Race and the Politics of Close Elections

Tom Vogl

No 18320, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Elections between black and white candidates tend to involve close margins and high turnout. Using a novel dataset of municipal vote returns during the rise of black mayors in U.S. cities, this paper establishes new facts about turnout and competition in close interracial elections. In the South, but not the North, close black victories were more likely than close black losses, involved higher turnout than close black losses, and were more likely than close black losses to be followed by subsequent black victories. These results are consistent with a model in which the historical exclusion of Southern blacks from politics made them disproportionately sensitive to mobilization efforts by political elites, leading to a black candidate advantage in close elections. The results contribute to a growing body of evidence that the outcomes of reasonably close elections are not always random, which suggests that detailed knowledge of the electoral context is a precondition to regression discontinuity analyses based on vote shares.

JEL-codes: C18 D72 J00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
Note: LS POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as “Race and the Politics of Close Elections.” Journal of Public Economics, January 2014, 109: 101-­‐‑113.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18320.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:18320

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18320

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 ().