The American State and Social Engineering: Policy Instruments in Affirmative Action

The American state is conventionally depicted as inactive and organizationally weak compared with the state in comparable industrial democracies, and it is sometimes depicted as weak compared with the private sector’s capacities to effect change. This interpretation stems from applying an inappropriate Weberian model of stateness. This article examines the way in which measures to implement affirmative have been employed through the policy instruments of quotas to reengineer the divisions between key groups in American society. Placed in historical context, affirmative action illustrates a powerful activism associated with the American state conceived as an institution engaged in setting and monitoring national standards.     

Political Competition and Voter Mobility

The existing model of political competition is extended to allow voters to live in different regions and to migrate between regions in response to an inter-regional transfer policy. We then show that regions have a different ``weight'' in the expected vote function of political parties. This gives parties an incentive to bias the transfer policy in favour of relatively high weight regions, with potentially adverse efficiency and equity effects. However, we then show that parties always propose efficient and equitable regional transfers, regardless of whether regions have different weights, if there is some mobility of citizens across regions. Mobility constrains parties to act efficiently and equitably even though they face an incentive to act otherwise. However, when voters are immobile political competition leads to inequitable though efficient outcomes.     

Affirmative Action and Its Alternatives in Public Universities: What Do We Know?

University administrators have made difficult choices in response to the changing policy context for the use of affirmative action in admissions. This paper synthesizes the empirical literature on affirmative action and evaluates the efficacy of alternative strategies, including top-percent programs, class-based affirmative action, and targeted recruiting. The analyses offer several findings of interest to officials who direct such programs: (1) Affirmative action preferences given by top-tier universities have been large; (2) affirmative action leads minorities to enroll in higher-quality institutions; and (3) affirmative action has mostly positive effects on minority students later in life. The evidence shows a decline in minorities' relative share of enrollment at flagship public universities after affirmative action was eliminated in several states, and the alternative strategies used by these universities have not offset these declines.     

Managerial Perspectives on Implicit Bias,Affirmative Action,and Merit

Public sector organizations concerned about gender inequality have increasingly sought to address the effect of implicit biases on merit‐based employment practices through bias training and affirmative action programs. Applying qualitative content analysis to interviews with 104 managers in three government agencies in which bias training and affirmative action were being implemented, the authors find that many managers acknowledge the existence of implicit biases and their potential to create unequal employment outcomes. However, this recognition of bias does not translate into support for affirmative action, which is seen by many managers to be an unacceptable violation of merit. The authors argue that implicit bias training and affirmative action are unlikely to create a cultural “tipping point” to progress gender equality without a critical reassessment of merit.     

Supreme Court Legitimacy and Group-Centric Forces: Black Support for Capital Punishment and Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court has addressed capital punishment and affirmative action many times and, as a result, has had sweeping policymaking effects. For that reason, we argue that black opinion on capital punishment and affirmative action will be shaped by diffuse support for the Court. We also recognize the important role of group-centric forces in shaping black opinion. We find that diffuse support for the Court leads blacks with lower levels of race consciousness to be more supportive of capital punishment and less supportive of affirmative action, positions in line with the Court's decisions on these issues but contrary to black interests. The Court, however, is not able to throw its cloak of legitimacy around its policy position for blacks with the highest levels of group consciousness.     

Beyond Gratz and Grutter: Prospects for Affirmative Action in the Aftermath of the Supreme Court's Michigan Decisions

This article explores the meaning of the Supreme Court's Michigan decisions and their implications for higher education in the judicial, political, and social–cultural context. It concludes that the complex and dynamic interplay of judicial policymaking, politics and public opinion, and demographic changes could have important consequences, including unanticipated ones, in the years ahead.     

Affirmative action: What do we know?

An Erratum for this article has been published in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management,26(1), 215.     

Subsidized housing and neighborhood racial transition: An empirical investigation

Abstract

Popular wisdom has it that the development of project‐based assisted housing will cause whites to flee or avoid the surrounding neighborhood, leading to rapid racial transition. This article examines the question of whether the development of several types of project‐based, federally assisted housing had an impact on neighborhood racial transition during the 1980s. In general, the development of assisted housing in a neighborhood did not lead to racial transition, nor did it approach levels suggesting “white flight” in the few instances where racial transition did occur.

The results of our analysis suggest that one of the major criticisms of project‐based assisted housing—that it contributes to racial segregation by causing white flight—is not supported by empirical evidence.     

The Impact of Affirmative Action on the Employment of Minorities and Women: A Longitudinal Analysis Using Three Decades of EEO‐1 Filings

What role has affirmative action played in the growth of minority and female employment in U.S. firms? This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of this question by exploiting rich variation across firms in the timing of federal contracting to identify affirmative action effects over the course of three decades spanning 1973 to 2003. It constitutes the first study to comprehensively document the long‐term and dynamic effects of affirmative action in federal contracting on employment composition within firms in the United States. I use a new panel of over 100,000 large private‐sector firms from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including both firms that obtain federal contracts and are therefore mandated to implement affirmative action and firms that are noncontractors, across all industries and regions. The paper's key results indicate that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in federal contracting over 1973 to 2003 were black and Native American women and men. Dynamic event study analysis of workforce composition around the time of contracting reveals that a large part of the effect of affirmative action on increasing protected group shares occurred within the first four years of gaining a contract, and that these increased shares persisted even after a firm was no longer a federal contractor. The paper also uncovers important results on how the impact of affirmative action evolved over 1973 to 2003, in particular that the fastest growth in the employment shares of minorities and women at federal contractors relative to noncontracting firms occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s, decelerating substantially in ensuing years.