The Voting Rights Act: Sirens of Extremism

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) was designed to guarantee actual voting rights for Black Americans, rights that had been abrogated for a century by obstructive electoral devices (known as the Jim Crow laws) which kept them from their free exercise of the right to vote. Language added in 1982 to § 2 of the VRA reoriented its purpose from the guarantee of the individual right to vote to a focus on, first, assuring a descriptive representation of Black Americans to the body of elected officials, then second, preventing vote dilution resulting from the then-processes of electing these representatives. Attaining this dual goal was operationalized through the mechanism of Majority-Minority districts (MM’s). Our research finds, however, that the Majority-Minority mechanism does not guarantee political influence in the legislative body as opposed, on the contrary, to descriptive political representation. Indeed, the mechanism may in fact work against a target group’s actual political influence, all the while that it succeeds in increasing the group’s descriptive representation. It does so by institutionalizing partisan polarization across the body of elected representatives. Polarization, in turn, if based on partisanship, neuters the political influence of any specific group present in the elected body: First, by mandating the artificial creation of M-M districts, reapportionment processes implemented by state legislators move Black voters from opposite leaning districts. The Black AND the White majority districts that result are increasingly homogenous and therefore susceptible to the sirens of extremism, shorthand for political discourse never has to take into account opposite views. Second, the process then leads to elected officials whose electoral incentives wholly oriented to the wishes of homogenous constituencies and because these homogenous districts have put into place by the constitutional process of apportionment, they are both inviolable and semi permanent, impermeable thereby to entreaties pressing in upon them from others’ points of view. What the new language in § 2 has in fact accomplished is to provide sustained presence of a larger Black Caucus inside the House. But “larger,” as long as larger does not reach the level of absolute majority, does not necessarily translate to greater Black-American influence at the level of the House floor and its votes or within the body’s committees as this influence is neutered by the polarization dynamic within the House overall. Moreover, the polarization dynamic within the House is rendered self-reinforcing, and therefore self-perpetuating in perpetuity: first, in one very important unintended consequence of the MM mechanism, for every safe Majority-Minority district that is created, at least one and sometimes multiple White majority districts are also created. These White majority districts are also thereby safe districts insofar as it was ideological difference between Blacks and Whites that created the need for a districting mechanism such as the M-M, the safe White majority districts representatives, also beholden to only the views of their homogenous constituency bring their defense of these opposing values to their work as representatives in the House.