Race Less a Factor in Minority Mayoral Elections

Race and ethnicity are still very much a part of American politics, but a new study suggests that, increasingly, voters are selecting candidates based on their job performance, not just their racial affiliation.

Voters in communities where whites or African Americans are in the majority tend to select first-time officeholders based on their racial affiliation. In their study of mayoral elections in a large metropolitan area with no ethnic or racial majority, university researchers found that voting continues to be race-based. For incumbent re-elections, however, voter evaluation of a minority candidate increasingly is based on his or her job performance.

Robert Stein

“It increasingly appears that minority candidates are getting elected in biracial and multiracial communities and that what influences voter behavior is the same in both settings,” says Robert Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science.

“Voters still are influenced by their racial identification, particularly when a candidate first runs for office,” Stein comments. “But when a minority candidate seeks re-election, his or her job performance is more important to the voter.”

Given the demographic trends in the United States, the Census Bureau estimates that, by 2050, less than half of the U.S. population will be Anglo American. Studying the voting patterns in a city whose racial and ethnic make-up already reflect these population changes in America, Stein and his research colleagues believe they now have a better picture of how race and other factors may or may not continue to influence election outcomes.

The researchers found, for example, that contrary to prior theories, Anglo Americans do not necessarily vote for Latino rather than black candidates based on the notion that they perceive Hispanics as more similar than blacks to themselves. Earlier assumptions that cooperation or support is more likely if two groups are similar in social, economic, or racial terms did not appear to be the case.

“We found that Anglo Americans were no less likely to vote for the African American incumbent against a Hispanic challenger than they were when the incumbent African American mayor faced an Anglo American candidate,” Stein says. “In fact, in the 1997 Houston election, Hispanics were significantly more likely to vote for the African American candidate than his Anglo opponent, even though other researchers hypothesized that Hispanics and Anglo Americans were more likely to form coalitions than Hispanics or Anglo Americans and African Americans.”

In a study for Urban Affairs Review on voting for minority candidates in multiracial and multiethnic communities, Stein, Rice University colleague Stephanie Post, and Stacy Ulbig from Southwest Missouri State University analyzed mayoral elections between 1997 and 2001 in Houston, where the population is 39 percent Anglo American, 36 percent Hispanic, and 25 percent African American. Houston’s first African American mayor was elected in 1997, defeating an Anglo American businessman. The incumbent was re-elected in 1999, facing weak Anglo American opposition, and won a third term in 2001, defeating a Hispanic candidate in a close runoff election.

Data was drawn from three cross-sectional surveys of registered voters conducted before the three mayoral elections in which they were asked about their vote intention, mayoral job approval, racial group membership, party affiliation, ideology, level of education, and racial attitudes.

In the candidate’s first race in 1997, African Americans were significantly more likely to vote for the black candidate compared to Anglo Americans and Hispanics, but in the following two elections, their support for him diminished as a result of their poor rating of his performance in office. “The relative importance of approval ratings increased more than three-fold for African American voters and nearly doubled for Anglo voters,” Stein says.

The researchers also attempted to test for racist versus racial voting by soliciting attitudes toward different racial and ethnic groups in their 1999 survey of voters. They also relied on a series of ratings by which voters were asked to assess different racial and ethnic groups on a 10-point scale from very unfavorable to very favorable. “Our analyses confirmed prior research that did not see racism as an explanation for voter choice,” says Stein. “Instead, voters seemed more inclined to initially favor one candidate over another based on their racial identification with that candidate.”

Stein believes their results provide both a positive and negative picture of the place of race in politics. On the one hand, voters’ choices are increasingly based on the officeholder’s job performance, but that factor hasn’t necessarily diminished the racial basis of their voting.

“Democracy depends on voters being utility maximizers: acquiring information, identifying their preferences, and making choices accordingly,” Stein says. “Racism is still part of that equation, but we now know it’s not necessarily the key to voters’ choice. What’s more important is whether their government is being managed well.”

—B. J. Almond