Minority Representatives and Minority Representation*
Latino Representation in State Houses and Congress. By Jason P. Casellas. (Cambridge
University Press, 2011).
Oversight: Representing the Interests of Blacks and Latinos in Congress. By Michael D. Minta.
(Princeton University Press, 2011).
Does the election of minority group members enhance the representation of their groups
in legislative bodies? It was once widely thought, at least when it came to groups like African
Americans and Latinos, that the answer is yes. Indeed, the prevailing view was the more the
better. But this view is not unchallenged. An alternative perspective, labeled the “perverse
effects thesis,” maintains that more descriptive representation is not necessarily better, at least in
contemporary American politics. This thesis, more popular among political scientists than the
evidence for it justifies, holds that the descriptive representation of these groups, to the contrary,
comes at the expense of their substantive representation.1 Advocates of this thesis do not claim
that group members do not prefer to be represented by people from within their own group.
Indeed, the tendency for them to prefer within group representatives has been so pronounced
empirically that Michael Minta is able to state in Oversight: Representing the Interests of Blacks
and Latinos in Congress, with little need for documentation, that “most people in the black and
1
“Descriptive representation” refers to people being represented by others from within
their own group [(see Pitkin 1967, 60-9 and Mansbridge 1999, 629), while “substantive
representation” refers to legislators “acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner
responsive to them” (Pitkin, at 209).
1
Latino community want their representatives to be black or Latino” (123). Jason Casellas
similarly states, in Latino Representation in State Houses and Congress, that “Latinos feel more
empowered as political agents when one like them has achieved political power and importance”
(124).
The previous view held that the election of the minority representatives preferred by
minority voters would enhance the representation of their groups. As Minta notes, “the concept
of descriptive representation presumes that a group’s interests will be best served by a legislator
from that group” (3). Advocates of the perverse effects thesis do not maintain that these
representatives do not behave, as legislators, in a manner supportive of the group’s interests and
concerns. But they still maintain that the presence of these minority representatives harms the
group in terms of its overall substantive representation within a legislative body or chamber.
This perverse outcome is attributed to the majority-minority districts from which the
great majority of minority representatives have been elected. These districts are said to be, often
inaccurately, “packed” with minority voters, draining the districts adjacent to them of such
voters.2 Central to the thesis is the notion that this process will result in the number of
2
A “packed” district is one in which a minority group constitutes a “preponderance” of
the voters (Gilligan and Matsusaka 2006, 385), or an “overwhelming” majority of them
(Engstrom 1986, 110), or in which “the probability that the minority population could not control
the outcome would approach zero” (Bullock 2010, 187, 220). These districts typically result in
much of the group’s voting strength being “wasted” through excessive support for a winning
candidate from within the group. Many majority-minority districts fall well short of that
standard, however. For example, the 10 new majority African American congressional districts
in voting age population (VAP) adopted in the South in 1992 following the 1990 Census, which
stimulated “racial gerrymandering” complaints by whites, complaints that are still commonly
heard regarding majority-minority districts today, were districts in which the African American
2
“bleached” adjacent districts exceeding the number of majority-minority districts. Given the
group differences in candidate and partisan preferences between African Americans and Latinos
on the one hand, and whites on the other, it is viewed as almost axiomatic that these adjacent
districts, at least in a partisan context, are likely to elect Republicans, more specifically,
conservative white Republicans. These legislators, given the policy choices of the Republican
Party, especially when it comes to racial policies, are expected to be less responsive, indeed,
much less responsive, to the interests and policy preferences of minority voters than are
Democratic legislators. When it comes to voting on bills and amendments on the floor, the
responsiveness of Republicans to the policy preferences of African Americans can be
summarized bluntly, “Republican members of Congress tend not to vote in the interests of
African Americans” (Grose 2011, 79). The same is reported to be the case when it comes to the
policy preferences of Latinos (see Epstein and O’Halloran, 2006).
