Minority Voters Research Articles

‘The names have changed, but the game’s the same’: artificial intelligence and racial policy in the USA

Like the Operations Research models used to justify the ethnic cleansing of minority voting blocs in 1970’s New York City, AI ‘risk assessment’ systems for individuals will be used to reinforce longstanding power relations between ethnic groups within the USA. From the perspective of African–Americans and their abolitionist allies, the central problem with AI risk assessment does not involve ‘corrective’ stabilization of an inadvertently unstable system. On the contrary, that system’s de-facto—if sometimes camouflaged—purpose is enforcing the stability of historic patterns of racial oppression, constitutional formalities notwithstanding. AI, like ‘OR’ before it, becomes, then, simply another tactic in a persistent strategy aimed at reinforcing a stable cultural trajectory with roots deep in human slavery. To the archetypic question ‘what is to be done?’ is the archetypic answer: build countervailing power.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 37, Number 2. April 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 2Front coverTHE CAPITOL INSURRECTIONThousands of people marched toward the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. The rally that day was part of an attempt to overturn the outcome of the presidential election. The attempted coup was carried out by multiple means. While the violent attack on the Capitol building that day has captured the world's attention, attempts to undermine democratic processes in the United States have a longer, more insidious history, including multiple forms of voter suppression, some of which are built into the system.The US has never been a direct democracy. In fact, in 2000 and 2016, candidates who lost the popular vote ‘won’ the election. The 2020 presidential election was perhaps outstanding because the unabashed attempts to disenfranchise voters – primarily minority voters – were suddenly on full display. The losing candidate tried to strong‐arm state election officials into fraudulently changing the vote count and pressured the vice president to overturn the lawful outcome of the elections – all of which happened in full view of the public.When it became clear that the vice president would not undermine the election result, the losing candidate called on his supporters to come to Washington, DC to demonstrate their belief that the election had been stolen from him and from them. The ensuing violent attack on the Capitol building was a spectacular display of a larger failed attempt at a coup.In this issue, Gregory Starrett and Joyce Dalsheim narrate their eye witness fieldwork accounts of the ‘March to save America’ rally earlier on that fateful day.Back coverTHE MYANMAR COUPOn 2 March 2021, police shot Kyal Sin, a 19‐year‐old protester, in the head from behind with live ammunition while she was engaged in peaceful civil disobedience in Mandalay against the Myanmar military, which seized control through a violent coup on 1 February. The artwork depicts Kyal Sin, whose name means ‘pure star’, as one of the martyrs of the democracy movement. Prior to attending the rally, Kyal Sin had posted on Facebook her wish for her organs to be donated should she die during the protest.Since the coup, millions of civilians across Myanmar have taken to the streets in protest. Civil servants, along with the general public, have participated in a nationwide strike. In response, the military have fired weapons into crowds of peaceful protesters, engaged in extrajudicial killings, raided civilian homes and businesses, kidnapped and illegally detained protesters, strikers, political and civil society leaders, tortured detainees and terrorized countless other civilians.In this issue, Seinenu M. Thein‐Lemelson reviews the history of violence and persecution perpetrated by the Myanmar military against participants in the Burmese democracy movement. The persecution of activists has included repression of their cultural and ritual life. The democracy movement possesses its own list of saints, martyrs (azarni) and heroes (thuyegaung). Between 1988 and 2012, keeping photographs or artistic depictions of these martyrs and heroes constituted an illegal act. During that time, owning or publishing this artwork of Kyal Sin could have resulted in imprisonment and torture. Indeed, even now the Myanmar military is so concerned about her martyrdom that they exhumed her body and filled her grave with cement.When Kyal Sin was shot, she was wearing a black T‐shirt emblazoned with the words: ‘Everything will be OK’, revealing a youthful hope and innocence. This sense of child‐like purity has deepened the poignancy and loss felt by all those who mourn her death. Kyal Sin's nickname was ‘Angel’ and a halo hovers above her head. She holds the Myanmar flag, shredded with bullet holes, in her left hand. Behind her are the outlines of other protesters or perhaps past martyrs of the movement, giving the three‐fingered salute, in approval and solidarity.

