the size of an elective body is related to minority officeholding in that body. A conceptual framework of the nature of minority representation and the types of differences that council size can make are examined using national survey data for 525 cities. The results support the position that council size does not explain the strength of minority representation but that larger councils provide a greater opportunity for minority incumbency. This effect is strongest in at-large election cities. For blacks, the strongest effect is found for at-large election cities in the South.

Testing Assumptions of the Totality-of-the-Circumstances Test

The effect of each element of the Voting Rights Act's totality-of-the-circumstances test on black city council membership is analyzed in 946 cities with 1980 populations exceeding 25,000. Several structural elements, namely, staggered terms, majority vote requirements, large councils, and longer terms for council members, do not significantly reduce rates of black membership. There is some evidence, however, that the proportion black on a council is higher when representation is from single-member districts, at least in the South. Even in the South, the advantages of single-member elections vis-à-vis at-large elections do not apply to all types of citywide voting. Black office holding in at-large southern cities with residency requirements or that combines staggered terms with pure at-large elections is very similar to that in single-member district cities.

The Use of Formal Intergovernmental Service Agreements: Does Government Structure Matter?

This study is concerned with the effect municipal government structure has on intergovernmental contracting. In addition, the impact of four other types of factors on the decision to enter into intergovernmental arrangements is examined-supply (cost savings), fiscal pressures, political influences, and legal constraints. The analysis also distinguishes between two different types of intergovernmental agreements-complete service contracting and joint contracting. Based on a sample of 614 U.S. cities, the findings indicate that municipal governments with reform structures (e.g., council-manager form of government, at-large elections, nonpartisan ballots) are significantly more likely to engage in complete intergovernmental service contracting than their unreformed counterparts. When considering joint contracting with other governments, though, government structure does not appear to be an important factor.

At-large versus ward elections: Implications for public infrastructure

Since Gordon Tullock's (1959) seminal piece on logrolling, economists and political scientists have attempted to find empirical support for the argument that vote trading leads to larger municipal expenditure levels. In order for logrolling to occur there must be clear potential gains from trade, negotiations must be feasible and less costly than the value of the trade, and enforcement must be possible (Buchanan and Tullock, 1962; Mueller, 1979). The city council environment appears to satisfy these requirements. Apart from Zax (1985), however, who examined municipal employment and compensation, no empirical evidence of the effect of logrolling on municipal expenditures levels has been uncovered. Different institutional structures may provide different incentives to trade votes. In particular, ward election systems may provide a greater incentive to logroll than at-large systems (Bradford, 1911; Goetz, 1977). Ward councilors rely on neighborhood loyalties for their re-election. Thus, they are interested in providing public services whose benefits are geographically concentrated but whose costs are spread city-wide. At large councilors, whose constituency is city-wide, are more concerned with city-wide benefits. This difference in loyalties suggests that ward councilors are more apt to engage in vote trading behavior than are at-large councilors. One reason for the lack of empirical evidence of this behavior is that researchers have not examined the appropriate measure of municipal output. The local public good whose provision is most likely to be affected by logrol-

Black votes count: political empowerment in Mississippi after 1965

Most Americans see the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the culmination of the civil rights movement. When the law was enacted, black voter registration in Mississippi soared. Few black candidates won office, however. In this book, Frank Parker describes black Mississippians' battle for meaningful voting rights, bringing the story up to 1986, when Mike Espy was elected as Mississippi's first black member of Congress in this century. To nullify the impact of the black vote, white Mississippi devised a political massive resistance strategy, adopting such disenfranchising devices as at-large elections, racial gerrymandering, making elective offices appointive, and revising the qualifications for candidates for public office. As legal challenges to these mechanisms mounted, Mississippi once again became the testing ground for deciding whether the promises of the Fifteenth Amendment would be fulfilled, and Parker describes the court battles that ensued until black voters obtained relief. |Most Americans see the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the culmination of the civil rights movement. When the law was enacted, black voter registration in Mississippi soared. Few black candidates won office, however. In this book, Frank Parker describes black Mississippians' battle for meaningful voting rights, bringing the story up to 1986, when Mike Espy was elected as Mississippi's first black member of Congress in this century.

The Impact of At-Large Elections on the Representation of Blacks and Hispanics

Political scientists have long been interested in the link between election structures and the representation of interest. Here we examine one such link, that between local election structures and minority representation. Research of the middle and late 1970s revealed that at-large city council election procedures resulted in a dramatic underrepresentation of blacks and some underrepresentation of Hispanics. Now a revisionist position claims that at-large elections no longer have this detrimental effect on minority representation, if needed they ever did. In this paper we examine this controversial link by assessing the impact of at-large and district elections on the representation of blacks and Hispanics using varied methodologies and 1988 data. We find that although at-large elections represent blacks much better than a decade ago, there is still a small gap between the representation afforded by at-large and district systems. On the other hand, the impact of local election structures on Hispanic representation is less clearcut and seems to vary from region to region.

Urban Reform and Its Consequences: A Study in Representation. By Susan Welch and Timothy Bledsoe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 154p. $27.50 cloth, $10.95 paper.