Problems with the Thesis
The perverse effects thesis maintains, in essence, that majority-minority districts result in
more African American and Latino representatives, but also result in more Republican
representatives. Given the Republicans’ more conservative views on issues, especially racial
issues, than Democratic representatives of any race, these districts are said to result in a lower
level of substantive representation overall for minorities. This thesis has great intuitive appeal,
but its simplicity limits its utility.
percentages of the VAP were only 50.6, 52.3, 53.3, 53.4, 54.0, 58.3, 60.4, 61.2, 62.6, and 63.5
(Engstrom 2006, 97).
3
The theoretical linkage it initially, and crucially, relies upon might not be present in
many, if not most, settings. Majority-minority districts might not result in any significant
“bleaching” of adjacent districts, let alone more than one. Residential patterns can affect the
ability to bring about these outcomes, and of course, which party is in control of redistricting, if
any, can have a major impact on the placement of district lines, and therefore the partisan nature
of the adjacent districts, despite population equality constraints. These are important contextual
factors, backed up by both theoretical and empirical work, that limit the application of the
thesis.3 In short, there is nothing axiomatic, nor nearly axiomatic, about majority-minority
districts resulting in more Republicans being elected. And there is little question that the number
of Republican districts that have been the direct result of majority-minority districts has been
greatly exaggerated by many commentators (see, e.g., Carol Swain’s contention that “the loss of
no fewer than 17 Democratic seats can be directly attributable to the creation of majority-black
districts in the South” during the 1990s (1995, 227). Indeed, many studies claiming to find
support for the thesis do not even consider the extent to which Republican gains are in districts
adjacent to majority-minority districts!
And there are issues with the ultimate linkage in the thesis, that due to these districts,
substantive representation declines. There is little doubt that, in the U.S. House and many state
legislatures an increase in the Republican presence will result in less support for African
American and Latino policy preferences.4 But studies typically do not distinguish between
3
See Shotts 2002, Shotts 2003a, Shotts 2003b, Lublin and Voss 2000, Lublin and Voss
2003, Lublin and Lampkin 2007, Engstrom 2006, Gilligan and Matsusaka 2006, Grose 2011,
and McKee 2010.
4
See, e.g., Bratton 2006, Haynie 2001, Tate 2004, and Whitby 1997.
4
reduced substantive representation due to Republicans winning in districts adjacent to majorityminority districts as opposed to those elected from other districts, including districts located far
from a minority district, and even districts in states without any.
The issue that receives the most attention, however, is how best to measure substantive
representation. Studies that have reported findings consistent with the last linkage, that the
substantive representation of African-Americans and Latino minorities is reduced when the
descriptive representation of these groups increases, rely primarily on roll call voting analyses
(see, e.g., the most widely referenced of these studies, Lublin 1997 and Cameron et al 1996).
One author has even noted an “obsession with roll-call voting” in these studies (Grose 2011,
59).5 Casellas himself writes that “the empirical literature on representation has focused too
heavily on statistical roll call analyses,” noting that substantive representation “involves much
more than how legislators vote” (10, see also 15).
Minta questions, along with others, whether roll-call voting is the most appropriate
medium for assessing substantive representation. He expresses common concerns about the
censored sample problem with roll-call votes that reach the floor of the U.S. House, which could
be especially important with issues that deal with race. The majority party typically has control
over what bills and amendments become the subject of votes in that chamber. This can result in
controversial racial issues being avoided when Democrats are in control, with only bills and
5
While the roll-call votes cast by legislators are clearly relevant to addressing
substantive representation, Canon has suggested that the focus on roll-call voting indices in so
many studies might be due largely to the “law of available data” (1999, 174). Certainly when it
comes to the U.S. House, numerous indices purporting to reflect legislators supporting liberal or
conservative positions generally are available on an annual basis.
