By D. Stephen Voss and David Lublin
Formal citation: Voss, D. Stephen, and David Lublin. 2001. "Black Incumbents, White Districts: An Appraisal of the 1996 Congressional Elections." American Politics Research 29(March):141-82.
Abstract: Explores the controversial 1996 success of three African-American incumbents (Sanford Bishop and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia; Corrine Brown of Florida) who lost their majority-black Southern congressional districts to Supreme Court decisions. Using aggregate electoral data and Gary King’s solution to the ecological inference problem, the paper seeks to gauge (1) the extent of bias against black candidates, (2) the extent of backlash against black voters, and (3) the extent to which incumbency explains away the Georgia victories. The findings are compatible with neither a full defense of racial redistricting nor an attack on it. Rather, while Southern white voters appear to exhibit neither consistent bias against black candidates nor backlash against black voters, racial polarization is nonetheless evident, and dispersed in a geographically systematic manner. Barriers against black representation still appear strong - Bishop’s victory, in particular, seems the result of incumbency - but they may not be the same electoral barriers that civil-rights activists assume when they embrace majority-minority districts.
This article began as a tiny segment of the 1997 APSA paper by Lublin and Voss, expanded to be part of a larger 1998 APSA paper by Voss, then evolved into its stand-alone phase at the 1998 SPSA meeting. A different version, emphasizing the white backlash hypothesis, appeared as Chapter 9 of Voss' dissertation.
A replication data set will soon be available, as promised in the published articles.
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