Suchergebnisse

ObjectiveIn this article, I test for evidence of own‐race bias in voting for the Heisman Trophy.MethodsTo study own‐race bias in Heisman Trophy voting, I use individual vote data from Heisman voters from 2002 to 2012 and an ordered probit model with controls for player and team performance that flexibly allows votes be affected by a player's race and racial match between player and voter.ResultsEstimates show nonblack voters are more likely to vote for nonblack players in absolute terms and compared with black voters assuming homogeneous voter preferences. Allowing preferences to vary by race, results show nonblack voters continue to be more likely to vote for nonblack players in absolute terms and are strongly suggestive of a larger relative bias in favor of nonblack players by nonblack voters as compared with black voters.ConclusionThere is a racial component to Heisman Trophy voting and bias is large enough to affect official aggregate results. Racial bias may have affected the award's winner in multiple Heisman races between 2002 and 2012.

I seek to determine whether race is a factor in how black representatives vote in the United States House of Representatives; if so, this suggests electing more black representatives may improve the economic and political position of blacks if policy positions taken by black representatives on bills that fail to pass would provide tangible positive impacts to members of the black community if passed. Confounding the impact of legislator race, districts represented by blacks on average are quite different than those represented by whites. While past research on this topic uses linear regression techniques with undesirable properties, I improve on past research using matching techniques with more desirable properties. Utilizing a combination of Mahalanobis and propensity score matching, within-caliper matching, and exact matching using data from the 100th–113th Congress, I show black representatives are more likely to vote in agreement with the majority of the Congressional Black Caucus on all votes and on Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Americans for Democratic Action, and Congressional Quarterly key votes, indicating a substantive racial impact on roll-call voting.

It is well known that the hiring rate of black head coaches in major college football is not representative of the number of student-athletes that are black. However, less obvious is the fact that black head coaches may be treated unfairly when decisionmakers decide whether to retain or fire their institution's current head coach. In this paper, I use a rich dataset of National Collegiate Athletic Associate football coaches from 1990 to 2012, containing measures of coaching performance and school expectations, as well as information on each coach's race and whether he was fired or retained in each season. Using this data, I estimate a discrete-time hazard model of the probability that a head coach is fired, allowing the hazard rate of black head coaches and white head coaches to differ, and find that black head coaches are 5.28 percentage points more likely to be fired than their white counterparts. Additionally, I find that black head coaches are more likely to be fired in the initial 3 years of tenure, and again in their seventh and eighth years, but that the difference in the probability of release between black and white head coaches in the fourth through sixth years of tenure is small and statistically insignificant.

Gender gaps have been documented in numerous areas of American politics, but one area that has not yet been fully explored is responsiveness, the link between citizen preferences and public policies. Equal responsiveness to the preferences of citizens is a central aspect of democratic representation. This article extends work on income gaps in responsiveness to gender gaps. Specifically, it considers whether women's preferences are less likely than men's preferences to be adopted as policy in the US. It uses data on preferences and policy adoptions from 1981 to 2002 created by Gilens. The main finding is a large gender gap in responsiveness. The gap is similar in size to the one between rich and poor, it is particularly large in policies related to the use of force, and it did not narrow over the two decades studied. These results show that inequalities beyond social class deserve significant attention in the study of democratic responsiveness and that aspects of bias against women in politics remain underexplored.

AbstractObjectivesHow much does group membership influence voting behavior? This article adds to existing work by considering a novel context where voting is public and voters are well‐informed.MethodsThe article analyzes public votes in a prominent award for the best football player in the world. It uses ordered probit regressions to assess the extent to which votes by players, coaches, and journalists are related to national, regional, cultural, racial, and religious affinities between voters and candidates controlling for measures of player performance and celebrity.ResultsThe estimates indicate that while player performance does matter, a number of group‐based characteristics continue to influence voting. Some of these effects appear to be rooted in incentives—a tendency to vote for co‐nationals and teammates—but others—such as a tendency to vote based on geographical, racial, and religious similarities—are rooted more in group affinities.ConclusionsThe analysis provides relatively strong support for the group‐based theory of democracy championed by Achen and Bartels as opposed to a theory of democracy founded on individual rational choice. The specific case considered suggests that more attention should be given to the composition of juries that choose the winners of prizes.

The ongoing debate about nomenclature has been part of the discourse in Black Studies since the late 1960s, yet there remains no consensus on an ideal name. The existing literature ties specific name choices to political, ideological, and paradigmatic approach; regional focus; and/or institutional and market pressure. In this study, we augment the literature with survey data on the opinions of Black Studies scholars. Our findings show "Africana Studies" is most often chosen as the ideal name, followed by "Black Studies," "African Diaspora Studies," "African American Studies" and "Pan-African Studies," "Africology," and "African Studies," and that trends for positive and negative connotations follow a somewhat similar pattern. Just as the literature ties specific name choices to political, ideological, and paradigmatic approach; regional focus; and/or institutional and market pressure, so too do our respondents. It is our hope these results add to the ongoing scholarly discussion around nomenclature in Black Studies.