Vol. 4 No. 8 (August, 1994) pp. 116-119
QUIET REVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH: THE IMPACT OF THE VOTING RIGHTS
ACT 1965-1990 by Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman (eds.).
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Reviewed by Royce Hanson, Dean of Social Sciences, University of
Texas at Dallas
If any doubt remains that the Voting Rights Act has been an
effective instrument for expanding minority suffrage and office
holding in the eight southern states fully covered by Section 5,
this book should dispel it. Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman
have assembled an impressive set of state-by-state analyses,
pooled data interstate comparisons, and enough detailed
descriptions of specific changes to convince any but the most
misanthropic revanchist that but for the Voting Rights Act most
of the progress toward minority political equality in voting and
office holding would not have occurred.
The state-by-state stories demonstrate that the gains in minority
office holding cannot be attributed to the diminishing prejudice
of white voters against minority candidates, even in those few
states where minority candidates have had considerable success in
statewide and citywide elections. They also make a persuasive
case that the need for the Act is far from ended. The most
substantial gains made thus far have been in the urbanized south.
Much remains to be done in the rural south, with the possible and
notable exception of Mississippi. Moreover, progress has been
faster and more extensive in those jurisdictions where the Act
has been vigorously enforced, whether by the Department of
Justice or private litigants.
The book is the product of a carefully designed research
enterprise involving many authors and is a good model of how to
keep so many independent spirits focused on a common research
goal. It avoids the curse of most such volumes as the authors of
each of the state chapters address and seek to measure by common
techniques the changes that have occurred in minority
registration and office holding. Each state chapter contains a
set of similar tables containing useful data on registration and
office holding before and after enforcement of the Act. Several
of the state chapters have a complete listing of the court cases
that produced changes from at-large to single member district or
mixed electoral systems. The value of the volume would have been
enhanced if the editor's discipline had extracted that feature in
a consistent form from all of the authors. A tighter editing of
the state chapters might also have eliminated some redundancies
in explaining the methodology being employed. The chapter on
registration belabors the obvious point that black registration
was suppressed more extensively by local whites in those places
where there was some real threat of a black majority. Here is a
case where regressions are unnecessary, even if they are
possible. These, however, are quibbles about a valuable
contribution to the understanding the effects of one of the most
important laws ever enacted.
To a remarkable extent, the Voting Rights Act has done what it
set out to do. Its enforcement by the Justice Department and the
federal courts, especially after the 1982 amendments corrected
the crabbed reading of the original Act by the Supreme Court in
BOLDEN V. THE CITY OF MOBILE, has eliminated most of the Jim Crow
practices that
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restricted black political participation. In many respects, the
most remarkable achievement has been the effect of the law on the
reconstruction of the southern electoral system, using single
member districts as the weapon of choice in expanding minority
political power in state houses, and particularly in local
governments. That this "quiet revolution" in the
distribution of political power in the south has occurred without
popular tumult (but not without a lot of litigating) is testimony
to the predictive powers of the late Alfred L. Scanlan. In
arguing the original Maryland reapportionment case in 1960,
Scanlan responded to a concerned judge that he doubted that a
favorable ruling would produce rioting in the streets by unseated
incumbents.
It is in its uncritical treatment of single member districts that
OUIET REVOLUTION is both most thorough and most disturbing. The
editors disclaim an ambition to assess the comparative merits of
different electoral arrangements or the extent to which minority
elected officials have become an integral part of the political
process. They argue that such matters are "third and fourth
generation" issues. Even so, a reader might have hoped for
greater consideration of the limitations of single member
districts in meeting the narrow aims of the 1982 amendment to
prevent minority vote dilution and to allow members of minority
groups to have an equal chance to elect candidates of their
choosing.
Neither the Act nor THORNBURA V. GINGLES, in which the Supreme
Court laid out the standards for compliance with the Act,
requires single member districts as a remedy. But it has been
almost uniformly selected by the courts and litigants in all
eight states (plus others). Why has so little creative
imagination been brought to bear on an action with such profound
implications for the system of local and state government,
especially when there appear to be other, better ways of ensuring
that minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect
representatives of their choice? To what extent has the remedy
selected been controlled by the interests of self-selected
plaintiffs who may not quite "representative" of a
broader public interest in an inclusive and functional political
system?
In another dimension, we learn how pervasive the use of the
single member district remedy is, and how effective it has become
in leading to election of minority candidates. We learn nothing
from the state analyses, however, about how the districts were
drawn to produce that result beyond the fact that the super
majority of black population required to ensure the election of a
black candidate appears to vary from state to state. That in
itself is a useful point, and should caution those who seem bent
on applying a rule of thumb that a safe minority district must
contain at least 65 percent minority voters.
