Bernard L Fraga
Biographic Data
| ID | 799298 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bernard L Fraga |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bernard L |
| FAMILY NAME | Fraga |
| SIGNATURE | FRAGA B L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9907-4883 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 305 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Partisan Change with Generational Turnover: Latino Party Identification from 1989 to 2023
Narratives and studies of Latino partisanship often emphasize Democratic identification, but some have recently suggested a shift towards Republicans. We address these by examining Latino party identification over a 34-year period, leveraging 35 national surveys with a total of over 103,000 Latino respondents along with Census data to create post-stratified survey weights to correct for biases. We emphasize changing partisanship over time by nati…
Can Elite Allegations of Election Fraud Demobilize Supporters
Reversion to the Mean, or Their Version of the Dream? Latino Voting in an Age of Populism
In 2020, support for Joe Biden among Latina/o/x voters was 8 percentage points lower than support for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the largest drop of any racial/ethnic group. While much media and academic attention has focused on understanding the impact of misinformation, COVID-19 concerns, and racial animus on Latino voters in 2020, we take a step back and clarify the demographic and core ideological characteristics of Latino voters who voted for …
Evaluating the Minority Candidate Penalty with a Regression Discontinuity Approach
Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments.…
American Democracy and Voter Suppression
We review the history, magnitude, and scope of voter suppression in the United States., showing that, when it is attempted, it targets the voting rights of a disfavored group. We argue that this is an important weakness of American democracy and that current efforts at voter suppression focus on states with major demographic shifts that are seen by some to be threatening. We then discuss the consequences of recent decisions by the Supreme Court t…
The Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement Overstates Minority Turnout
The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a key source of information on who votes. Turnout estimates derived from the CPS are often cited in academic research on participation, widely used in the calibration of surveys, and central to ongoing legal and policy debates over the protection of voting rights in the United States. We compare CPS estimates to official voter turnout records from 2008–18 and document consistent, significant discrepancies th…
Who Do Voter ID Laws Keep from Voting
Voter identification (ID) laws have sparked concerns of vote suppression, but existing evidence relies on aggregate analyses or survey self-reports. We leverage unique information from Texas, where registrants without ID filed "reasonable impediment declarations" (RIDs) before voting. Linking 16,000 RID forms to the Texas voter file, we provide the first direct documentation of the traits of voters who would be stopped from voting under strict id…
Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting
Here Comes Everybody: Using a Data Cooperative to Understand the New Dynamics of Representation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Contextualizing the gender gap in voter turnout
Overall women turn out to vote at a higher rate than men, yet few studies have examined the consistency of this finding across American electoral contexts. We use voter file data to compare turnout for men and women at the national-, state-, and district-level from 2008 to 2018, focusing on variation in the gender turnout gap by electoral competition, candidate gender, and race and ethnicity. While we find no relationship between women candidates…
Are Minority and Women Candidates Penalized by Party Politics? Race, Gender, and Access to Party Support
Racial/ethnic minorities and women continue to be underrepresented in public office in the United States. Here, we evaluate the role of general election political party support for women and minorities in structuring these inequalities, as a key part of general election success is support from party networks. With detailed data on party support and the demographics of congressional candidates, we use two difference-in-differences strategies to le…
One Run Leads to Another: Minority Incumbents and the Emergence of Lower Ticket Minority Candidates
The primary determinant of minority office holding is the racial/ethnic composition of the legislative district. Using comprehensive data on the race/ethnicity of state legislative candidates in 2012 and 2014, we find that minority candidates still emerge at lower rates than whites after accounting for district composition. Leveraging information about the overlap between congressional and state legislative districts, we demonstrate that the vict…
Did Women and Candidates of Color Lead or Ride the Democratic Wave in 2018
Headlines touted a “wave” of women and minority candidates running in the 2018 elections, leading some to conclude that 2018 was the new “year of the woman” and perhaps “year of the candidate of color” (Lai et al. 2018). In fact, the number of women and candidates of color contesting US House elections was so high in 2018 that for the first time on record, White men were the minority of Democratic House nominees (Schneider 2018). Surveys taken im…
Measuring youth and college student voter turnout
The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America
In The Turnout Gap, Bernard L. Fraga offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the causes and consequences of racial and ethnic disparities in voter turnout. Examining voting for Whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans from the 1800s to the present, Fraga documents persistent gaps in turnout and shows that elections are increasingly unrepresentative of the wishes of all Americans. These gaps persist not because of socioeco…
