White Voters, Black Representatives, and Candidates of Choice

The challenge of minority representation is an important area of public policy that relies heavily on the work of political scientists. Minority voting rights in the United States encompasses not just access to the ballot, but also guarantees that the ballot has meaning in areas with historic discrimination. In this paper we explore the nomination and election of African-American congressional representatives, with an emphasis on the unsuccessful primary re-nomination fight of Cynthia McKinney. Relying on both precinct level racial participation data and also unique, voter-level information on the partisanship of all white primary participants, we ascertain the extent to which the African-American incumbent’s loss to an African-American challenger was a product of strategic voting by white Republicans under Georgia’s open primary law. We also draw conclusions about the implications of such strategic white voting for the election of African-American candidates of choice, and discuss the implications of those conclusions for the interpretation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

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Cultural Disenfranchisement and the Politics of Stigma

Explorations in Ethnic Studies ◽

10.1525/esr.2019.421002 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 7-24

Author(s):

Myra Mendible

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Voting Rights ◽

The United States ◽

Cultural Citizenship ◽

Voting Rights Act ◽

Legal Documents ◽

Moral Geography ◽

Exclusionary Policies ◽

Physical Spaces

This article focuses attention on the pivotal role that stigmatization processes play on both legal and discursive fronts, that is, in justifying restrictive policies affecting ethnic minorities and in framing reactionary discourses in support of such measures. It argues that racial stigmatization is the key component in ongoing efforts to exclude Black and Latino citizens from full cultural citizenship in the United States, setting the groundwork for punitive and exclusionary policies aimed at disenfranchising and undermining their political agency. While legal documents record the rights and privileges accorded citizens within the nation’s physical spaces, the politics of stigma, I contend, maps a moral geography: it sets the contours and limits of communal obligation, disrupting affective bonds and attachments that can spur social change. As an instrument of power, stigmatizing processes today are helping to reinstate the kinds of policies and attitudes that the Voting Rights Act intended to redress, engendering a hostile climate for Blacks and Latinos in the United States and threatening hard-won civil rights and political gains.

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Preparing for 2007: Legal and Legislative Issues Surrounding the Reauthorization of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

University of Pittsburgh Law Review ◽

10.5195/lawreview.2005.71 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 67 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Jocelyn Benson

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

African Americans ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Voting Rights ◽

The United States ◽

Voting Rights Act ◽

Political Empowerment

Forty years ago, civil rights activists across the country rejoiced in the passing of the Voting Rights Act1 (“VRA” or “the Act”). The Act was a crowning achievement of the classical civil rights movement and the culmination of a bloody series of events seeking political empowerment for African-Americans in the United States.

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Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States

American Politics Research ◽

10.1177/1532673x18754555 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 195-237 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

David Cottrell ◽

Michael C. Herron ◽

Javier M. Rodriguez ◽

Daniel A. Smith

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

African American Men ◽

Voting Rights ◽

Premature Death ◽

The United States ◽

The Right

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

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Belief in Redeemability and Punitive Public Opinion: “Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal” Revisited

Criminal Justice and Behavior ◽

10.1177/0093854820913585 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 47 (6) ◽

pp. 712-732 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Alexander L. Burton ◽

Francis T. Cullen ◽

Velmer S. Burton ◽

Amanda Graham ◽

Leah C. Butler ◽

...

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Public Policy ◽

Public Opinion ◽

Crime Control ◽

Voting Rights ◽

The United States ◽

Mechanical Turk ◽

Criminal Records ◽

Punitive Attitudes ◽

Capacity For Change

In 2009, Maruna and King presented results from a British survey showing that the public’s belief in the redeemability of people who committed offenses curbed their level of punitiveness. Based on a 2017 national survey in the United States ( n = 1,000), the current study confirms that redeemability is negatively related to punitive attitudes. In addition, the analyses reveal that this belief predicts support for rehabilitation and specific inclusionary policies (i.e., ban-the-box in employment, expungement of criminal records, and voting rights for people with a felony conviction). Findings regarding measures for punishment and rehabilitation were confirmed by a 2019 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey. These results suggest that beliefs about capacity for change among people who committed offenses are key to understanding crime-control public policy.

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THE LAST STAND?

Du Bois Review Social Science Research on Race ◽

10.1017/s1742058x1500017x ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 25-44 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Desmond S. King ◽

Rogers M. Smith

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

African Americans ◽

United States Supreme Court ◽

Voting Rights ◽

The United States ◽

United States Supreme ◽

Voting Rights Act ◽

Shelby County ◽

To Come ◽

Over Time

AbstractIn 2013, the United States Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling is part of longstanding efforts to maintain American institutions that have provided wide-ranging benefits to White citizens, including disproportionate political power. Over time, such efforts are likely to fail to prevent significant increases in political gains for African Americans, Latinos, and other minority citizens. But they threaten to foster severe conflicts in American politics for years to come.

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Partisanship, Structure, and Representation: The Puzzle of African American Education Politics

American Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s0003055414000148 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 108 (2) ◽

pp. 265-280 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

KENNETH J. MEIER ◽

AMANDA RUTHERFORD

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

Voting Rights ◽

The United States ◽

Voting Rights Act ◽

African American Education ◽

Education Politics ◽

The Impact ◽

The Relationship ◽

Electoral Structures

The 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act targeted electoral structures as significant determinants of minority representation. The research regarding electoral structures and representation of constituents, however, has produced conflicting results, and the continued application of some of the provisions set forth in the Voting Rights Act is in doubt. This article addresses the impact of at-large elections on African American representation and reveals a striking and unanticipated finding: African Americans are now overrepresented on school boards that have at-large elections when African Americans are a minority of the population. Using the 1,800 largest school districts in the United States (based on original surveys conducted in 2001, 2004, and 2008), we find that partisanship changes the relationship between electoral structures and race to benefit African American representation.

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