Determinants of Rejected Mail Ballots in Georgia’s 2018 General Election

Because of the COVID-19 threat to in-person voting in the November 2020 election, state and local election officials have pivoted to mail-in voting as a potential solution. This method of voting—while safe from a public health standpoint—comes with its own set of problems, as increased use of mail voting risks amplifying existing discrepancies in rejected mail ballots. While some mail ballot rejections are to be expected, a lack of uniformity in whose ballots get rejected among subgroups of voters—whether for mistakes on a ballot return envelope (BRE) or lateness—raise concerns about equal representation. We draw on official statewide voter file and mail-in ballot data from the 2018 midterm election in Georgia, a state that until the pandemic did not have widespread use of mail voting, to test whether some voters are more likely to cast a mail ballot that does not count. Most importantly, we distinguish between ballots rejected for lateness and those rejected for a mistake on the return envelope. We find that newly registered, young, and minority voters have higher rejection rates compared with their counterparts.

“Tough on immigration”: social democratic parties, group interests and the ethnic minority vote

ABSTRACT As social democratic parties reposition themselves on immigration and integration issues to appeal to anti-immigrant voters, ethnic minority voters may switch to parties that are perceived to better protect their group interests. The Flemish social democrats in Antwerp adopted several policies that were perceived as discriminatory by ethnic minorities in response to the electoral growth of the radical right party, while the francophone social democrats in Liege faced no such threat. Evidence from the Belgian Ethnic Minority Election Study 2014 confirms that ethnic minority voters who perceive their group to be more discriminated in everyday life more likely turn to the radical left in Antwerp but not in Liège, supporting the claim that social democrats cannot adopt assimilationist integration policies unpunished. Besides, findings suggest that ethnic minorities distinguish between different group interests in evaluating parties, contributing to the study of the role of group interests in ethnic minority voting.

When Are Legislators Responsive to Ethnic Minorities? Testing the Role of Electoral Incentives and Candidate Selection for Mitigating Ethnocentric Responsiveness

Previous studies have documented ethnic/racial bias in politicians’ constituency service, but less is known about the circumstances under which such ethnocentric responsiveness is curbed. We propose and test two hypotheses in this regard:the electoral incentives hypothesis, predicting that incentives for (re)election crowd out politicians’ potential biases, andthe candidate selection hypothesis, stipulating that minority constituents can identify responsive legislators by using candidates’ partisan affiliation and stated policy preferences as heuristics. We test these hypotheses through a field experiment on the responsiveness of incumbent local politicians in Denmark (N= 2,395), varying ethnicity, gender, and intention to vote for the candidate in the upcoming election, merged with data on their electoral performance and their stated policy preferences from a voting advice application. We observe marked ethnocentric responsiveness and find no indication that electoral incentives mitigate this behavior. However, minority voters can use parties’ and individual candidates’ stances on immigration to identify responsive politicians.

Asian American Candidate Preferences: Evidence from California

The diversity of the Asian American population presents challenges for theories of bloc voting, partisan voting, and descriptive representation. What cues (if any) do Asian American voters rely on? How informative are racial and partisan cues to Asian American voters. This article looks at the candidate preferences of Asian American voters in the 2018 election. I look at elections where an Asian American candidate was on the ballot and compare outcomes within district to the gubernatorial race (a race with no minorities on the ballot). I use surname-coded voter registration records and precinct-level vote returns to estimate Asian American candidate preferences as a racial group and by national-origin. I find strong evidence of national-origin preferences (i.e. Vietnamese for a Vietnamese candidate) among Asian American voters. In instances where the national-origin of the candidate and the national-origin of the voter did not align, voters seem to rely on partisan cues. National-origin preferences are sufficient enough that in one instance voters switched parties within the same election to vote for a candidate of the same national-origin. These findings have implications for theories of minority vote choice and challenges the existing literature on the strength of partisan cues (replication data can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/vivienleung/research).

The influence of candidate race and ethnicity: the case of Asian Americans

ABSTRACT Do voters use the race or ethnicity of a candidate in selecting whom to support? This paper examines the voting behavior of Asian Americans in elections in California. The analysis hinges on co-partisan elections stemming from California’s open primary system where two candidates from the same party compete, and thus a candidate’s party no longer serves as a reliable cue for voters at the ballot box. Using surname matched vote returns for seven state assembly and two congressional elections between 2012 and 2018, I find evidence of bloc voting in every race where an Asian American candidate is pitted against a non-Asian. When Asian candidates compete, however, evidence of polarization at the national origin level is found. The findings have theoretical implications for understanding the dynamics of co-ethnicity and descriptive representation for Asian Americans, as well as practical implications for the study of elections and minority voting rights.

