Summary from The New Books Network Podcast Episode: Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender and Immigration in American Elections. May 2, 2022.

Why has the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in elected office proved so persistent in American politics? In Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections (Oxford UP, 2021), Dr. Christian Dyogi Phillips argues that any analysis must contend with multiple dimensions of identity, context, and the simultaneous dynamism of opportunity and constraint. Complementing previous studies with her original datasets and rich interviews, Phillips demonstrates how two simultaneous and interactive processes shape electoral opportunity across groups. At the national level, majority-white districts sharply limit realistic opportunities for Latinx and Asian Americans of either gender to get on the ballot – and partisan politics further narrows prospects for women from these groups. At the local and group level, within districts and among Asian American and Latinx political elites and activists, the scarcity of viable opportunities exacerbates informal processes and institutions that tend to push Latinas and Asian American women further from the pipeline. Phillips’s integration of national and local-level processes reveals that the pathways to getting on the ballot are few and far between for Latinx and Asian Americans – and especially fraught with prospects for exclusion of Latinas and Asian American women. Race and gender simultaneously constrain and facilitate electoral opportunities for Asian American women and men, Latinas, and Latinos. These sharp differences in opportunities across groups help explain persistent underrepresentation among elected officials.

Nowhere to Run Podcast

Majority minority districts are widely viewed as opportunities for racial minority groups to expand their representation in elected office. Do these districts facilitate the same opportunities for descriptive representation for women and men? I argue that majority minority districts have served as important, but distinct opportunities for Latinas and Latinos to get on the ballot. Analyzing pooled data from 57,812 state legislative general elections from the mid 1990’s to 2015, and during the first rounds of elections following 2000 and 2010 Census-based redistricting, I find support for this view. Key factors often associated with majority minority districts’ capacity as vehicles for minority representation, such as increasingly large Latina/o proportions of district populations and incumbent networks, are more robustly related to the presence of Latinos than Latinas on the ballot. These findings bear directly on our understanding of how majority minority districts fit into a portfolio of institutions for expanding descriptive representation.

Descriptive representation is shaped by more than the number of seats group members occupy in legislatures—it is also informed by how group members hold on to that seat once they win. Drawing from the literatures on women of color, gender and minorities in politics, I argue that assessments of the relationship between incumbents and descriptive representation must begin from the assumption that these links are different among groups that hold distinctive political positioning and power. To uncover those differences, I introduce a new measure of descriptive maintenance, which accounts for a group’s ability to retain descriptive representation in a seat across unique group members and elections. This multidimensional approach expands current conceptualizations by treating incumbency and descriptive representation as interrelated, group-level, phenomena. I test this framework using a group of state legislative incumbents that has rarely been explicitly examined, and yet outnumbers all others: white men.