African-American Committee Chairs in U.S. State Legislatures

Objective. In this article, we explore whether African-American state legislators have been able to translate election to office into positions of power, particularly as committee chairs. Methods. We cull data from all state legislative chambers that contained a black legislator during two time periods, 1989 and 1999. In doing so, we compare the observed numbers of African-American chairs with their expected numbers. We also examine each state's percentage of black chairs using multiple regression to determine what factors—political, partisan, institutional, cultural— influence the selection of black committee chairs. Results. Overall, our descriptive analysis reveals that blacks are underrepresented as chairs. They are not, however, significantly underrepresented as chairs of the most important committees and they are generally overrepresented as chairs of committees with jurisdiction over social services. Our multivariate analyses show that the prevalence of black chairs is driven primarily by factors related to partisan control of legislative chambers and size of the black legislative delegation, and that these dynamics have changed over time. Conclusion. Although the increase in African-American state legislators has led to an increase in substantive leadership roles, these positions have been limited almost entirely to chambers where the black caucus is a critical element of a Democratic majority. As the United States enters the 21st century, race continues to be the distinctively ''American dilemma'' identified by Myrdal (1944) over 60 years ago. Although African Americans have made substantial progress in many areas, numerous economic, social, and political problems persist. In the political arena, African Americans have made considerable advances since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s. Although election rates still lag behind their percentage of the n Direct correspondence, including data requests for replication purposes, to Professor project was partially funded by a Senning Fellowship from the University of Nebraska. We express our appreciation to Bob Darcy and Robert Mickey for their guidance on a much earlier version of this article. We also express our thanks to Joel Wiegert and Mitch Herrian for their data-collection efforts. Finally, the first author would like to thank the late Dan Orey, Jr. for his inspiration and guidance. population, 1 the past several decades have seen minority enfranchisement translated into the election of significant numbers of minority representatives at the local, state, and national levels. In this article, we examine an underexplored aspect of minority representation, the extent to which African-American representatives have attained significant positions …