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Chapter 4 When Identity and Constituency Collide at Roll Call People in Pittsburgh love their football Steelers and baseball Pirates, and they cheered both teams to world championships at the famed Three Rivers Stadium on the city’s waterfront. By the end of the 1990s, however, Three Rivers Stadium had become outmoded. When city leaders turned to the state of Pennsylvania for help with financing the construction of separate new stadiums for Pittsburgh’s professional football and baseball teams, many state legislators in Harrisburg were eager to help. For Pennsylvania’s black state legislators, all of whom then hailed from either the Pittsburgh or Philadelphia area, the stadium question presented a difficult dilemma. To help finance the construction of two new stadiums, the legislature would have to raise the state’s debt ceiling. As it happened, Philadelphia-area legislators and other political officials were also planning to build new stadiums for their beloved Eagles and Phillies. Philadelphia’s leaders worried that the state would be too close to its debt cap after financing the Pittsburgh stadiums to help Philadelphia. Members of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus might easily have chosen sides, each contingent defending its respective hometown project. But PALBC members had more than new skyboxes and season tickets on their minds. Just when it appeared that the Pittsburgh stadium bill would pass, PALBC members from both cities refused to support it, “taking a walk” in the wee hours of the debate over the Pittsburgh deal. The Caucus objected on the grounds that there were no assurances that minority-owned construction firms would receive their share of building contracts for the new stadiums. Without their votes the debt-ceiling bill failed, and the 1998 legislative session ended with Pittsburgh’s rabid fans wondering how much longer they would be stuck with their hallowed, but antiquated Three Rivers Stadium.1 91 Like the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus walkout episode that began this book, the Pittsburgh stadium controversy testifies to the power of cohesive voting behavior.2 In this chapter, we measure the degree of voting cohesion of four legislative black caucuses compared to other legislators in those states whose districts contain significant African American populations. Our purpose is to disentangle the competing influences on floor voting of the racial identities of legislators and the racial composition of the districts they represent. BLACK VOTING, BLOC VOTING Voting is the fundament of legislative democracy.This is true for citizens electing legislators, as well as for the votes those elected officials then cast for legislation . At least in theory, the actions of legislators echo the voices of their constituents. For African American voters and the legislators who represent them, the expectation is no different. If race really matters within the legislature , however, we must assume that the racial identity of legislators has an independent—and, normatively speaking, salutary—effect on the behavior of legislators. If not, all that would matter is that African Americans enjoy full suffrage and participation, for with that they would receive a perfect, literal translation of their desires, demands, and dreams through the vessels of legislators of any racial or ethnic background. In previous chapters, we demonstrated that the changing racial composition of American state legislatures has already had many important, visible effects. The formation of legislative black caucuses has had a demonstrable effect and confirms that most black legislators perceive themselves as natural allies. Caucus affiliation allows individuals to share information, pool resources, influence staffing patterns, and alter the legislative agenda—all noteworthy behaviors that affect the substantive representation of black interests (Bratton and Haynie 1999; Hammond 1998; Singh 1998; Whitby 1997). But as the stadium finance story shows, talk is one thing, votes are another. In the final analysis, every dollar of every program enacted by state governments requires legislators to cast a vote, aye or nay. That fact provides the question that animates this chapter: Does the race of the legislator matter to legislative voting? To answer this and related subquestions, we examined the floor roll-call voting patterns on contested votes of black legislators and white legislators who represent districts with significant percentages of minority citizens.3 Our purpose in collecting and analyzing roll call data was to determine which types of legislation: (a) create cleavages between members of state black caucuses and white members from districts with significant minority populations; (b) create cleavages among those white legislators; and/or (c) create cleavages among 92 When Identity and Constituency Collide at Roll Call [18.116.51...

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