The geography of racial stereotyping: Evidence and implications for VRA preclearance after Shelby County

California Law Review

Volumn 102, Issue 5, 2014, Pages 1123-1180

  Elmendorf, Christopher S ^a,b   Spencer, Douglas M ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b Berkeley   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84910649548     PISSN: 00081221     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (189)

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13. 42 U.S.C. §§ 1971-1973aa-1a (2006)).
14. Understanding the Benefits and Costs of Section 5 Pre-Clearance: Hearing Before the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. (2006)
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34. Legal standards under Section 2 are murky, but the courts generally consider a broad range of factors concerning the history, effects, context, and rationale for the challenged measure.
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37. Peyton McCrary et al., The End of Preclearance As We Knew It: How the Supreme Court Transformed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 11 MICH. J. RACE & L. 275 (2006));
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45. We think this approach would be viable if judges were required to make a determination about the risk of future constitutional violations before imposing the remedy of coverage. The resulting pattern of coverage would, however, probably be pretty limited. We think most judges would be reluctant to issue preclearance remedies that go much beyond the conduct at issue in the case - unless the plaintiff made a strong showing that circumstances in the defendant jurisdiction present an exceptional risk of constitutional violations. Cf. E-mail from John Tanner, former chief of the voting rights section at the Department of Justice, to law-election@department-lists.uci.edu (July 10, 2013) (on file with author) (noting that judicial bail-in remedies under Section 3 of the VRA have generally been limited in this way);
46. infra Part V (explaining how our results on the geography of voter discrimination could be used to shape broader bail-in remedies for certain jurisdictions). And we suspect that the Roberts Court would not accept what it has called the "extraordinary" remedy of preclearance as an automatic remedy for Section 2 violations - at least not unless Congress first amends the standard for liability under Section 2 to better connect it to actual or threatened constitutional violations.
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61. Such that plaintiffs can produce an alternative map that better serves the redistricters' political objectives.
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105. There is no similar large-N survey with questions about old-fashioned racism.
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113. We applied survey weights to both datasets before pooling.
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117. The survey did not include evaluations of racial groups other than the respondent's own group and blacks. Therefore, this Article analyzes the difference between own-group and black evaluations in our formula, rather than the difference between the respondent's evaluation of blacks and her average evaluation of all non-black groups.
118. 42 U.S.C. 1973(b) (2006).
119. However, it is hard to even imagine a world in which such negative views of blacks do not shape white preferences with respect to public policies that particularly concern the black community.
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124. In our dataset, Republicans were more prejudiced than Democrats overall and anti-black prejudice increases linearly with conservativeness. On average, the average Republican stereotype was 3% more negative than the national average whereas the average Democratic stereotype was 3% more positive than the national average. In relative terms, where positive scores mean worse than the national average and negative scores mean better than the national average, the (normalized) score among Republicans is 0.14 and among Democrats is -0.17. Broken down by ideology, the relative, normalized prejudice scores are: (Table Presented).
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127. In the primary, though, the measure of party identification no longer explains non-support for Obama, and women were less likely than men to support Obama in the primary.
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129. A "dummy variable" is a variable that can have only two values.
130. In 2008, there were no Latino or Asian American candidates among the major party nominees or among the front-runners for the major party nominations.
131. Shelby Cnty. v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013)
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146. An important question about disaggregation (which we plan to pursue in future work) is whether better estimates can be created by reweighting the disaggregated data so that it better matches the demographics of the geographic sub-population of interest (e.g., residents of a state). "Disaggregation plus reweighting" would represent something of an intermediate approach between pure disaggregation and MRP.
147. Jeffrey R. Lax & Justin H. Phillips, How Should We Estimate Sub-National Opinion Using MRP? Preliminary Findings and Recommendations (Apr. 10, 2013) (unpublished manuscript), available at http://www.columbia.edu/~jrl2124/mrp2.pdf.
148. Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/misc/sec-4.php#bailout (last visited June 18, 2014).
149. Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1975, 40 Fed. Reg. 43,746, 49,422 (1975).
150. The data do not allow us to meaningfully differentiate citizens from other residents at the state level. Only eighteen respondents to the CCAP report being non-citizens (question SCAP764) and the NAES does not ask about citizenship at all. Nevertheless, we would be very surprised if the distribution of attitudes among citizens differed meaningfully from the distribution of attitudes among the total population in many states