The Political Benefits of Voter ID Lawsuits

In one of the most pronounced developments in American political and election law over the past two decades, voter ID laws have developed from an insipid topic of interest only to policy wonks and local government enthusiasts into one of the most contentious and hot-button issues in American politics. To date, the Democratic party — either directly as plaintiffs or indirectly via its attorneys — have filed nearly a dozen lawsuits challenging voter ID laws across the United States, arguing such laws disproportionately burden minority voters. However, these lawsuits are puzzling considering the minimal impact these laws have, as social science scientists have yet to conclude these laws have a racially disparate impact. Furthermore, this litigation is costly and limited: it is time-consuming, expensive, ineffective, and risky. Why Democrats continue to litigate voter ID laws, in light of these costs and limitations, is the central inquiry of this Essay. To answer it, this Essay applies emerging sociolegal theories that reveal the benefits litigation engenders unto the litigating party, thus explaining the Democratic penchant for litigating voter ID laws.

House Prices, Government Quality, and Voting Behavior

The hypothesis that minority voters act in their economic self-interest in supporting municipal candidates of their own race or ethnicity has been tested using changes in municipal spending and employment. However, governments affect voter welfare in many other ways, particularly in the provision of quality public services. This paper exploits a natural experiment arising in 1995 when Congress created an appointed financial control board for the District of Columbia and gave to it many of the powers previously reserved to the local elected government. The natural experiment sets up a triple-difference research design based on changes in property values across District neighborhoods and voting behavior compared to untreated adjacent areas across the District boundary in Maryland. We find that oversight by the control board raised annual appreciation rates in the District by 178 to 254 basis points during the period from 1995 to 2001. Furthermore, effects of the intervention were uniformly positive across areas of the District that varied dramatically in their support for the incumbent administration that lost its powers. This implies, after the fact, that the administration’s supporters had not voted in accord with economic self-interest.

Review: The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America, by Bernard L. Fraga

Review: <i>The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America</i>, by Bernard L. Fraga

Gingles Unraveled: Hispanic Voting Cohesion in South Florida

The Voting Rights Act protects the ability of racial and language minority groups to elect candidates of choice by prohibiting states and localities from diluting those groups’ votes when drawing electoral districts. The Fair Districts provisions of the Florida Constitution include a similar ban on vote dilution, plus further protections against diminishing (retrogressing) existing minority voting strength. A key element of proving vote dilution or retrogression is that the minority group votes cohesively. Historically, minority voting cohesion has often been uncontested or easily proven in VRA suits. But in South Florida, Hispanic citizens are voting less cohesively than they used to. This Article investigates the legal issues that arise when the assumption of cohesion unravels. First, this Article investigates to what extent the Hispanic community in South Florida is cohesive. It then proposes several alternative approaches to the vote dilution and retrogression framework to better align doctrine with the real-world conditions of voters and communities.

Legacies of Segregation and Disenfranchisement: The Road from &lt;em&gt;Plessy&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Frank&lt;/em&gt; and Voter ID Laws in the United States

This article explores how voter ID laws further the dismantling of voting rights and the promises of full political engagement for racial minorities, especially African Americans. The authors highlight the racial politics that inform the emergence of these laws, and the racial intent and impact these laws have in diluting minority voting access and therefore political power. It begins with a short historical overview of voting rights since the eradication of slavery, then offers background on the current legal climate in which voter ID laws are situated. The essay concludes with an analysis of Frank v. Walker as a case study exposing the intent and impact of voter ID laws.

Business group opportunism: the difference in real earnings management between parent firms and nonparent firms

PurposeThis paper aims to understand real earnings management behavior in the context of a parent–subsidiary relationship. It explores the differences between business groups and firms that do not have controlled subsidiaries and provides potential explanations for any measured difference.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses the random-effects generalized least squares (GLS) estimation to find the difference between the real earnings management behavior of business groups, represented by the ultimate parent firms and the nonparent firms from 73 countries.FindingsThe results show that ultimate parent firms have lower abnormal production costs and abnormal discretionary expenses than nonparent firms. In contrast, parent firms have higher abnormal cash flow from operations (CFO) than nonparent firms. The results are unexpected because abnormal production costs usually have a dominant direct relationship with abnormal CFO. The results indicate that business groups use a route different from manipulating production costs and discretionary expenses.Research limitations/implicationsThe results reveal that parent firms use a route different from manipulating production costs and discretionary expenses. The results can be used to extend the discussion to specific business group cases, such as tracing the route or allocation of real earnings management (REM) pressure from a parent firm to its listed and private subsidiaries, and if the consolidation of minority voting rights and the transitivity of control affect the behavior in its subsidiaries.Originality/valueInstead of the degree of diversification or affiliation, this paper investigates REM behavior based on the parent firm's control of its subsidiaries. With this approach, the study argues that business groups prefer a route other than manipulating production costs and discretionary expenses. The results may redirect the attention of regulators to the activities of parent firms that need more policing.