Single member districts have long been recognized as having the
ability, if drawn artfully, of enhancing the electoral power of
some groups and diluting the power of others. Both
"packing" and "cracking" cohesive blocks of
partisans, coreligionists, ethnics, and classes among a set of
districts can, in dedicated hands, produce a governing body that
creatively distorts the representation of interests in favor of
the artist. Single member districts simplify elections by
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reducing electoral choice. They tend to produce a more diverse
representative body than multiple member districts and at-large
systems, but they remain suspect in many circles that are
innocent of racial bias.
Traditionally, democratic reformers have insisted that single
member districts should be of equal population, compact in form,
and composed of contiguous territory. They have also favored
their creation by bipartisan commissions. These criteria, to be
sure, do not guarantee fully against gerrymandering by
self-interested partisans, incumbents, and others, but they
impose SOME constraints on the unabashed manipulation of the
electoral system. They are faithful to the underlying idea that a
geographic distribution of representation will reflect more
fairly than not the space-based "communities of
interest," of the polity, such as political subdivisions,
and clusters of similar economic activities, and neighborhood
interests. This does not suppose that physical propinquity is the
sole basis for political interest. Party, class, religion, race,
and other factors will intrude and often override or conflict
with the community interests within the district. Thus, it is
assumed that a fairly designed compact district will contain a
variety of interests, the relative salience of which will depend
upon times and circumstances.
Whether one interest dominates the others or the district is
heterogeneous is not of central concern, although single member
district advocates differ on the extent to which, within the
rules, district drawers should strive for homogeneous or
heterogeneous districts. Those who favor diverse districts argue
that they tend to produce politicians who are skilled at
compromise and coalition building. The friends of homogeneous
districts maintain that legitimacy is promoted by ensuring that
each self-conscious group has a champion in the government, and
that compromise and accommodation will be promoted by a policy
making process that no faction can consistently or permanently
control.
The crux of designing a representative system is the salient
variables upon which the districts should be based. When
legislatures do the job, incumbency is often the most salient
concern, with party control a close second. When a U.S. District
Court orders a remedy for a violation of the Voting Rights Act,
race matters most. It matters, in the logic of the litigation,
because the votes cast by members of a cohesive and protected
racial minority have been "diluted" by at large and
mixed electoral systems as a result of polarized voting by
whites, who refuse consistently to vote for a candidate who is a
black or Hispanic. Q.E.D., the remedy is to undilute the minority
vote by concentrating it, if a computer can do it, in its own
district. There, if racial cohesion remains, only a black can
win, and the odds of a minority candidate winning in the residual
white district is even less than before. Construction of such
districts, of course, may stretch the definition of contiguity to
include several miles of highway median connecting isolated
neighborhoods, or parts of blocks. Such districts seem to stretch
to absurdity the GINGLES standard that "First, the minority
group must be able to demonstrate that it is sufficiently large
and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a
single-member
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district" (478 U.S. 30, 50).
Although OUIET REVOLUTION was written before the decision in SHAW
V. RENO, it is hard to believe that the constitutional issues
raised there could not have been foreseen. In any event, harder
thinking would have been welcome about how well single member
districts ultimately achieve the objectives of the law in
providing minority voters an equal opportunity to elect
candidates of their choice, as opposed to merely ensuring the
election of minority candidates. Such districts do allow those
minority voters who end up packed into racially homogeneous
districts to vote for and elect candidates of their choice,
assuming that the race of the candidate is the most salient
factor determining their votes. For the minority voters who are
left in the resulting overwhelmingly white districts, however,
they have even less opportunity than before to elect candidates
of their choice so long as racially polarized voting prevails.
The implicit assumption of the single member district remedy is
that such blacks and other minorities are vicariously represented
by officials elected from the minority dominated districts,
although they do not even have the opportunity of voting for
them. The same, of course, can be said of Republicans in
Democratic districts, which may explain the passion of Republican
politicians for the creation of more safe black districts.
The editors asked that the state chapter authors resist
speculation, and they got what they asked for. In many respects,
we ought to be satisfied with the result -- a reliable resource
remarkably free of the special pleading that so often surrounds
the subject. We can hope that the next volume will address some
of these third and fourth generation issues of equality of voting
rights in the same patient and systematic way. The next set of
issues are harder, but they are even more important, as they deal
with the intersection of law and politics in fashioning a fair
system of representative government that builds on a clearly
necessary and effective national intervention into the
foundations of state and local democratic governance.
References:
CITY OF MOBILE V. BOLDEN 446. U.S. 55 (1980)
SHAW V. RENO 113 S.Ct. 2816 (1993)
THORNBURG V. GINGLES, 478 U.S. 30 (1986)
Copyright 1994