5
amendments that white and minority Democrats agree on being brought up for votes, resulting in
findings that white Democrats are just as supportive of minority interests and concerns as
minority Democrats. When Republicans are in control votes could be limited to amendments
and bills that are not minority friendly, resulting again in white Democrats voting similarly to
minority Democrats. This problem can lead to the perception that white and minority Democrats
are interchangeable when it comes to the representation of minorities (80).6
In addition, Minta expressed concerns, as others have, with the roll-call voting indices
used as the dependent variables in these studies, beyond the censored sample problem. He points
out that these indices “include a host of issues that either blacks do not care about or on which
their views are not different from those of whites,” and do not distinguish between “class-based
policies that address the poor” generally and “racial / ethnic policies” that are specific to
minority groups (8).7 Indices that focus on general liberal and conservative distinctions in rollcall voting can also result in masking differences between African American Democrats and
white Democrats. Similarly, studies using multiple state legislatures often assume, without
empirical justification, that legislators map onto the liberal-conservative spectrum in exactly the
same way across the various states. That is, representatives who are classified as liberal in New
York are assumed to occupy the same ideological space as representatives classified as liberal in
Texas. Such assumptions may not only mask differences within the parties, but they might also
mask them across the parties.
6
For a more extensive discussion of the censored sample problem, see Canon 1999, 165,
174-174).
7
For similar criticisms of these indices, see Canon 2999, 31, 172, and Grose 2011, 57-
58, 62.
6
The censored sample and relevance critiques of roll-call voting studies raise questions
about the frequent findings in them that white, African American, and Latino Democrats tend to
be similar in their levels of support for social welfare measures and other “liberal” policies
generally. These results motivate suggestions that African American and Latino substantive
representation will be enhanced if fewer majority-minority districts are adopted, and fewer
African Americans and Latinos thereby elected.
These findings have been central to another approach to redistricting that is often
recommended as a way to provide minorities with greater substantive representation. This
approach entails reducing the number of majority-minority districts, and consequently the
number of minority representatives, by dispersing minority voters into more majority-white
districts in which they will have “influence” over the white representatives of those districts. In
a partisan context, this is expected to result in the election of more white Democrats, and fewer
Republicans, which allegedly will increase the level of substantive representation overall.
The concept of an “influence district,” however, and how such districts can be identified
or measured, and how likely Democrats are to be elected in them, and how responsive those
Democrats will be to minority interests and concerns, are all matters with serious theoretical and
empirical problems of their own. Needless to say, there is nothing axiomatic about majoritywhite “influence districts” enhancing substantive representation, or how many influence districts
need to be created to offset the loss in minority representation. The impact of influence districts
might itself be conditioned by variations in contextual conditions, as is the case with majorityminority districts (see Engstrom 2012, and sources referenced therein).
Descriptive Representation
7
Casellas and Minta both provide data that address this thesis in one way or another, as
well as other matters, in their respective books. As the titles of the books indicate, Casellas is
concerned with Latino representation, which he examines in both the U.S. House of
Representatives and state legislatures, while Minta looks at the representation of both African
Americans and Latinos in the U.S. House. Their approaches to the subject however differ
considerably. Both address the impact of the group composition of election districts and the
election of minorities, although this is examined more extensively and systematically by Casellas
than Minta. This is no doubt due to the fact that this linkage has been documented empirically
by previous studies far more often for African Americans than Latinos. Indeed, Casellas claims
that his book contains “the first systematic examination of the election of Latinos to U.S. state
legislatures and Congress” (1). We note however that several prior studies address the topics
that are the focus of the analyses in his book (e.g., Bratton 2006, Hero and Tolbert 1995, Kerr
and Miller 1997, Nelson 1991, and Welch and Hibbing 1984).
Minta simply notes that the descriptive representation of African Americans and Latinos
in the U.S. House has been strongly dependent on racial redistricting that produces majorityAfrican American and Latino districts (53, 64, 123). Casellas also reports that “Latinos are
primarily elected from districts with substantial majorities of Latino citizens, much in the same
pattern as African Americans” (28). He performs probit analyses to assess the probability of
Latinos being elected in to the U.S. House and in four state legislatures relying exclusively on
single member districts with varying percentages of Latinos among the citizen population. The
results of the analysis for the U.S. House places that probability in a district in which Latinos
constitute 50 percent of the citizen population at only 14 percent (60, 62). The corresponding
probabilities are much better however in the typically smaller state legislative districts. The
8
projected probabilities in single member districts in which Latinos constitute 50 percent of the
citizens vary considerably, from a reported 40 percent in New York, 53 percent in Texas, 65 in
New Mexico, to 95 percent in California (60).