New hardware redundancy approach for making modules tolerate faults using a new fault detecting voter unit structure

Electronic systems’ growth causes complexity and increases the risk of failure. Fault tolerance structures are one of the useful ideas for resolving this problem. In this paper, a fault tolerant approach to digital electronic modules is introduced, using hardware redundancy to make those modules fault tolerant. The proposed structure of hardware redundancy has a voter unit that can mask and detect faults at the same time. Such a voter unit is achieved by using both majority voter units and minority voter units in its structure. The proposed voter unit has a three-layer structure. One minority voter, three majority voters, and another minority voter are respectively producing these three layers of the proposed voter unit. These layers can mask and correct fault and detect the faulty module by producing a unique fault detecting code simultaneously. The code works properly as long as the majority of the modules work properly. Then, the result of the voter unit (the code) is transmitted to a relevant switching unit in order to switch the faulty module with a spare module. A redundant system based on the proposed redundancy structure with M spare modules can switch M faulty modules and tolerate (M + 1) faults.

House Prices and Voting Behavior

The hypothesis that minority voters act in their economic self-interest in supporting municipal candidates of their own race or ethnicity has been tested using changes in municipal spending and employment. However, governments affect voter welfare in many other ways, particularly in the provision of quality public services. This paper exploits a natural experiment arising in 1995 when Congress created an appointed financial control board for the District of Columbia and gave to it many of the powers previously reserved to the local elected government. The natural experiment sets up a triple-difference research design based on changes in property values across District neighborhoods and voting behavior compared to untreated adjacent areas across the District boundary in Maryland. We find that oversight by a control board raised appreciation rates in the District by 178 to 254 basis points. Furthermore, effects of the intervention were uniformly positive across areas of the District that varied dramatically in their support for the incumbent administration that lost its powers. This implies, after the fact, that the administration's supporters had not voted in accord with economic self-interest.

Shared Identities: Intersectionality, Linked Fate, and Perceptions of Political Candidates

Scholars of gender and race have long acknowledged the importance that descriptive representation plays for marginalized groups, if not substantively than symbolically. Yet, as candidate pools diversify to better reflect the population, it becomes less clear which among intersecting and overlapping identities will matter and how. Employing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we explore the association between minority voters’ sense of linked fate and their beliefs about candidates who share (or do not share) their gender and racial identities. Using this timely and unique data, collected immediately after the 2016 election when race and gender were of particular salience, we examine whether shared racial and gender identity is associated with Black and Latina/o voters’ beliefs about how well different candidates will represent their interests. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research for the changing face of American political candidates and voters.

The Politics of Locating Polling Places: Race and Partisanship in North Carolina Election Administration, 2008–2016

Do local election administrators change precincts and Election Day polling place locations to target voters based on their partisanship or race? We systematically evaluate whether decisions consistent with targeting occur using the near universe of eligible voters, polling place locations, and precinct boundaries across three presidential elections in the closely contested state of North Carolina. We find no evidence that local administrators allocate precincts and polling places in a manner consistent with partisan manipulation for electoral gain. Some counties appear to differentially target opposition party voters with these changes, but the county-level variation we document is likely due to random variation rather than deliberate manipulation. There is also little evidence that the removal of minority voter protections in Shelby County v. Holder impacted polling place placement. If partisan-motivated precinct or polling place decisions occur in North Carolina, they are seemingly more idiosyncratic than pervasive.

Asian American Mobilization: The Effect of Candidates and Districts on Asian American Voting Behavior

While numerous studies have examined the effect of a co-ethnic candidate on the ballot for African Americans and Latinos, Asian Americans remain understudied in this regard. With the growth of Asian American voters nationwide, empirical questions prevail: Does the presence of an Asian American candidate on the ballot spur Asian American turnout or like other minority communities, is the demographic composition of a district the central mobilizing mechanism? Can we expect country of origin subgroups of Asian Americans such as Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Japanese, and Korean Americans voters to mobilize or does such cohesion not exist? Using surname-matched vote returns from the California state assembly across four election years, I examine the constraints and opportunities for pan-ethnic and national origin Asian American turnout in the presence of a co-ethnic candidate. I find that Asian American candidates have a measurable increase on pan-ethnic turnout, but conditional on the percentage of Asian Americans in the district. Across national origin groups, the effect of a co-ethnic candidate varies. The findings suggest Asian American voting behavior is highly nuanced and markedly distinct from other minority voters.

