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The Election of Blacks to City Councils: Clarifying the Impact of Electoral Arrangements on the Seats/Population Relationship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Richard L. Engstrom  and
Michael D. McDonald
Richard L. Engstrom
Affiliation:
University of New Orleans
Michael D. McDonald
Affiliation:
University of New Orleans
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Abstract

The notion that at-large elections for city council seats are discriminatory toward blacks has recently been attacked as empirically invalid. Recent studies have reached conflicting conclusions as to whether electoral arrangements or socioeconomic factors are the major influence on how proportionately blacks are represented. This article addresses this issue, using a regression-based analysis in which proportionality is treated as a relationship across cities with electoral structure as a specifying variable. Socioeconomic variables found to be important in other studies are included. The results support the traditional notion and suggest that the electoral structure begins to have a discernible impact on the level of black representation once the black population reaches 10 percent of the total municipal population. While one socioeconomic variable, the relative income of the city's black population, is found to affect the election of blacks, its impact is greater than that of the electoral structure only when the black population is less than 15 percent.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , June 1981 , pp. 344 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1981

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