Curiously, in his concluding chapter, Casellas refers to “the outdated concept of majorityminority districts” (138-139, emphasis supplied). This is apparently because, as he states,
“Latino candidates are winning in districts with either Latino majorities or Latino and white
combined majorities” (139, emphasis again supplied). Yet we have been unable to find
sufficient information in the book about these later districts to know how prevalent the election
of Latinos is in them.8
Substantive Representation
Numerous studies have concluded, when it comes to the U.S. House, that there is a great
difference in the substantive representation of minorities provided by Democratic and
Republican members. When it comes to voting on bills and amendments on the floor, the
responsiveness of Republicans to the policy preferences of African Americans can be
summarized bluntly, “Republican members of Congress tend not to vote in the interests of
African Americans” (Grose 2011, 79). The same is reported to be the case when it comes to the
policy preferences of Latinos (see Epstein and O’Halloran, 2006). Democrats as a group are far
more responsive to the preferences of these groups.
8
We do note however our belief that if alternatives to majority-minority districts are on
the agenda, especially to majority-Latino districts, given the residential integration of Latinos is
greater than that for African Americans, the conversation should include alternative election
systems such as cumulative and limited voting (see, e.g., Engstrom 2010). Casellas does not
reference these systems however.
9
While both Casellas and Minta assess the substantive representation provided by minority
representatives to their fellow group members, there is a major difference in their approaches.
Despite being critical of the focus on roll call voting in previous studies on this topic, and noting
that there is more to substantive representation than how a legislator votes, Casellas relies
exclusively on that medium to assess the substantive representation provided to Latinos by
Latino legislators. Minta, in contrast, looks beyond roll call voting to assess the substantive
representation provided to African Americans and Latinos by representatives from those groups.
Casellas argues that the analysis of roll-call votes “can shed light on the differences, if
any, among representatives’ voting patterns, and it can provide insights into the normative
question of whether Latino elected officials are essential to advancing a Latino agenda” (12728). Only two of the states used in the descriptive representation portion of the study are used in
this part, Texas and New Jersey, and another state, Colorado, is added, all without explanation.
Using several regression models, Casellas tests four separate hypotheses. The Latino
Constituency Effect and the African American Effect hypotheses posit that the higher the
minority presence in a district, Latino citizens and African Americans respectively, the more
liberal the ideology of the representative for the district. The Latino Legislator Effect hypothesis
contends that a non-Cuban Latino legislator is likely to be more liberal than Cuban-American
legislators. Finally, the Partisan Effect hypothesis says a Democratic legislator will be more
liberal than a Republican legislator.
Poole-Rosenthal DW- NOMINATE ideology scores for the 87th –104th Congresses and
McCarthy NOMINATE ideology scores for state legislators who served in Colorado in 1999, in
New Jersey in 2002, and in Texas in 2001serve as the dependent variables in the regression
10
models.9 The independent variables are the proportion of the district that is Latino, proportion of
the district that is black, party affiliation of the representative, whether the legislator is a senator,
and whether the legislator is Latino. Legislators with more liberal NOMINATE scores are
assumed to provide more substantive representation to Latinos than those with more conservative
scores. Contrary to his expectations, Casellas finds that “The presence of Latino representatives
makes no difference in the voting patterns for any of the legislative bodies except for the U.S.
House in one Congress” out of the eighteen he analyzed (137). From this, he concludes, “Latino
citizens apparently do not experience greater degrees of direct substantive representation when
they elect Latino representatives as opposed to non-Latino representatives (137).” His analyses
show that political party affiliation is the strongest predictor of ideology. Democrats, as
expected, were found to be more liberal than Republicans. Because of some concerns we have
about the regression models, however, we do not place much confidence in these results.
First, conspicuously missing from the models are variables that interact the party
affiliation of a legislator with his or her ethnicity. Thus we get no information on what is
perhaps the most important concern when it comes to determining if there is a link between
descriptive and substantive representation, namely whether white and Latino Democrats are
interchangeable, or whether Latino Democrats are more liberal than white Democrats. Recall, in
this study, being more liberal is assumed to mean providing more substantive representation.