Media Coverage of Campaign Promises Throughout the Electoral Cycle

ABSTRACT Previous studies conclude that governments fulfill a large share of their campaign pledges. However, only a minority of voters believe that politicians try to keep their promises, and many voters struggle to recall the fulfillment or breaking of salient campaign pledges accurately. I argue that this disparity between the public perception and empirical evidence is influenced by the information voters receive throughout the electoral cycle. I expect that the media extensively inform readers about political promises. In addition, I posit that news outlets focus more on broken than on fulfilled promises and that the focus on broken promises has increased over time. I find strong support for these expectations based on a new text corpus of over 430,000 statements on political commitments published between 1979 and 2017 in 22 newspapers during 33 electoral cycles in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Newspapers inform voters regularly about announced, broken, and fulfilled promises. Yet, across the four countries, newspapers report at least twice as much on broken than on fulfilled promises. Moreover, this negativity bias in reports on political promises has increased substantively. The results have implications for studying campaign promises, negative information in mass media, and the linkages between voters and parties.

Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston by Kyle Shelton

Reviewed by: Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston by Kyle Shelton Bruce Seely (bio) Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston. By Kyle Shelton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. 312. $29.95. Kyle Shelton’s study of transportation in Houston, Texas, touches on important elements of urban history, including politics; demographics, race, and class; geography and environment; public policy; and most importantly, transportation and mobility. The book explores and compares specific moments in Houston’s development of roads and public transit from the mid-1950s through the 2010s. The result is a longitudinal study of urban transportation that documents significant changes in policy, politics, and technology. The book’s five substantive chapters follow individual episodes in transportation development in Houston. The first tracks planning and initial construction of Houston’s expressways during the 1950s and 1960s. Houston’s [End Page 369] efforts resembled those of other cities, where state and municipal engineers and business leaders (real estate developers in Houston) dominated highway planning. Shelton shows the elite’s main motive was Houston’s continued economic growth and regional domination; local residents were not part of the conversation. Two road projects illustrate Shelton’s point, one in the white suburbs and another in a minority urban neighborhood. Neither group could alter the chosen routes, but African-American neighborhoods paid a much higher price. Shelton shows, however, that citizens throughout Houston learned from these initial skirmishes. By the mid-1960s, many residents pressed for a voice in transportation decision-making, engaging in what Shelton labels infrastructural citizenship. The second chapter presents a case study of citizen involvement, as individuals in a Hispanic neighborhood stopped construction of the Harrisburg Freeway through their community. My one criticism is that Shelton could have examined the federal Bureau of Public Roads’ role in Houston’s highway planning and construction efforts. Shelton shows that Texas highway department engineers were involved, but the views of BPR engineers mattered. They had to approve any project using interstate funding. And Shelton notes in passing that changing federal stances on urban expressway routes and environmental impact statements help explain shifts in Houston’s highway politics after 1965. Bringing federal officials into the narrative likely would have added to Shelton’s history. The next two chapters examine how public transit came to Houston. Shelton explores the politics behind a failed referendum in the mid-1970s and a successful campaign to fund transit in 1978. Minority voters allied with certain white suburban dwellers spearheaded the first plan’s defeat, while the same voters carried the second to a successful conclusion. The difference is explained by the transit agency’s decision to seek public input after the initial failure. In a major step for Houston, the agency paid attention to black and brown residents, and was rewarded. This public policy landscape differed markedly from the top-down structure responsible for Houston’s highways during the 1950s and 1960s. The fourth chapter details competition in the 1980s between a heavy-rail transit system and new toll roads across metropolitan Houston. The political landscape was shifting again, with the emergence of regional political fragmentation. Within a period of months, a ballot proposal on transit failed while a plan for toll expressways passed. This outcome not only launched another road-building boom, but also shattered the coalition that shaped transit policy during the 1970s. White suburbs generally rejected transit programs they saw as primarily benefitting urban neighborhoods, and which also might encourage minority residents to move into their enclaves. A final chapter examines expansion of the city’s light-rail system across [End Page 370] Houston after 2000, especially the protracted struggle to lengthen the Green Line. Tracing lengthy debates about the line’s location, Shelton demonstrates the limits of infrastructural citizenship. He shows that the transit agency clearly consulted residents, but could not, in the end implement the preferences of local residents. Shelton’s study of infrastructure politics across time is important. It bridges a gap in urban and technological history, linking politics and technology. He shows how urban politics in Houston changed from totally top-down to more democratic, and finally to the geographic, racial, and socio-economic fragmentation of...