Are Americans Stuck in Uncompetitive Enclaves? An Appraisal of U.S. Electoral Competition
Most elections in the United States are not close, which has raised concerns among social scientists and reform advocates about the vibrancy of American democracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that while individual elections are often uncompetitive, hierarchical, temporal, and geographic variation in the locus of competition results in most of the country regularly experiencing close elections. In the four-cycle period between 2006 and 2012, 89%…
Examining the Causal Impact of the Voting Rights Act Language Minority Provisions
The following study investigates the causal impact of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) language minority provisions, which mandate multilingual election assistance if certain population thresholds are met. While lower rates of Latino and Asian American political participation are often attributed to language barriers, scholars have yet to establish a direct impact of the provisions on electoral behavior. Building off of previous state- and county-leve…
Redistricting and the Causal Impact of Race on Voter Turnout
Recent work challenges traditional understandings of the link between race and voter turnout, suggesting that there is limited evidence of increased minority voting due to co-ethnic representation and majority-minority districts. Here I examine 65.3 million registration records from 10 states to trace individual-level participation before and after the 2012 round of redistricting, testing whether a shift in congressional representation, candidacy…
Candidates or Districts? Reevaluating the Role of Race in Voter Turnout
Leading theories of race and participation posit that minority voters are mobilized by co‐ethnic candidates. However, past studies are unable to disentangle candidate effects from factors associated with the places from which candidates emerge. I reevaluate the links between candidate race, district composition, and turnout by leveraging a nationwide database of over 185 million individual registration records, including estimates for the race of…
Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections
In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns. Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply assume the results are relevant to competitive contexts. This article questions that assumption by utilizing Election Day inclement weather as an exogenous…
Candidates or Districts? Reevaluating the Role of Race in Voter Turnout
Leading theories of race and participation posit that minority voters are mobilized by co‐ethnic candidates. However, past studies are unable to disentangle candidate effects from factors associated with the places from which candidates emerge. I reevaluate the links between candidate race, district composition, and turnout by leveraging a nationwide database of over 185 million individual registration records, including estimates for the race of…
Redistricting and the Causal Impact of Race on Voter Turnout
Recent work challenges traditional understandings of the link between race and voter turnout, suggesting that there is limited evidence of increased minority voting due to co-ethnic representation and majority-minority districts. Here I examine 65.3 million registration records from 10 states to trace individual-level participation before and after the 2012 round of redistricting, testing whether a shift in congressional representation, candidacy…
Are Minority and Women Candidates Penalized by Party Politics? Race, Gender, and Access to Party Support
Racial/ethnic minorities and women continue to be underrepresented in public office in the United States. Here, we evaluate the role of general election political party support for women and minorities in structuring these inequalities, as a key part of general election success is support from party networks. With detailed data on party support and the demographics of congressional candidates, we use two difference-in-differences strategies to le…
Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections
In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns. Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply assume the results are relevant to competitive contexts. This article questions that assumption by utilizing Election Day inclement weather as an exogenous…
Who Do Voter ID Laws Keep from Voting
Voter identification (ID) laws have sparked concerns of vote suppression, but existing evidence relies on aggregate analyses or survey self-reports. We leverage unique information from Texas, where registrants without ID filed "reasonable impediment declarations" (RIDs) before voting. Linking 16,000 RID forms to the Texas voter file, we provide the first direct documentation of the traits of voters who would be stopped from voting under strict id…
One Run Leads to Another: Minority Incumbents and the Emergence of Lower Ticket Minority Candidates
The primary determinant of minority office holding is the racial/ethnic composition of the legislative district. Using comprehensive data on the race/ethnicity of state legislative candidates in 2012 and 2014, we find that minority candidates still emerge at lower rates than whites after accounting for district composition. Leveraging information about the overlap between congressional and state legislative districts, we demonstrate that the vict…
Reversion to the Mean, or Their Version of the Dream? Latino Voting in an Age of Populism