Second, as we mention above, and as Minta discusses in some detail in his book, reliance
on general ideology indices to make race or ethnicity-related claims is problematic and might
yield misleading or erroneous conclusions. This could very well be the case here. For instance,
9
There is no discussion of potential consequences from pooling of the data from
different years, nor are there any controls for this included in the regression models.
11
it is likely not the case, as the models imply, that Latino interests always correlate with more
liberal positions. In other words, using NOMINATE or other such measures alone might not be
sufficient for assessing who provides substantive representation to whom, and how much of it
they provide.
Third, we believe that it is very likely the case that there is some lag effect between
changes that occur in legislative districts and changes in the behavior of representatives. That is,
if changes in the racial or ethnic makeup of districts do indeed influence legislators’ ideology or
behavior within the institution, we may not see evidence of the changes until several years after
the changes in the district have occurred. The models do not allow for such a lag effect.
Finally, although Casellas highlights throughout the text the importance of accounting
for variations among state legislatures and variations between state legislatures and the U.S.
House, ironically and regrettably he fails to incorporate some of these institutional variations into
many of the analyses from which his most profound conclusions are drawn. For example,
control of and the ability to influence the legislative agenda may vary by institution and the party
in the majority. These variations likely have an effect on which bills are brought to a vote, and
thus factor into indices like NOMINATE. Neither of these, nor other possibly relevant
institutional differences, are accounted for in the substantive representation analyses.
As noted above, Minta and others question whether roll-call voting is the most
appropriate medium for assessing substantive representation. But his concern extends even
beyond that, to asking “would a white legislator who votes identically to a black or Latino
legislator necessarily represent his or her district’s blacks and Latinos just as well?” (4). He
argues, again as others have, that legislators’ roll-call votes, and the outcomes thereof, are simply
12
one indicator of substantive representation, and the one most likely to be constrained by party
agendas. Other forms of legislative behavior, unencumbered by a party’s policy agenda, might
well reveal larger differences in substantive representation based on the race of the
representatives.
Others have examined the behavior of minority and other representatives in areas such as
the sponsorship of bills and amendments, speeches made on the floor of legislative bodies, the
provision of “pork” to their districts, services provided to particular groups and individuals in
their constituencies, and even how assessable district-based offices are to minority constituents.
These studies have a consistent record of finding that the race of a representative matters; that
minority representatives behave in ways much more responsive to their minority constituents
(see, e.g., Canon 1999 and Grose 2011).
Minta adds to this work by examining a form of legislative behavior not previously
studied in this context, and concludes, consistently with the previous work, that African
American and Latino representatives provide “superior substantive representation” (4). He
investigates a form of behavior that he claims is “more likely than their votes to reveal their true
positions” (12) – their intervention in committee oversight hearings! This is a low visibility
“work horse” activity that does not readily lend itself to credit taking, yet an activity that “can be
and often is vital to the substantive representation of constituent interests” (33).10 Minta
10
Minta notes that “Congressional hearings are second only to direct staff contact with a
given agency as the primary means by which legislators engage in the oversight of federal
agencies” (56).
13
identifies interventions as “a proxy for the intensity of legislators’ commitment to supporting
black- and Latino- interest policies” (58).
Built into his analysis is an important contextual variable concerning the partisan control
of Congress and the party affiliation of the President. This is done by examining interventions in
three sessions of Congress – the 103ed Congress (1993-1995) in which the Democrats were the
majority in both chambers and the President was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, the 104th (1995-1997)
in which the Republicans were the majority in both chambers while Clinton remained as
President, and the 107th (2001-2003) in which Republicans were again the majority in both
chambers but the president was a Republican, George W. Bush.
