More of the Same? Race, Representation, and Policy Responsiveness

• In Event: Representation and Responsiveness

Abstract

While African Americans can be found at the highest levels of government and black voter turnout, at times, equals or exceeds white voter turnout, there remain questions regarding the extent and quality of the representation of African Americans at the local, state, and federal levels (Mansbridge 1999; Phoenix 2019; Schaffner, Rhodes, and La Raja 2020). Some scholars conclude that issues of unique importance to African Americans remain off the political agenda, due in large part to persistent levels of racism among the white majority of the electorate and the concomitant perception that white politicians who seek to publicly address these policy concerns will face electoral backlash (Frymer 2011; Harris 2012). Indeed, a large body of literature, through the use of correspondence field experiments (or “audit studies”), has shown that politicians discriminate against African Americans when it comes to constituency service (see, e.g. Butler and Broockman 2011; Butler 2014; Costa 2017). These studies have demonstrated that when African Americans contact public officials, they are responded to less frequently than white Americans. However, recent work casts doubt on the prevalence of racial discrimination, suggesting that African Americans are as likely as White Americans to receive responses from elected officials (Rivera-Burgos and Rubio 2023).
While this scholarship has provided empirical evidence that African Americans may still experience discrimination at the hands of state legislators, we note that much of this literature focuses attention on “service requests,” or messages from constituents asking for help navigating the bureaucracy or obtaining social services. Very few of these studies examine responsiveness to policy-based requests made by African Americans (see Butler, Karpowitz, and Pope 2012; Costa 2017). Of the handful of studies that do focus on policy, to our knowledge, none have systematically analyzed how the chosen issue area itself shapes politicians’ responsiveness. Thus, it remains an open question if variation in the policy issue area influences the likelihood that elected officials will respond in a discriminatory fashion to African American constituents.
In this paper, we investigate whether policy-based inquiries, particularly ones that feature policies that are popularly associated with African Americans, impact the likelihood that elected officials will respond to African American constituents and thereby decrease the racial gap in representation. In so doing, we conducted an audit experiment in which roughly 6,000 state legislators were sent an email, purportedly from one of the legislators’ constituents, where the race of the constituent was randomized as well whether the policy-based inquiry regards a policy issue deemed as being important to African Americans or to white Americans. Our results will not only expand the boundaries of the scholarship on race and representation, but also provide new directions in the design and implementation of audit experiments.

Authors

• Tatishe Mavovosi Nteta, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Mia Costa, Dartmouth College

• Adam Eichen, University of Massachusetts Amherst