In 2020, support for Joe Biden among Latina/o/x voters was 8 percentage points lower than support for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the largest drop of any racial/ethnic group. While much media and academic attention has focused on understanding the impact of misinformation, COVID-19 concerns, and racial animus on Latino voters in 2020, we take a step back and clarify the demographic and core ideological characteristics of Latino voters who voted for …
Measuring youth and college student voter turnout
The Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement Overstates Minority Turnout
The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a key source of information on who votes. Turnout estimates derived from the CPS are often cited in academic research on participation, widely used in the calibration of surveys, and central to ongoing legal and policy debates over the protection of voting rights in the United States. We compare CPS estimates to official voter turnout records from 2008–18 and document consistent, significant discrepancies th…
Contextualizing the gender gap in voter turnout
Overall women turn out to vote at a higher rate than men, yet few studies have examined the consistency of this finding across American electoral contexts. We use voter file data to compare turnout for men and women at the national-, state-, and district-level from 2008 to 2018, focusing on variation in the gender turnout gap by electoral competition, candidate gender, and race and ethnicity. While we find no relationship between women candidates…
Are Americans Stuck in Uncompetitive Enclaves? An Appraisal of U.S. Electoral Competition
Most elections in the United States are not close, which has raised concerns among social scientists and reform advocates about the vibrancy of American democracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that while individual elections are often uncompetitive, hierarchical, temporal, and geographic variation in the locus of competition results in most of the country regularly experiencing close elections. In the four-cycle period between 2006 and 2012, 89%…
Did Women and Candidates of Color Lead or Ride the Democratic Wave in 2018
Headlines touted a “wave” of women and minority candidates running in the 2018 elections, leading some to conclude that 2018 was the new “year of the woman” and perhaps “year of the candidate of color” (Lai et al. 2018). In fact, the number of women and candidates of color contesting US House elections was so high in 2018 that for the first time on record, White men were the minority of Democratic House nominees (Schneider 2018). Surveys taken im…
Can Elite Allegations of Election Fraud Demobilize Supporters
Evaluating the Minority Candidate Penalty with a Regression Discontinuity Approach
Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments.…
American Democracy and Voter Suppression
We review the history, magnitude, and scope of voter suppression in the United States., showing that, when it is attempted, it targets the voting rights of a disfavored group. We argue that this is an important weakness of American democracy and that current efforts at voter suppression focus on states with major demographic shifts that are seen by some to be threatening. We then discuss the consequences of recent decisions by the Supreme Court t…
Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting
Here Comes Everybody: Using a Data Cooperative to Understand the New Dynamics of Representation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections
In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns. Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply assume the results are relevant to competitive contexts. This article questions that assumption by utilizing Election Day inclement weather as an exogenous…
Examining the Causal Impact of the Voting Rights Act Language Minority Provisions
The following study investigates the causal impact of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) language minority provisions, which mandate multilingual election assistance if certain population thresholds are met. While lower rates of Latino and Asian American political participation are often attributed to language barriers, scholars have yet to establish a direct impact of the provisions on electoral behavior. Building off of previous state- and county-leve…
Redistricting and the Causal Impact of Race on Voter Turnout
Recent work challenges traditional understandings of the link between race and voter turnout, suggesting that there is limited evidence of increased minority voting due to co-ethnic representation and majority-minority districts. Here I examine 65.3 million registration records from 10 states to trace individual-level participation before and after the 2012 round of redistricting, testing whether a shift in congressional representation, candidacy…
Candidates or Districts? Reevaluating the Role of Race in Voter Turnout
Leading theories of race and participation posit that minority voters are mobilized by co‐ethnic candidates. However, past studies are unable to disentangle candidate effects from factors associated with the places from which candidates emerge. I reevaluate the links between candidate race, district composition, and turnout by leveraging a nationwide database of over 185 million individual registration records, including estimates for the race of…
The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America
In The Turnout Gap, Bernard L. Fraga offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the causes and consequences of racial and ethnic disparities in voter turnout. Examining voting for Whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans from the 1800s to the present, Fraga documents persistent gaps in turnout and shows that elections are increasingly unrepresentative of the wishes of all Americans. These gaps persist not because of socioeco…
Are Americans Stuck in Uncompetitive Enclaves? An Appraisal of U.S. Electoral Competition
