The New Racial Calculus: Electoral Institutions and Black Representation in Local Legislatures

In this study we revisit the question of black representation on city councils and school boards using a novel substantive and methodological approach and longitudinal data for a sample of over 300 boards and councils. Conceptualizing black representation as a two-stage process, we fit Mullahy's hurdle Poisson models to explain whether and to what extent blacks achieve representation in local legislatures. We find that while the size of the black population and electoral arrangements matter more than ever, especially for overcoming the representational hurdle, the extent to which the black population is concentrated is also strongly associated with black council representation. Further, whereas black resources and opportunities to build "rainbow" coalitions with Latinos or liberal whites are marginally if at all related to black legislative representation, we find that legislative size is an underappreciated mechanism by which to increase representation, particularly in at-large systems, and is perhaps the best predictor of moving towards additional representation.     

Substantive Symbols: The Attitudinal Dimension of Black Political Incorporation in Local Government

Traditional studies of minority incorporation focus on the redistribution of public resources that purportedly follows black gains in representation. The present study departs from this approach by focusing on the attitudinal effects of black leadership. Two research questions guide this study: To what extent do blacks' assessments of neighborhood services and conditions stem from black representation in local executive and legislative offices? Are these attitudinal effects rooted in policy and service delivery outcomes? Employing survey data from 3,000 blacks embedded in 52 cities and 53 school districts, this study reveals that blacks report higher levels of satisfaction with their neighborhood conditions, police services, and public schools when represented by blacks in city hall and on school boards and that these evaluations are most positive when improvements in local services are conspicuous. Overall, these findings extend conventional conceptualizations of substantive benefits and challenge more pessimistic accounts regarding the effects of black representation in local politics.     

Investigating Investigators: Examining the Impact of Eyewitness Identification Evidence on Student-Investigators

This research examined the impact of eyewitness identification decisions on student-investigators. Undergraduates played the role of police investigators and interviewed student-witnesses who had been shown either a good or poor view of the perpetrator in a videotaped crime. Based on information obtained from the witness, student-investigators then chose a suspect from a database containing information about potential suspects and rated the probability that their suspect was the culprit. Investigators then administered a photo lineup to witnesses, and re-rated the probability that their suspect was guilty. Student-investigators were highly influenced by eyewitness identification decisions, typically overestimating the information gained from the identification decision (except under conditions that led witnesses to be very accurate), and were generally unable to differentiate between accurate and inaccurate witnesses.

Child Development and Migrant Transnationalism: The Health of Children Who Stay Behind in Ghana and Nigeria

This paper examines the relation between parental migration and children’s health in Ghana (N = 2760) and Nigeria (N = 2168) and considers four dimensions of parental migration: the type of separation, parental migration and the caregiver, stability of care arrangements, and the availability of remittances. By employing an ordered scale of children’s self-rated health, we found that children with international migrant parents who are divorced/separated are less likely than children in non-migrant families to have good health. The magnitude of the effects are higher in Nigeria, attesting for a greater vulnerability of Nigerian children in divorced migrant families. Among children with parents living abroad who are stably married, specific dimensions of children’s transnational life are associated with negative health, while others are not. This study highlights the sensitivity of results to the context of parent-child separation and to the transnational dimension being measured.