Multi-level Political Careers in the USA: The Cases of African Americans and Women

Abstract

This article explores what forces shape the careers of women and African American legislators, focusing on two key stages in the process: the election to state legislatures and the election to the US House of Representatives. We further consider the impact of that process on the maintenance of the political class in the US. Our findings suggest that African American members get elected when there are enough African American voters to elect them. State houses provide a nice starting point because the districts tend to be small allowing for a number of majority minority districts. But, at each successive step, i.e., the state senate and the US House, other factors enter the process. As districts get larger and the stakes get higher, it seems that success also becomes dependent on the number of African American politicians primed to move up by having experience serving in the preceding body. The pattern for women is less predictable with cultural variables and opportunity structure playing a role. The supply of candidates is the one variable common to women and African Americans. We conclude that the process is in many ways similar to that for white males and facilitates the stability of the political class.

Keywords:

• Political careers
• African American representatives
• women representatives
• state legislative professionalism

Notes

From the biographical directory of current and former members of the Congressional Black Caucus: http://www.house.gov/ebjohnson/cbcformermembers.htm.

http://musgrave.house.gov/Welcome.

http://www.house.gov/graves/bio.htm.

By availability we refer to the existence of a political office and by accessibility we refer to the ease with which such an office can be obtained. Theoretically, the distinction is quite important but, in the USA, there is no evidence that the two are empirically distinct when it comes to the Congress. Specifically, there is no evidence that the incumbency advantage or that voluntary turnover is higher for some states as opposed to other states so the two concepts are nearly perfect correlates of each other. In our model, we utilize the number of seats in a state's congressional delegation as a variable. The number of seats is a direct measure of availability but it is also a good substitute for accessibility (which would otherwise be empirically difficult, if not impossible, to measure). In those models, then, the variable is a pure indicator of availability, but it seems to us that the theoretically more interesting concept is accessibility. We consider the number of seats to be a reliable indicator of that concept.

The desire for predictability led many interest groups and their lobbyists to oppose legislative term limits for US legislatures because they feared the loss of predictability if turnover becomes too high and there are too many new members with whom to develop a relationship and to socialize (see Copeland and Rausch, 1991).

Squire's measure of professionalization is widely accepted in the literature, although other measures have been employed. These include those of Grumm (1971), Morehouse (1983) and Bowman and Kearney (1988). See Mooney (1995) for an analysis of the effects of using these different measures.

Berry et al. (2000) argue that professionalization promotes legislative institutionalization by establishing boundaries that shield members from external shocks.

We use turnover to capture accessibility rather than Squire's (1988) three categories of legislative bodies—career, springboard and dead-end legislatures—because those classifications are available only for a subset of states and using turnover allows us to keep all 50 states in our analysis.

Various operationalizations of education (e.g. percent with a high school diploma) produce different conclusions, indicating that its influence is very unstable. We suspect this finding is an anomaly.

Even though the bivariate correlation between ideology and being a southern state is only 0.36, we ran separate analyses using each variable without the other. No substantial differences were found. This conclusion is not really surprising. Since concentrations of African American voters elect African Americans to office and since their status is protected by legislation and court decisions, it hardly matters who lives outside those majority–minority districts.

See Evans (2005) for a discussion of other career paths, notably women whose family of origin had a strong political or business reputation in the community.

Of the four, only one currently serves, Senator Roland Burris (D-IL) who was appointed to replace President Barack Obama. Burris announced in July 2009 that he would not seek election in 2010. Three of the four African American senators have represented Illinois; the fourth was from Massachusetts.