Most elections in the United States are not close, which has raised concerns among social scientists and reform advocates about the vibrancy of American democracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that while individual elections are often uncompetitive, hierarchical, temporal, and geographic variation in the locus of competition results in most of the country regularly experiencing close elections. In the four-cycle period between 2006 and 2012, 89%…
One Run Leads to Another: Minority Incumbents and the Emergence of Lower Ticket Minority Candidates
The primary determinant of minority office holding is the racial/ethnic composition of the legislative district. Using comprehensive data on the race/ethnicity of state legislative candidates in 2012 and 2014, we find that minority candidates still emerge at lower rates than whites after accounting for district composition. Leveraging information about the overlap between congressional and state legislative districts, we demonstrate that the vict…
Did Women and Candidates of Color Lead or Ride the Democratic Wave in 2018
Headlines touted a “wave” of women and minority candidates running in the 2018 elections, leading some to conclude that 2018 was the new “year of the woman” and perhaps “year of the candidate of color” (Lai et al. 2018). In fact, the number of women and candidates of color contesting US House elections was so high in 2018 that for the first time on record, White men were the minority of Democratic House nominees (Schneider 2018). Surveys taken im…
Measuring youth and college student voter turnout
Contextualizing the gender gap in voter turnout
Overall women turn out to vote at a higher rate than men, yet few studies have examined the consistency of this finding across American electoral contexts. We use voter file data to compare turnout for men and women at the national-, state-, and district-level from 2008 to 2018, focusing on variation in the gender turnout gap by electoral competition, candidate gender, and race and ethnicity. While we find no relationship between women candidates…
Are Minority and Women Candidates Penalized by Party Politics? Race, Gender, and Access to Party Support
Racial/ethnic minorities and women continue to be underrepresented in public office in the United States. Here, we evaluate the role of general election political party support for women and minorities in structuring these inequalities, as a key part of general election success is support from party networks. With detailed data on party support and the demographics of congressional candidates, we use two difference-in-differences strategies to le…
The Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement Overstates Minority Turnout
The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a key source of information on who votes. Turnout estimates derived from the CPS are often cited in academic research on participation, widely used in the calibration of surveys, and central to ongoing legal and policy debates over the protection of voting rights in the United States. We compare CPS estimates to official voter turnout records from 2008–18 and document consistent, significant discrepancies th…
Who Do Voter ID Laws Keep from Voting
Voter identification (ID) laws have sparked concerns of vote suppression, but existing evidence relies on aggregate analyses or survey self-reports. We leverage unique information from Texas, where registrants without ID filed "reasonable impediment declarations" (RIDs) before voting. Linking 16,000 RID forms to the Texas voter file, we provide the first direct documentation of the traits of voters who would be stopped from voting under strict id…
Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting
Here Comes Everybody: Using a Data Cooperative to Understand the New Dynamics of Representation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
American Democracy and Voter Suppression
We review the history, magnitude, and scope of voter suppression in the United States., showing that, when it is attempted, it targets the voting rights of a disfavored group. We argue that this is an important weakness of American democracy and that current efforts at voter suppression focus on states with major demographic shifts that are seen by some to be threatening. We then discuss the consequences of recent decisions by the Supreme Court t…
Evaluating the Minority Candidate Penalty with a Regression Discontinuity Approach
Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments.…
Partisan Change with Generational Turnover: Latino Party Identification from 1989 to 2023
Narratives and studies of Latino partisanship often emphasize Democratic identification, but some have recently suggested a shift towards Republicans. We address these by examining Latino party identification over a 34-year period, leveraging 35 national surveys with a total of over 103,000 Latino respondents along with Census data to create post-stratified survey weights to correct for biases. We emphasize changing partisanship over time by nati…
Can Elite Allegations of Election Fraud Demobilize Supporters
Reversion to the Mean, or Their Version of the Dream? Latino Voting in an Age of Populism
In 2020, support for Joe Biden among Latina/o/x voters was 8 percentage points lower than support for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the largest drop of any racial/ethnic group. While much media and academic attention has focused on understanding the impact of misinformation, COVID-19 concerns, and racial animus on Latino voters in 2020, we take a step back and clarify the demographic and core ideological characteristics of Latino voters who voted for …
Political science (20 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (19 works) · Politics (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Voting (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Demographic economics (10 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (9 works)