Suchergebnisse

Racial and partisan consequences of eleven plans for redistricting the South Carolina Senate proposed after 1980 census data became available.

In the construction of majority-minority districts, it has typically been assumed that turnout of minority voters is low compared to that of Whites. But what happens in the minority-dominated districts that are created? With a considerably enhanced ability to elect a candidate of their own choosing, does turnout increase? We test whether the creation of majority-minority legislative districts in Florida increased turnout of Black and Hispanic voters in 1992. The results are mixed. Over-time comparisons suggest that turnout of both groups might have benefitted from the creation of majority-minority districts. Cross-sectional analyses, however, suggest both increases and decreases in turnout in the newly created minority districts. We cannot yet conclude that the creation of minority-dominated districts has a consistent effect on minority turnout.

In order to provide minorities with a realistic opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, an apparently obvious step is to create districts in which the minority equals half the population. A number of factors, however, make this a false equality. As a consequence, courts have used a "65 percent" rule, suggesting that equality of the voting population is achieved only when the overall population of a district is nearly two‐thirds minority. We distinguish between this "equalization percentage" and the percentage needed to create a "safe" seat. We show that for blacks "equalization percentages": 1) are almost never as high as 65 percent; 2) vary widely across time and space; 3) have declined somewhat in the 1980s; 4) vary sharply between primaries and general elections; 5) are affected most heavily by the proportion of minority populations that is of voting age (or noncitizen) rather than by differences in registration and turnout. Election results further caution us that even when numerical equality in the voting population is appropriately calculated, such a population proportion is not always sufficient to elect minority candidates because of incumbency effects and differentially polarized voting. We argue that both packing blacks into overwhelmingly black districts and ignoring less tangible factors that hinder black electoral success are extremes to be avoided.