Caucus Cohesion and Substantive Representation in State Legislatures

• In Event: Examining Black Legislative Caucuses

Abstract

A vast body of literature asserts the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. While scholars argue that ethno-racial minority elected officials in legislatures can better represent their co-ethnic constituents through service and appropriations, oftentimes their arguments ignore the internal dynamics of legislatures that could help or hinder the relative productivity of these officials. Motivated by a simple model of legislative bargaining, this paper studies how the relative cohesion of Black legislative caucuses influences the capacity of their members to represent their Black voters. Using a novel dataset on the roll-call behavior of all lower chamber state representatives from 1996 to the present, I document how Black caucus vote cohesion varies with the provision of funds to co-ethnic recipients — proxied using the remittance of state dollars to majority-Black public schools. Then, I rely on exogenous shocks to the stability of caucuses during state-level redistricting years to uncover the causal effect of caucus cohesion on representatives’ ability to bring benefits home to their districts. Taken together, this project illuminates an understudied yet critical mechanism for representation.

Author

• Hunter Rendleman, Harvard University