Vision Circle

The central theoretical work in this area is Hannah Pitkin's REPRESENTATION. Pitkin deals the various ways we might think about representation. Most focus on the distinction between symbolic and substantive representation, as blacks could be more effective at one than the other...or black citizens could want one more than they want the other.

Starting with Carol Swain's BLACK FACES BLACK INTERESTS, a number of scholars have tackled this question empirically. Rather than going through their works I'm going to talk a bit about measurement.

So what exactly do legislators do? They draft legislation, vote on legislation, sit on committees, alter amendments, visit with constituents, deal with constituent issues, vote in committees, give speeches on various issues, meet with President, negotiate with their parties...and some other stuff on top of that. And black mayors actually propose and implement budgets, hire officials, create rules regarding contracts, often negotiate contracts, etc.

There is a comparative question implicit in the black representation issue right? The real question is do black representatives represent black people better than non-black ones? Again, I'm not dealing with citizen preferences here, but not because they aren't important.

So the way to do this is simple. We've got rollcall records, voting records, committee meeting records, legislation records, we have some idea of how much time constituents spend at home, we've got records of their speeches, we know how much money they raise, and we know how they spend it. Most of these things would be coded and used as dependent variables. Then we'd need to know the race of the legislator, his party (it could be party rather than race doing the heavy lifting), the region (southern legislators are usually different), perhaps the type of district (urban vs. rural), and probably percentage black.

There are still areas that can be mined here. But what the literature says is pretty clear. Black legislators spend more time on issues that black citizens care about, their voting record is better, their behavior in committees is better, and i believe they spend more time on legislation than their non-black counterparts. Off the top of my head I cannot recall whether black representatives get more of their legislation actually PASSED. But this should be a start.