“Descriptive Representation of Neighborhood-Based Associations: The Case of Neighborhood Councils in the City of Los Angeles"

To address the question on democratic legitimacy of communityor neighborhood-representing organizations, this paper was based on Pitkin’s differentiation of representation. Among her four semantic discernment of the term, the relationship among formalistic and descriptive was empirically analyzed. The main motivation for considering the quality of representativeness of a participatory vehicle was because neighborhood councils were created as a citywide system to represent the interests of the community. Another reason for considering descriptive representation is how the new participatory mechanism enhances the political incorporation of previously neglected voices and concerns for political equality. The main purpose of paper was to explain descriptive representation. In the literature on minority representation, the theoretical tension between the electoral arrangements and community contexts on minority representation has been extensively elaborated. There are not only unresolved tensions in the literature on descriptive racial representation but also methodological issues have been problematic as well. In the chronological overview of these studies the main argument that grew out of this literature was the adequate measurement of descriptive representation. To obviate the limitation of the measurements (e.g., both difference and ratio), other modeling techniques were advanced which was adopted from partisan electoral studies. From linear proportionality model (Engstrom & McDonald, 1981) to nonlinear one (Sass, 2000), the relationship between minority seats and population has been analyzed. This paper reports results on both of these models for three major race/ethnic groups in the City of Los Angeles. First the results from these models were consistent and they seem to suggest that community context matters more than governance structures or electoral arrangements (i.e., formalistic representation) on descriptive representation. Another result from the analyses is that contextual factors influence race groups differently. Next in the results from the nonlinear model that differentiate between racial bias and representation (i.e., proportionality or responsiveness between seats and population share), formalistic representation was not found to be related to descriptive representation. With respect to our results, for White and Hispanic population, there was statistically significant racial bias towards favoring the other groups in the electoral arrangements. Overall, formalistic representation that is formal institutions for electoral arrangements was initially considered because of its potential to be adopted as a policy variable to enhance political equality. However from this analysis in the case of neighborhood council system in the City of Los Angeles, electoral arrangement was not statistically significantly related to descriptive representation.