Scholars continue to debate the degree to which electoral institutions matter for representation. The literature predicts that minorities benefit from districts while women benefit from at-large elections. The mechanisms by which institutions affect the ability of traditionally underrepresented groups to win seats have been understudied. Using an analysis of over 7,000 cities and interviews with city councilors, we find that compared to at-large systems, district systems can increase diversity only when underrepresented groups are highly concentrated and compose a substantial portion of the population. In addition, we find that the electoral system has a significant effect on representation only for African American male and white female councilors; the proportion of African American women and Latina councilors is not affected by the use of either district or at-large systems.E xtensive research has been devoted to understanding the continuing underrepresentation of women and people of color in legislatures. At the city level scholars have found mixed results for the effect of singlemember district elections in increasing descriptive representation. Particularly in places where citywide elections were implemented to dilute the vote strength of racial groups, districts have been seen as a key factor in increasing racial and ethnic diversity. Alternatively for women, districts have been found to be detrimental to the election of female councilors. Scholars have proposed numerous, contradictory explanations for these findings. For minorities the focus has been on residential segregation and size of the group, while women are said to benefit from the multicandidate setting of at-large elections. For women of color these explanations are in direct conflict. This article contributes to this large literature by exploring the mechanisms by which institutions affect the representation of different groups, concurrently testing the segregation and group size hypotheses and taking into account the joint relationship between race and gender. for extremely helpful comments on drafts of the article, and Gretchen Kafoury for her very helpful advice on securing interviews with city council members. Benjamin Tagoe provided excellent research assistance. of the effect of different demographic contexts in varied institutional environments.As the Supreme Court anticipated in the landmark case Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), we demonstrate that compared to citywide elections, districts increase representation when a group is geographically concentrated and moderately sized. Further, we find districts only benefit black men. That is, the positive effect of districts is conditional on the context. Districts can increase opportunities for representation, but in some cases districts are not helpful. Only rarely do districts have a substantial impact. Taking advantage of variation among city institutional structures, council composition, and demographics, we use quantitative and qualitative methods to study these relationships. We analyze dat...

There is a widespread concern that imbalances in voter turnout across race and class have led to biased outcomes in American democracy. Yet empirical tests have generally found that the unrepresentative nature of the electorate has little effect on who wins and loses elections. We challenge this finding by arguing that existing research minimizes the chances of finding bias because it focuses largely on national elections where turnout is relatively high and where minority groups are generally too small a percentage of the population to sway elections. By focusing on city elections we find that lower turnout leads to substantial reductions in the representation of Latinos and Asian Americans on city councils and in the mayor's office. For African Americans district elections and off-cycle local elections are more important barriers to representation.At its core democracy rests on the vote. The vote is the primary tool for citizens to control their government. Through the vote citizens communicate information about their interests, preferences, and needs and make important decisions about who to elect to office. Nevertheless, most Americans do not vote when given the opportunity. At best roughly half of eligible voters vote in national contests. At worst, fewer than 10% of adults vote in local elections (Bridges 1997;Hajnal, Lewis, and Louch 2002). Even more importantly, those who do turn out to vote look very different from those who do not. Study after study of American elections has found that individuals with ample resources vote much more regularly than those with few resources-the poor, racial, and ethnic minorities and the less educated (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993;Verba and Nie 1972;Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995).The skewed nature of the vote raises real concerns about how well the interests of different groups are served in democracy. As Key noted decades ago, "The blunt truth is that politicians and officials are under no compulsion to pay much heed to classes and groups of citizens that do not vote" (1949, 99).

The core question driving the study of local politics is-who or what governs local democracy? After decades of study, researchers continue to debate the relative merits of economic, political, institutional, and bureaucratic accounts of local democracy. By providing a test that incorporates each of these four different theoretical perspectives, that analyzes major spending decisions that cities make, and that includes a large, representative sample of localities, we offer a systematic examination of local government decision making. We find that each of the existing one-sided stories is incomplete. Economic constraints are critical in determining what a government can do but the overall balance between redistributional, allocational, and developmental spending is also strongly influenced by political imperatives, institutional constraints, and actual needs.

What is urban politics really about? Despite decades of research, there is still considerable disagreement about the relative roles of race, class, ideology, partisanship, and other factors in shaping the urban vote. In this article, we assemble a wide range of data on a diverse set of urban elections and offer a more explicit empirical test of what shapes urban politics. Our results suggest that local elections are partly an ideological battle, partly a partisan contest, and at least marginally linked to class, religion, and morality. Race, however, is the dominant factor in the local electoral arena. Local elections are in no small part a competition between blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asian-Americans over the leadership of their cities. We also assess how and why these divides vary across cities and electoral contexts finding that a theory of realistic group conflict best predicts patterns in the vote.

Incumbents are highly likely to win reelection at all levels of government, but scholars continue to debate the extent to which serving in office has a causal effect on winning. For city council elections it is unclear whether or not we should predict a causal effect at all. City councilors may not regularly seek reelection, and any apparent advantage could be entirely attributable to preexisting qualities rather than incumbency. This article uses a regression discontinuity design to provide evidence that city council incumbents are more likely to run and win their next elections because they served a term in office.