Willing to Risk Defeat: Black Linked Fate and Support for Racial Representation

• In Event: Race and Representation

Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which cues about electoral risk can modify contemporary black support for and black opposition to race-conscious representation strategies. In the backdrop of Barack Obama’s two-term presidency and early twenty-first century Supreme Court rulings about the Voting Rights Act – much of which nullified the race-conscious interpretations typically associated with enforcing the law – little is known about whether and how black attitudes about the risks associated with strategies aimed at increasing racial representation may have changed since the late 1990s. That is, changes to the American electoral and jurisprudential landscapes since the Shaw decisions [Shaw v Reno (1993) and Shaw v Hunt (1996)], especially the Georgia v. Ashcroft (2003) and Shelby County, Alabama v Holder (2013) decisions, may have amplified black acuity about the externalities associated with electoral reforms and legislative practices deemed especially beneficial to black voters. With this in mind, I leverage the 1996 National Black Election Study to replicate Katherine Tate’s analysis of black support for race-conscious electoral reforms, and I reexamine the substantive empirical question using data from a 2016 study which included an embedded experiment measuring support for representatives joining caucuses based on racial or ethnic identity. Building upon Tate, I focus on risk tolerance as a way of theorizing the combined import of political knowledge, race consciousness, and social perceptions on shaping black willingness to chance losses in representation. Findings from an analysis of the 2016 data show that risk tolerance is driven as much as by expectations about representative behavior as by linked fate and that strong racial identifiers are more likely to support race-conscious reforms and legislative activity. I also find that expectations are politically consequential, with risk tolerant strong racial identifiers viewing certain legislative activities as more important than do risk tolerant individuals and weak racial identifiers. I conclude that most blacks are willing to accept the risks associated with privileging descriptive representation, and that risk tolerance matters for understanding black approval of Congress and for understanding the probable conflicts between minority advocacy groups following the 2020 decennial Census.

Author

• Tyson D. King-Meadows, University of Maryland, Baltimore County