(Re-)Mobilizing Voters in Britain and the United States

Political Strategies from Parties and Grassroots Organisations (1867–2020)

Gregory Benedetti, Veronique Molinari, Grégory Benedetti, Véronique Molinari

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110710458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This collective work offers a historical approach to the issue of voters' mobilisation and, through case studies, aims to expand the fi eld's research agenda by taking into account less familiar mobilising strategies from various groups or parties, both in Britain and the United States. Two different yet complementary approaches are used, one from the top down with political parties, the other from the bottom up with grassroots organisations, to analyze how these groups either (re-)connect citizens with politics or give birth to social movements which durably occupy and change the political landscape of the United States and Britain.

Part 1: Empowering Racial Minorities: Legal Measures, Grassroots Mobilisation and Political Strategies

1 Empowering Minority Voters in the U.S.

The Paradoxes of Redistricting in the Age of Conjoined Polarisation

Olivier Richomme

Introduction

The American political landscape has been upended since the 1960s Minority Rights Revolution and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).¹ These episodes and their consequences have changed the way Americans perceive political representation. The absence of non-White elected officials became the symbol of institutional discrimination, especially in the eye of minorities, that delegitimised the entire political system and threatened the very core of the political compromise the nation was believed to have been built upon. The challenges of the period ushered by the Civil Rights Movement was that the U.S. Congress, state legislatures and other governing bodies were only composed of older White males. As long as this was the case, the American democracy would not be representative of the entire country. A diverse population required a diverse body of representatives. Furthermore, the United States could no longer be considered a democracy without an unhindered right to vote. But the franchise was meaningless if it did not translate into the election of representatives that carried the voices of the historically marginalised minority groups. Otherwise it meant that many political communities’ interests were not represented and their grievances would not be heard and addressed.

This voting rights revolution impacted many aspects of the American political system. One aspect often overlooked is the importance of redistricting that led to the emergence of minority elected officials. While the first goal of the Civil Rights Movement was access to the ballot and enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,² it soon became clear that enfranchisement alone could not achieve political representation in a racially polarised environment and in a winner-take-all electoral system.³ Racial polarisation, or racial bloc voting, can simply be defined as members of a community voting systematically for candidates they perceive as a member to their own racial group.⁴ Using racial polarisation and residential segregation, redistricting was used to keep racial minorities out of office. After the 1960s, thanks to federal legislation and court intervention, one solution was to use redistricting to help minorities get elected to office in a majoritarian system. Instead of opting for a form of proportional representation to guarantee that minorities might have a chance to elect a candidate representing their interest, American reformers opted to keep a winner-take-all system in which some electoral districts would be composed of large numbers of ethno-racial minorities.⁵ This policy raises a series of complex issues. One of them is the interaction of race and partisanship in American politics. It is in this context that voter mobilisation strategies need to be analysed.

The Minority Rights Revolution and the Republican “Southern strategy” completed a racial partisan realignment that has its roots in President Roosevelt’s coalition of the 1930s.⁶ The Democratic Party came to champion minority rights as its electoral base was reshaped by the integration of minority groups, starting with African Americans. Therefore, the issue of minority political representation, understood as necessarily including some sort of descriptive representation, became intertwined with partisanship.⁷ Most White voters prefer to vote for White candidates. Most African Americans (and to some extent other ethno-racial minorities), when given the option, prefer to vote for an African American candidate. Racial polarisation rates are especially high in the U.S. South but this phenomenon is by no means limited to this region.⁸ The Democratic Party has become the party of minority rights, thereby preferred by ethno-racial minorities, in particular among African Americans. As many scholars have observed, “it is often difficult to untangle racial consideration from partisan consideration”.⁹ After all, as Rick Hasen remarked, “Liberal and conservative scholars have long recognized that the Voting Rights Act’s enforcement and interpretation can have partisan implications and motivations”.¹⁰ Since the 1980s at least, over 90 per cent of African Americans and about two-thirds of Latinos have consistently supported the Democratic Party for presidential or congressional elections. By contrast, the Democratic Party has not won the white vote in a presidential election for more than 50 years, that is since the Civil Rights Movement and the voting rights revolution reached its apex.¹¹ Partisan and racial polarisation are so high and intertwined that Professor Bruce Cain considered that they are now “two sides of the same coin”.¹² The interconnection between race and partisanship is such that Cain and Zhang have astutely called this phenomenon “conjoined polarization”:

Racial sorting and party sorting trends have been closely intertwined. Civil rights policies gave socially conservative white Democrats reason to defect to the Republican Party. Immigration policies also enabled the non-white and non-European population to grow and eventually enter a coalition with liberal whites. At the same time, both parties became more ideologically consistent, with more within-party conformity in social and economic policy. This undercut the ideological heterogeneity that in the immediate post World War II era had limited the polarization of activists, donors, and representatives in both parties. The Democratic and Republican parties became more ideologically consistent and racially distinctive.¹³

In today’s United States, distinguishing between race and partisanship has become much more difficult than it used to be. As partisan and racial polarisation have increased, they have also aligned to the point that considering one without the other is, at least for the purpose of redistricting, simply untenable. Conjoined polarisation has tremendous political implications in a time of representative democracy crisis in the U.S. Parties have used every aspect of redistricting to mobilise the electorate or to counterbalance the other party’s voter mobilisation efforts. And because the number of districts that are left competitive is so small they concentrate all of the resources and attention, increasing the stakes for partisan gains or minority representation.

This chapter proposes to analyse how the interaction of race and partisanship complicates minority political representation. We will study the challenges of using redistricting as the preferred solution to achieve diversity in post-civil rights American politics. However, in order to understand the contradictions of the public policies designed to help elect minorities in the U.S. today, we first need to go back to the implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act

During the period that is sometimes called the second Reconstruction,¹⁴ due to the fact that Southern states and local governments resisted attempts to remove obstacles that prevented African Americans from voting, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to try and ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Empowering Racial Minorities: Legal Measures, Grassroots Mobilisation and Political Strategies
• Part 2: Mobilising Women: Grassroots Action and Political Discourse
• Part 3: Digital Mobilisation: Revolutionising Politics in the Twenty-first Century?
• Part 4: When Grassroots and Party Mobilisation Interact: the Case of the Republican Party in the Twentieth Century
• List of contributors
• Index