(iPoster) Beyond the Vote: A New Framework for Measuring Minority Impact on City Councils

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Political Science Education & Race, Ethnicity, and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

Abstract

In recent years, American city councils have rapidly diversified; by 2021, only 25 percent of councils nationwide remained entirely white. While the literature on descriptive representation suggests that electing legislators of color (LOCs) should yield substantive benefits for minority constituents, the literature on local politics generally sets up an inconsistent expectation that city councils are "consensus-building" institutions operating under severe legal and fiscal constraints where such effects might be muted. I aim to resolve this tension with a new theoretical framework that disaggregates the effects of representation into three areas: *voter* empowerment (affects on voters themselves), *policy* empowerment (substantive fiscal and legal changes) and *process* empowerment (changes in the deliberative agenda, rhetoric, and conflict). I argue that while institutional constraints (such as council-manager systems or state preemption) often neutralize the ability of LOCs to alter fiscal policy, these legislators retain a significant ability to enact change by altering the conduct of the city council itself. Specifically, I test my "constraint hypothesis," which predicts that in highly constrained environments, the election of LOCs will have minimal effects on budgets but immediate effects on the deliberative agenda. To do so, I use a difference-in-differences design on municipal election returns to estimate the causal effect of electing an LOC on city-level outcomes, alongside an analysis of council meeting transcripts. This project clarifies the conditions under which descriptive representation translates into substantive power, suggesting that the "new racial calculus" of local politics is defined not just by who wins, but by how candidates transform governing institutions in spite of structural limits.

Author

• Zachary Lorico Hertz, University of California, Berkeley