Do Majority Black Districts Limit Blacks' Representation? The Case of the 1990 Redistricting

Ebonya L. Washington

No 17099, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Conventional wisdom and empirical academic research conclude that majority Black districts decrease Black representation by increasing conservatism in Congress. However, this research generally suffers from three limitations: 1) too low a level of aggregation 2) lack of a counterfactual and 3) failure to account for the endogeneity of the creation of majority minority districts. I compare congressional delegations of states that during the 1990 redistricting were under greater pressure to create majority minority districts with those under lesser pressure in a difference-in-difference framework. I find no evidence that the creation of majority minority districts leads to more conservative House delegations. In fact point estimates indicate that states that increased their share of majority Black districts saw their delegations grow increasingly liberal. I find similar results for majority Latino districts in the southwest. Thus I find no evidence for the common view that majority minority districts decrease minority representation in Congress.

JEL-codes: D72 J15 K0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-ure
Note: LE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as “Do Majority Black Districts Lim it Blacks’ Representation? The Case of the 1990 Redistricting” Journal of Law and Economics , 2012, 55 (2) 251-274.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17099.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17099

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17099

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().