Minority Voting Equality: The 65 Percent Rule in Theory and Practice

In order to provide minorities with a realistic opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, an apparently obvious step is to create districts in which the minority equals half the population. A number of factors, however, make this a false equality. As a consequence, courts have used a "65 percent" rule, suggesting that equality of the voting population is achieved only when the overall population of a district is nearly two-thirds minority. We distinguish between this "equalization percentage" and the percentage needed to create a "safe" seat. We show that for blacks "equalization percentages": 1) are almost never as high as 65 percent; 2) vary widely across time and space; 3) have declined somewhat in the 1980s; 4) vary sharply between primaries and general elections; 5) are affected most heavily by the proportion of minority populations that is of voting age (or noncitizen) rather than by differences in registration and turnout. Election results further caution us that even when numerical equality in the voting population is appropriately calculated, such a population proportion is not always sufficient to elect minority candidates because of incumbency effects and differentially polarized voting. We argue that both packing blacks into overwhelmingly black districts and ignoring less tangible factors that hinder black electoral success are extremes to be avoided.     

Priming Partisan Evaluations of Congress

Congress has been the scene of increasingly partisan and ideologically polarized conflict in recent years. I examine the extent to which the national political climate mutes or amplifies the effect of partisanship on evaluations of Congress. Using data from the National Election Studies and a content analysis of national media coverage, I find that public evaluations of Congress divide most sharply along party lines when elite‐level discourse is most partisan (as during an election season or a highly charged partisan debate in Congress). This finding is consistent with an opinion leadership or priming hypothesis of public opinion. In addition, the most knowledgeable citizens are most likely to be primed by the partisan political climate in Washington. In contrast, less attentive citizens tend to rely on nonpartisan cues when evaluating Congress. I discuss the implications of these findings for public opinion and improving the public standing of Congress in an increasingly partisan climate.     

Reforming Justice by Geography; Organizational Responses to the Problem of Juvenile Crime

Growing public sentiment over the problem of juvenile crime has resulted in an administrative focus on "toughening" and rationalizing the sanctions for serious offenders. Our analysis of ten states examines two measures of organizational power, discretion and jurisdiction, to specify the changing mandate of juvenile justice. A typology of reorganization strategies is developed which consists of three "policy change" categories—regulation, negotiation, and displacement. Our findings have implications for defining the recent reforms in juvenile justice, distinguishing patterns within seemingly random geographical variation, and anticipating further directions in the control of serious youthful offenders.