Research

A longstanding claim is that at-large elections dilute minority votes and therefore bias policy away from segregated minority populations. Do reforms to district-based systems deliver both descriptive and substantive representation? I answer this question by focusing on jurisdictions with a clear, narrowly defined policy domain: school boards. I study both districts quasi-randomly forced to reform in the wake of the California Voting Rights Act and districts that reformed voluntarily. To account for the restrictive data setting and potential selection bias, I rely on finite-sample randomization inference and frontier panel methods. I verify that legally coerced reforming boards able to draw majority-Hispanic areas see increases in Hispanic officeholding. However, I find no evidence of downstream policy changes. Moreover, in voluntarily reforming districts I find no evidence of changes to either descriptive or substantive representation. My results highlight the difficulty of turning reform into changes in legislator identities and incentives.