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The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra Preclearance After Shelby County, Christopher Elmendorf, Douglas Spencer
The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra Preclearance After Shelby County, Christopher Elmendorf, Douglas Spencer
Douglas M. Spencer
The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively enjoined the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act. The Court deemed the coverage formula, which determines the jurisdictions subject to preclearance, insufficiently grounded in current conditions. This paper proposes a new, legally defensible approach to coverage based on between-state differences in the proportion of voting age citizens who subscribe to negative stereotypes about racial minorities and vote accordingly. The new coverage formula could also account for racially polarized voting and minority population size, but, for constitutional reasons, subjective discrimination by voters is the essential criterion. We demonstrate that the …
Citizens United, States Divided: An Empirical Analysis Of Independent Political Spending, Douglas Spencer, Abby Wood
Citizens United, States Divided: An Empirical Analysis Of Independent Political Spending, Douglas Spencer, Abby Wood
Douglas M. Spencer
What effect has Citizens United v. FEC had on independent spending in American politics? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused solely on federal elections where there is no baseline for comparing changes in spending behavior. We overcome this limitation by examining the effects of Citizens United as a natural experiment on the states. Before Citizens United about half of the states banned corporate independent expenditures and thus were “treated” by the Supreme Court’s decision, which invalidated these state laws. We rely on recently released state-level data to compare spending in “treated” states to spending in the “control” states …