Minority Mayors and the Hollow-Prize Problem

Extract

The number of African American and Hispanic mayors of American cities has grown steadily since 1967, the year that Cleveland elected Carl Stokes the first minority mayor of a major American city.Throughout this paper, we use the term “minority” to refer to African Americans and Hispanics. In doing so, we do not assume that African American and Hispanic voters have the same preferences, nor do we intend to minimize the significant diversity within each of these groups. Rather, we group Hispanics and African Americans together because of the relative disadvantage members of both communities have experienced in comparison to whites in the United States. Over the past three decades, cities in all parts of the country have elected black and Hispanic mayors, including the five largest: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia. As the new century begins, almost one-third (25/76) of major American cities have minority mayors. The election of minority mayors is a clear sign of political progress by minorities since passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s.