An analysis of oversight hearings is performed for each of two policy domains, that
dealing with policy issues that explicitly concern African Americans and Latinos, and the other
dealing with policy issues concerning general social welfare matters with disproportionate
effects on those groups.11 A quantitative analysis is performed for each Congress in which the
dependent variable is the number of lines in the hearing transcripts, based on oral or written
testimony, in favor of stronger enforcement of civil rights or social welfare legislation accounted
for by each member of one of the committees holding a hearing.12 While it could be interesting
11
The samples of hearings on which the analyses are based consist of 25 of the 92 over
the three Congresses dealing with racial/ethnic issues and 29 of those dealing with social welfare
issues. These were selected based on two purposive sampling criteria, racial or ethnic diversity
in the members of the committees and diversity in the issues dealt with by the committees.
Random selection was then used to choose the ultimate sample within each of the policy
domains. [For a list of the hearings relied upon, see Appendices C and D (132-138).]
12
The analyses are based on a zero-inflated negative bimodal model because of the
“overdispersion and excess number of zeros” in the data (59). The models include from nine to
14
to include interventions in opposition to stronger enforcement, they constitute only 16 percent of
the interventions in the racial/ethnic hearings and 21 percent of those in the social welfare
hearings. Substantive interventions coded as neutral constitute 8 percent and 11 percent
respectively. This analysis is supplemented by a review of the actual substance of the
interventions, which enhances the analysis greatly.
This review focuses on Minta’s findings that relate to the perverse effects theory. It is
certainly clear from his analyses that Democrats generally and African Americans and Latino
specifically are the most active in intervening in oversight hearings in a manner favorable to
African American and Latino interests. In all of his analyses either the party and/or race of the
representative have significant impacts on the intervention behavior of legislators. And he
concludes that African American and Latino members of Congress provide “qualitatively better”
representation for their respective minority group (5).
But the statistical analyses unfortunately never address whether among Democratic
representatives, African Americans, Latinos, and whites are fungible. He states at one point, in
his analysis of interventions in the 103rd Congress, that “Democrats – black, white, and Latino –
spent roughly equal amounts of time advocating for stronger enforcement of civil rights at the
11 separate and distinct independent variables, and occasionally an interaction term. The data
are pooled across committees for each Congress because no single committee conducted enough
hearings to support a multivariate analysis (58). While Minta states that he does another analysis
for non-committee members participating in hearings (58-59), that analysis consists of adding
them to the data set for committee members and then adding whether a legislator was a
committee member or not as a separate and distinct independent variable. This no doubt
presumably because there are too few non-committee members to analyze separately – the
number ranges across the two issue domains and three Congresses from 15 to 33.
15
various committees” (66). But the analysis does not demonstrate this because no coefficients are
estimated for these groups of Democrats separately; in short, there are no interaction terms that
would identify whether they do or not. And they are not present in the analyses of the other
Congresses.
There are in effect interaction terms in some of the models however that indicate that
African American and Latino Democrats do intervene in favor of their group’s interests more
often than white Democrats. These are in analyses in which coefficients are reported for
variables reflecting whether committee chairs or ranking minority party members of committees
were African Americans or Latinos in Congresses when all such positions were held by
Democrats. These are reported for African American committee chairs in the analysis of
interventions in hearings devoted to social welfare issues in the 103rd Congress, Latino ranking
members in hearings on racial/ethnic matters in the 104th Congress, and African American
ranking members in hearings on racial/ethnic matters in the 107th Congress. When converted
into a predicted number of transcript lines, Minta reports that these minority committee leaders
intervened more often, usually much more often, than did the similarly situated whites in all
three contexts (e.g,, in the hearings on racial/ethnic matters in the 104th Congress, “Latino
ranking minority members spent more time advocating for stronger enforcement of civil rights
laws, at 241 lines, than did white ranking minority members, at 57 lines” (71, see also 92, 79).
Coefficients for these variables are not reported, nor any predicted rates, in the other tables
however.
In addition, Minta notes that for the racial/ethnic hearings in the 107th Congresses,
African American Democratic and Latino Democratic committee members overall accounted for
more positive interventions than white Democrats, at rates of 57 lines, 36 lines, and six lines
16
respectively. When non-committee members were included, the figures were 49, 70, and eight
respectively (80). Similar disparities between African Americans and whites were also revealed
for the 104th Congress, but not for Latinos and whites (81). Again, these figures were not
reported for the other policy domains and Congresses.
