Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
For many years voting rights litigation has focused on elimination of at-large elections and the creation of "majority-minority" districts--election districts where a majority of the electorate are racial/ethnic minorities. Numerous studies have analyzed the impact of district elections on minority representation, particularly the election of blacks in the South. Most of these studies have focused on a single time period, comparing the ratio of black representatives to black population across cities with different electoral schemes. The present study combines data from six different data sets to produce a panel of data covering five distinct time periods over a 26-year span. Cross-sectional estimates of the effect of district elections in each time period are compared to determine how the efficacy of district elections has changed over time. To control for possible selection bias, inter-temporal models of the impact of changes in election structure on changes in representation are also estimated. Copyright 2000 by Kluwer Academic Publishers