151. Jurisdictions Previously Covered by Section 5, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec-5/covered.php (last visited June 17, 2014).
152. If states are the unit coverage, then substate jurisdictions would be subjected to preclearance if and only if the parent state is covered.
153. V.O. KEY, JR., SOUTHERN POLITICS IN STATE AND NATION (1949).
154. CRISTOPHER S. ELMENDORF &DOUGLAS M. SPENCER, TECHNICAL APPENDIX, THE GEOGRAPHY OF RACIAL STEREOTYPING: EVIDENCE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR VRA "PRECLEARANCE" AFTER SHELBY COUNTY (2014), available at http://www.dougspencer.org/research/geography-of-discrimination/s5%20Appendix.pdf.
155. MINN. POPULATION CTR. OF THE UNIV. OF MINN., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, https://usa.ipums.org/usa (last visited Aug. 12, 2014).
156. A fourth, though rather trivial, caveat is that we rely on a 5% sample that includes data from 2005 to 2009. Five percent samples are unavailable from 2004 to 2008 and relying on the available 3% sample would require us to drop all counties with less than twenty thousand people, or about one third of all counties.
157. For present purposes, a "nonparametric estimate" is one that does not depend on modeling assumptions about the demographic or geographic correlates of public opinion.
158. The correlation between the fifty-state rankings by anti-black stereotyping and polarized voting is 0.78; by black population size and stereotyping, the ranking correlation is 0.42; and by polarized voting and black population size, it is 0.52.
159. Our measure of polarized voting is derived from self-reported voting behavior in the 2008 NAES and CCAP. Because the number of black respondents was small (even zero) in some states, we used MRP to estimate Obama's vote share among blacks at the state level. We then subtracted Obama's white vote share in each state and reported the absolute value of the difference.
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163. Nw. Austin Mun. Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 U.S. 193, 203 (2009).
164. Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One v. Holder, 557 U.S. 193, 202 (2009).
165. The correlation is 0.35 overall, and 0.52 if one limits the analysis to the top thirty states by anti-black prejudice. There is no positive relationship between prejudice and the Kerry-Obama delta for the less-prejudiced states (the bottom twenty), suggesting that patterns of party switching in presidential voting between the 2004 and 2008 election were not much affected by racial attitudes in these states. We see a similar pattern when analyzing individual-level data from the 2008 NAES online survey; there is a strong relationship between stereotyping and defection for voters who are more prejudiced than average, and essentially no relationship for voters who are less prejudiced than average.
166. Only Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia are in the top ten by their ranking.
167. Brief of Political Science and Law Professors as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents at 8-11, Shelby Cnty. v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013) (No. 12-96)
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169. Facts for Features: Hispanic Heritage Month 2012: Sept. 15 - Oct. 15, U.S. CENSUS BUREAU (Aug. 6, 2012), http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts-for-features-special-editions/cb12-ff19.html.
170. Ming Hsu Chen & Taeku Lee, Reimagining Democratic Inclusion: Asian Americans and the Voting Rights Act, 3 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. 359 (2013).
171. We note that the NAES does not ask about stereotypes of Latinos. To test whether the results in Figure 9 are driven by unique features of the CCAP sample, we replicated the state rankings by anti-black stereotyping in Figure 5 using only the CCAP sample and obtained the same results (available upon request). The congruence of state rankings holds whether we subset the data to all non-black respondents (for anti-black stereotypes), to all non-Latinos (for anti-Latino stereotypes), or to white respondents only.
172. Free Enter. Fund v. Pub. Co. Accounting Oversight Bd., 130 S. Ct. 3138 (2010)
173. Christopher S. Elmendorf, Representation Reinforcement Through Advisory Commissions: The Case of Election Law, 80 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1366 (2005).
174. Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-110, § 4, 79 Stat. 437
175. 42 U.S.C. § 1973b (2006)).
176. 42 U.S.C. § 1973b(a)(1)(F).
177. Voting Rights Act § 3, 42 U.S.C. § 1973a(c) (2006).
178. Justin Levitt, Section 5 as Simulacrum, 123 YALE L.J. ONLINE 151 (2013);
179. Of course, Congress might still allow jurisdictions with a coverage-worthy propensity for voter discrimination to escape coverage on additional grounds such as those now provided in Section 4.
180. Defendant-Intervenors' Motion for Leave to File Amended Answer and Counterclaim, State of Texas v. United States, No. 1:11-cv-1303 (RMC-TBG-BAH) (D.D.C. July 3, 2013), available at http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/241-motion-sec-3redux.pdf.
181. Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-110, § 3(c), 79 Stat. 437, 437-38 (1965).
182. Jeffers v. Clinton, 740 F. Supp. 585 (E.D. Ark. 1990).
183. Jeffers, 740 F. Supp. at 600
184. Shelby Cnty. v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013).
185. Presley v. Etowah Cnty. Comm'n, 502 U.S. 491, 500-01 (1992)).
186. Addington v. Texas, 441 U.S. 418, 423-24 (1979)
187. 42 U.S.C. § 1973a(c) (2006).
188. This follows from the binomial distribution, assuming that the state actions are independent, (i.e., that the realization of unconstitutional motives in one action does not affect the probability of unconstitutional motives in another action). The binomial distribution gives the probability of at least x "successes" occurring in n trials, where trial outcomes are binary ("success" or "failure"), the probability of success is fixed across trials, and the n trials are independent. In our example, the trials consist of 100 elections, "success" is an unconstitutional election outcome, and the probability of "success" in each trial is 0.10.
189. RICHARD A. POSNER, HOW JUDGES THINK (2008).