As noted above, Minta’s review of the substance of the interventions enhances the
analysis. He states, no doubt correctly, that “considering the diverse perspectives that legislators
bring to public policy decision making is just as important to the substantive representation of
minority interests as measuring how much legislators intervene” (104). These perspectives,
drawn from personal experiences and constituent concerns, can contribute to perfecting
legislation and the implementation of it. His review of the transcripts for their actual content,
rather than just valence, reveals minority legislators attempting to expand opportunities for
minority businesses, demanding the full implementation of anti-discrimination laws, defending
affirmative action, and endorsing bilingual education and bilingual election material. It also
reveals a pronounced “partisan slant” to interventions (79). This is especially the case in
hearings on social welfare programs, in which minority legislators challenge negative racial and
ethnic stereotypes used to justify programmatic cuts in responsibilities and budgets, and in the
alleged causes of poverty. In Minta’s words, “black and Latino legislators tend to provide and
share a point of view that comes from being a part of the minority group and having experiences
and insights that only being a group member can provide” (76).
This portion of the study also highlights the importance of control of the agenda in the
U.S. House. Minta’s sensitivity to the different political contexts present over the Congresses he
examines reveals the importance of partisan control of the chamber especially, as well as the
presidency (63), to the substantive representation of minorities. Republican control forces the
17
Democrats’ minority representatives to engage in defensive behavior in their interventions far
more than when Democrats are in the majority. In this respect, if the number of Republicans
elected from bleached districts that result from the creation of majority-minority districts is
critical to a Republican majority in that chamber, a very improbable event in a 435-member body
(see Grose 2011), then the policy effect on minority groups could indeed be harmful to their
interests and concerns.
Conclusions
Readers need to know that both of these books cover and contribute to more substantive
topics than we have focused on in this review. Casellas for example draws our attention to the
tremendous diversity found among Latino legislators. This adds an important layer of
complexity to the analysis of Latino legislative behavior, complexity that will no doubt have to
be accommodated by additional theorizing about and models for analyzing aspects of that
behavior. And Minta develops the concept of “strategic group uplift” to help account for
differences in the substantive representation provided by minority and white legislators. He
describes this as an “ideology” that motivates minority representatives to view the scope of their
representational activities as extending beyond not only roll call voting but also beyond their
own geographic constituencies. He argues that this concept needs to be “a central component of
all congressional studies that evaluate what motivates legislators to engage in advocacy
activities” (115).
In neither of these books is the analysis explicitly framed as a test of which redistricting
strategy is most likely to enhance the substantive representation of African Americans and
Latinos, that which calls for majority-minority districts or that which calls for minority
“influence” districts instead. Both will no doubt be cited in that debate however. Casellas’
18
conclusion about the fungibility of Latino and non-Latino representatives in his roll call analysis
can be expected to be referenced often, but it must be remembered that it is based on a general
liberal/conservative index that does not focus on racial/ethnic issues. More importantly,
however, his analysis does not tell us about the consequences of replacing within-group
representatives preferred by Latino voters with white representatives of the same party elected
from Latino “influence” districts. Minta’s examination of interventions in oversight hearings can
also be expected to be referenced often as well, especially given its focus on matters more
directly related to race and/or ethnicity. But again, the analysis does not tell us about the
consequences of replacing within-group representatives preferred by African American or Latino
voters with white representatives of the same party elected from “influence districts.” Neither
study therefore can be considered particularly probative on this very important redistricting
issue.
Richard L. Engstrom, Duke University
Kerry L. Haynie, Duke University
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Cameron, Charles, David Epstein, and Sharyn O’Halloran. 1996. “Do Majority-Minority
Districts Maximize Substantive Black Representation in Congress?” American Political
Science Review 90 (4): 794-812.
Canon, David T. 1999. Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences
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*This review is an extension of remarks about these books made by the reviewers at an “Authors
Meet Their Critics” Session at the Southern Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting,
2012, New Orleans, LA.
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