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Responsiveness to Coethnics and Cominorities: Evidence from an Audit Experiment of State Legislators

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2023

Viviana Rivera-Burgos Open the ORCID record for Viviana Rivera-Burgos [Opens in a new window]  and
Julia María Rubio
Viviana Rivera-Burgos*
Affiliation:
City University of New York–Baruch College, New York, NY, USA
Julia María Rubio
Affiliation:
Political Science Department, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
*
Corresponding author: Viviana Rivera-Burgos; Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

How do legislators respond to coethnic and cominority constituents? We conduct an audit study of all state legislators to explore white legislators’ responsiveness to different minority groups and minority group legislators’ responsiveness to each other. Black and Latino Americans currently make up about one-third of the overall U.S. population and an even larger share of some state populations. In light of this growing diversification of the American electorate, legislators may have incentives to appeal to a broad racial constituency. In our experiment, state legislators are randomly assigned to receive an email from a white, Black, or Latino constituent. Our findings suggest a lack of legislators’ discrimination, on average, against Black relative to white constituents. Instead, we find that all legislators, on average, respond more to both white and Black constituents relative to Latinos. The evidence suggests that Black legislators do not exhibit coethnic solidarity toward their Black constituents or cominority solidarity toward their Latino constituents; however, Latinos do exhibit coethnic and cominority solidarity (though there are too few Latino legislators to definitively establish this claim). We also estimate effects among white legislators by party and racial composition of districts in order to provide suggestive evidence for white legislators’ intrinsic vs. strategic motivations.

Keywords

descriptive representationraceresponsivenesscominoritycoethnicaudit experimentLatino politics
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 55 - 79
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

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