Minority Voting Equality
The 65 Percent Rule in Theory and Practice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6090671 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kimball Brace, B Grofman (0000-0002-2801-3351), Bernard N Grofman, Lisa R Handley, Lisa Handley, Richard G Niemi (American Political Science Association) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 43-62 |
| Publication date | 1988-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Law & Policy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0265-8240 • E-ISSN: 1467-9930 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9930.1988.tb00004.x |
| OpenAlex | W2026016730 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 18 |
| References cited | 4 |
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
Demographic economics · Econometrics · Economics · Majority rule · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Turnout · Voting · Computer Science · Demography · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies · Mathematics
St Century Urban Race Politics
Unintentional Gerrymandering
Minority Success in Non-Majority Minority Districts
Redistricting and Black Political Mobilization
Analyzing the turnout-competition link with aggregate cross-sectional data
Minority Representation under Cumulative and Limited Voting
Redistricting Principles and Racial Representation
A Comparative Analysis of Redistricting Institutions in the United States, 2001-02
Obama and the White Vote
Redistricting
The Context Matters
Party Splits, Not Progressives
Regulating Redistricting
Comparing the Wilder and Gantt Campaigns
Why the 1980s Measures of Racially Polarized Voting Are Inadequate for the 1990s
An integrated perspective on the three potential sources of partisan bias
Modeling the dropoff between minority population share and the size of the minority electorate in situations of differential voter eligibility across groups
Partisan bias and redistricting in France
| Unique citing works | 18 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 1990 - 2025 (36) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 18 |