African‐American Committee Chairs in U.S. State Legislatures*

Byron D'Andra Orey, L. Marvin Overby and Christopher W. Larimer

Social Science Quarterly, 2007, vol. 88, issue 3, 619-639

Abstract: Objective. In this article, we explore whether African‐American state legislators have been able to translate election to office into positions of power, particularly as committee chairs. Methods. We cull data from all state legislative chambers that contained a black legislator during two time periods, 1989 and 1999. In doing so, we compare the observed numbers of African‐American chairs with their expected numbers. We also examine each state's percentage of black chairs using multiple regression to determine what factors—political, partisan, institutional, cultural—influence the selection of black committee chairs. Results. Overall, our descriptive analysis reveals that blacks are underrepresented as chairs. They are not, however, significantly underrepresented as chairs of the most important committees and they are generally overrepresented as chairs of committees with jurisdiction over social services. Our multivariate analyses show that the prevalence of black chairs is driven primarily by factors related to partisan control of legislative chambers and size of the black legislative delegation, and that these dynamics have changed over time. Conclusion. Although the increase in African‐American state legislators has led to an increase in substantive leadership roles, these positions have been limited almost entirely to chambers where the black caucus is a critical element of a Democratic majority.

Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2007.00475.x

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:bla:socsci:v:88:y:2007:i:3:p:619-639

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0038-4941

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science Quarterly is currently edited by Robert L. Lineberry

More articles in Social Science Quarterly from Southwestern Social Science Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().