Despite substantial research on descriptive representation for Blacks and Latinos, we know little about the electoral conditions under which Asian candidates win office. Leveraging a new dataset on Asian American legislators elected from 2011 to 2020, combined with pre-existing and newly conducted surveys, we develop and test hypotheses related to Asian American candidates’ ingroup support, and their crossover appeal to other racial and ethnic groups. The data show Asian Americans preferring candidates of their own ethnic origin and of other Asian ethnicities to non-Asian candidates, indicating strong ethnic and panethnic motives. Asian candidates have comparatively strong crossover appeal, winning at higher rates than Blacks or Latinos for any given percentage of the reference group. All else equal, Asian American candidates fare best in multiracial districts, so growing diversity should benefit their electoral prospects. This crossover appeal is not closely tied to motives related to relative group status or threat.

Though African-American and Latino electoral success in state legislative and congressional elections continues to occur almost entirely in majority-minority districts, minorities now have new opportunities in districts that are only 40–50% minority. This success can primarily be explained in terms of a curvilinear model that generates a “sweet spot” of maximum likelihood of minority candidate electoral success as a function of minority population share of the district and the proportion of the district that votes Republican. Past racial redistricting legal challenges often focused on cracking concentrated racial minorities to prevent the creation of majority-minority districts. Future lawsuits may also follow in the steps of recent successful court challenges against racially motivated packing that resulted in the reduction of minority population percentage in a previously majority-minority district in order to enhance minority opportunity in an adjacent non-majority-minority district.

Taking into proper account the geographic distribution of ethnic groups and the operation of electoral systems within individual countries reveals that the impact of ethnic diversity and electoral systems on the number of parties has been underestimated. Contrary to earlier findings, this study reveals that ethnic diversity spurs party proliferation in countries with both majoritarian and proportional electoral systems, though the effect is stronger in the latter. The insights gained here provide a theoretically derived measure of ethnic diversity that is useful for estimating its effect on specifically political phenomena and generating an improved holistic measure of the impact of electoral systems. More crucially, the results indicate that electoral system designers have a greater capacity to structure electoral outcomes. The results rely on multivariate models created using a new database with election results from 1990 through 2011 in sixty-five free democracies.

Political scientists have fiercely debated the impact of decentralization on ethnic conflict; some see it as a panacea, while others contend that it sows the seeds of its own failure by stimulating ethnic divisions via ethnoregional parties. Using multiple methods—historical analysis, quantitative case studies, and multivariate models of the share of votes won by ethnoregional parties in 71 democracies—this article demonstrates that ethnoregional parties derive no benefit from decentralization in nonethnically decentralized countries. Even in ethnically decentralized countries, much ethnoregional party success is explained by the continuation of parties that originally pressed for decentralization. Any impact of decentralization on ethnoregional parties can be minimized through the careful construction of institutions to enhance regional autonomy but not statewide influence. Consequently, institutional designers should retain decentralization as an option when crafting political institutions even in countries with ethnic divisions.

The battle over lesbian and gay rights has gained increased prominence in the political arena. Discrimination against homosexuals may have been widely accepted in the past, but today such discrimination is strongly debated. In 2004, the presidential candidates as well as members of Congress squared off on whether to enshrine a ban on gay marriage into the Constitution. Analyzing the 106th–108th Congresses reveals that member and district characteristics greatly influence the level of support for gay and lesbian rights. Democrats are far more supportive of pro-gay and -lesbian initiatives than Republicans. Region similarly plays a key role. Southerners are more tepid in their support for gay and lesbian rights than their northern colleagues. At the same time, New England representatives are even more liberal than other northerners. Despite strong opposition to gay marriage within the churches of their communities, African-American and Latino representatives are especially likely to support gay and lesbian rights. Church membership also guides representative behavior, though not always as conventional wisdom might indicate. Catholic representatives are not more hostile to gay and lesbian rights than other representatives. Moreover, the influence of religious affiliation on congressional voting behavior is declining. Constituency characteristics, such as urbanicity and education, also shape representative behavior but play a secondary role.

Racial redistricting decimated the southern congressional districts once represented by centrist Democrats. Electoral maps drawn in the 1990s instead helped polarize the South's congressional delegation into a mixture of minority Democrats and right-wing Republicans, creating a more favorable environment for conservative legislation. The median-voter approach offered by Ken Shotts misses this phenomenon, primarily because neither his statistical model nor his formal model incorporates the sharp rightward shift in the House median that followed the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. As a result, his models completely discount gains made by hard-right Republicans at the expense of moderate Democrats.

New techniques of ecological inference are utilized to estimate with confidence intervals francophone support in each federal electoral district in Quebec for the pro-sovereignty side in the 1993 and 1997 Canadian general elections and the 1992 and 1995 referenda. Analyzing the link between demographic and political contextual variables and support for the sovereignty of Quebec suggests that demographic factors, such as the proportion of farmers and government workers, influence francophone voting behaviour more often than political factors such as incumbency. Unlike in many other countries with ethnically based movements, francophone support for sovereignty actually rises as the francophone portion of the population rises. This finding indicates that the contact hypothesis probably applies to the Quebec sovereignty movement.

Contrary to Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran's article (1996), (1) racial redistricting remains vital to the election of African Americans to the U.S. House, and (2) the tradeoff between black descriptive and substantive representation is actually greater in the South than in the North. Substantive and methodological errors explain why they arrived at their findings. Specifically, their analysis ignores the effect of the presence of Latinos on the election of African Americans. Ironically, due to the very policy assessed in the article, Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran's data set does not allow them to examine the link between the racial composition of a district and the ideology of its representative. In addition, they do not consider that racial redistricting not only changes the aggregation of seats into votes but also indirectly boosts the Republican share of votes and seats.

Analyzing senatorial elections between 1952 and 1990, I estimate the impact of challenger experience in various elected offices on vote for the incumbent. Controlling for other factors, U.S. representatives gain a higher proportion of the vote than other elected officials. Consistent with Jacobson's (1990b) theory that the increase in the importance of challenger quality over time in House elections explains the decline in the proportion of marginal House seats, the importance of challenger quality and the proportion of marginal seats remained stable over time in Senate elections. After developing a challenger quality scale based upon the estimated impact of having held different elected offices, I demonstrate that potential senatorial challengers strategically take into account both local and national political and economic conditions when making their candidacy decisions.