Throughout this century, reformers have fought to eliminate party control of city politics. As a result, the majority of American cities today elect council members in at-large and nonpartisan elections. This result of the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement, which worked for election rules that eliminated the power of the urban machine and the working class on which it was based, is today still a subject of lively debate. For example, in the mid-1980s, regular Democrats in Chicago sought to institute a nonpartisan mayoral election. Supporters thought that reform would make the electoral process more democratic, while opponents charged that it was meant to dilute the voting powers of blacks. Clearly, the effect of urban reform remains an important issue for scholars and politicians alike. Susan Welch and Timothy Bledsoe clarify a portion of the debate by investigating how election structures affect candidates and the nature of representation. They examine the different effects of district versus at-large elections and of partisan versus nonpartisan elections. Who gets elected? Are representatives' socioeconomic status and party affiliation related to election form? Are election structures related to how those who are elected approach their jobs? Do they see themselves as representatives concerned with the good of the city as a whole? Urban Reform and Its Consequences reports an unprecedented wealth of data drawn from a sample of nearly 1,000 council members and communities with populations between 50,000 and 1 million across 42 states. The sample includes communities that use a variety of election procedures. This study is therefore the most comprehensive and accurate to date. Welch and Bledsoe conclude that nonpartisan and at-large elections do give city councils a more middle- and upper-middle-class character and have changed the way representatives view their jobs. Reform measures have not, however, produced councils that are significantly more conservative or more prone to conflict. Overall, the authors conclude that partisan and district elections are more likely to represent the whole community and to make the council more accountable to the electorate.

Racially Polarized Voting in the South: Quantitative Evidence from the Courtroom

Within the last 15 years historians, political scientists, and sociologists have played major roles as expert witnesses in southern voting-rights cases. In most of these lawsuits, black plaintiffs challenged the racially discriminatory effects of at-large elections, contests in which candidates must run citywide or countywide rather than from single-member districts. Unless a white majority casts its votes as a bloc against minority candidates, at-large elections do not have a discriminatory impact. For this reason, the court’s decision frequently turns on its assessment of the degree to which electoral patterns in the jurisdiction are polarized along racial lines. Although the expert witnesses on whom the court must rely have employed a variety of statistical methods, they increasingly have preferred a technique known as ecological regression analysis to measure the degree of racial bloc voting (Loewen 1982: 179–94; Grofman et al. 1985; Engstrom and McDonald 1985; Jacobs and O’Rourke 1986).

The blue guitar: political representation and community

Americans conceive of the process of political representation as operating like a transmission belt. Elections convey citizens' preferences unchanged into the legislative assembly and thereby allow them to participate, through their representatives, in the political affairs of the nation. This conception stands firmly in the tradition of liberal thought, as does much theory about political representation. In that tradition, government is defined primarily in terms of power, and elections are little more than the means by which that power is transferred from the people to their representatives. In The Blue Guitar (the title alludes to a poem by Wallace Stevens), Nancy L. Schwartz offers a radically new understanding of representation. As she sees it, representatives should be and, in the past, have been more than mere delegates or trustees of individual desires and interests and the process of representation more than the appropriation of power and control. Ideally, representation should transform both representative and citizen. Representatives should be caretakers of the community, not the watchdogs of special interest groups or individuals. Citizens in turn should feel increased personal responsibility for the whole that membership in the community entails. Moreover, representatives should serve as founders of their constituencies, constituting communities whose members value citizenship as an end in itself. In her analysis, Schwartz canvasses the political experience of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance city-states to discover the communitarian meaning of citizenship, and she draws on classical political theory from Plato to Rousseau and Hegel, on the political sociology of Marx and Weber, and on such contemporary theorists as Arendt and Pitkin. Schwartz also enters the controversy over whether local, state, and national legislators should be selected by district or at-large elections. After examining a set of key Supreme Court cases on voting rights and district elections, she proposes that representatives come from single-member geographic districts.

The Political Dynamics of Urban Voting Behavior

credentials in council elections. Data for the analysis are drawn from Cincinnati, Ohio, a city whose electoral system is representative of the majority of American cities of over 25,000 population that currently employ nonpartisan, at-large elections. The data consist of a sample of 103 council campaigns that were waged in five successive elections over a ten-year time span. The results support several conclusions. First, they demonstrate the critical importance of political legitimacy in urban elections. Thus, the most important predictors of electoral success are those that measure the candidates' relative political acceptability. In approximate rank order, they are the candidates' political following, political resources, civic endorsements, and personal achievements. Second, the results show that two different voting models are necessary to explain the calculus of candidate choice: one for first-time candidates and a second for incumbents and former losers. For first-time candidates, the key credentials are those that enhance their name familiarity, especially partisan and newspaper endorsements. In subsequent campaigns, what appears to be decisive are the size of their political following and the racial and partisan coalitions that coalesce around them. Finally, the results suggest that a candidate's political following may play a role in local elections similar to the stabilizing function of party identification in national elections. The voting behavior of Americans in urban elections represents one of the most important, yet least understood, topics in the voting literature. Consider, for example, that in a federal system of over 80,000 governments, local elections are both the most numerous and frequent type in American politics. Consider too that local office is often the first and most important stepping-stone to higher elected positions of public trust and responsibility.' Finally, recall that local and state issues have profoundly altered the course of national politics, as reflected, for example, in the progressive reform movement; the ascendancy of the Democratic party in northern cities around the time of the Great Depression; and more recently, the diffusion of the neopopulist, Proposition 13 tax revolt.