Todd, Jason Douglas, Curtis Bram, and Arvind Krishnamurthy. Forthcoming. “Do At-large Systems Reduce Black Representation? A New Baseline for County Legislatures.” Electoral Studies.
Blurb
Local governments affect the lives of their citizens on a daily basis, and it matters who serves. Much work has shown that, at all levels, Black Americans tend to be underrepresented in government. By compiling data on the composition of North Carolina’s 100 county commissions, we take up the question of how electoral institutions – at-large versus ward-based elections – affect Black descriptive representation in county legislatures. We propose an alternative measure of descriptive representation, termed “seats above expectation,” and apply a counterfactual simulation approach to gauge the effects of at-large and ward-based elections. We find that Black citizens are underrepresented statewide: there are four fewer Black County commissioners than we would expect conditional upon county board sizes, demographics, and institutional arrangements. Furthermore, we find that a policy shift towards universal implementation of ward-based elections could increase the statewide total of Black County commissioners by as much as 20, a 17% increase over the baseline.
