Suchergebnisse

Despite the growing body of scholarship urging congressional scholars to consider the racialization of Congress, little attention has been given to understanding how racial resentment impacts legislative behavior. To fill this gap, we ask if and how racial resentment within a member's home district influences the positions she takes on racially tinged issues in her press releases. Due to constituent influence, we expect legislators from districts with high levels of racial resentment to issue racially tinged press releases. Through an automated content analysis of more than fifty four thousand press releases from almost four hundred U.S. House members in the 114th Congress (2015–2017), we show that Republicans from districts with high levels of racial resentment are more likely to issue press releases that attack President Barack Obama. In contrast, we find no evidence of racial resentment being positively associated with another prominent Democratic white elected official, Hillary Clinton. Our results suggest that one reason Congress may remain racially conservative even as representatives' cycle out of office may be attributed to the electoral process.

In this study, we assess whether Blacks and/or Latinos are more likely to identify with political parties that nominate a U.S. House candidate who shares their race/ethnicity using the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Our results indicate that Blacks are more likely to identify with both the Democratic and Republican Party when they nominate successful Black candidates for the House of Representatives. To assess the temporal order of the relationship, we examine the differences in Black Democratic partisanship before and after Obama's election to the White House and changes in Republican partisanship among Blacks in districts before and after the nomination of a successful Black Republican candidate. In combination, we find that both political parties can make gains in the Black community through the nomination of co-racial candidates. While descriptive candidates consistently influence Black partisanship, we find that Latino partisanship is not significantly affected by the presence of co-ethnic candidates.