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The local political implication of Black maternal mortality raises questions about the extent to which city leaders, especially Black females, can influence policies to improve outcomes for Black expectant mothers. The case of Mayor Muriel Bowser, the second Black female mayor of Washington, DC, is examined to demonstrate the connection between intersectional identities and substantive representation through an examination of how she has attempted to reduce Black maternal mortality in the district. Data including press releases from her office, newsletters, accountability reports, and budget proposals are assessed. Other data including news reports from nonprofit organizations as well as local media are examined to provide a comprehensive understanding of how stakeholders in the community have reacted to actions taken by the Bowser administration. Currently serving her second term as mayor, Bowser has pursued actions that attempted to reduce this racial health disparity. Solutions pursued by Mayor Bowser have ranged from symbolic proclamations to substantive legislation as well as programs created through executive agencies as part of her administration. It is also worth noting that some of her actions appear to be in response to legislation approved by the city council. Bowser’s racial/ethnic, gender, and partisan identities strongly align with the actions she and her administration have taken to address Black maternal mortality in Washington, DC.

This study examines how the interplay between racial diversity and economic inequality affects variations of social capital in the U.S. counties. In general, racial and economic heterogeneity is as...

Recently, there has been a surge of national attention toward the U.S.-Mexican border in South Texas, known as the Rio Grande Valley (RGV). Despite the attention and potential impact, which the wall would directly have on the RGV community, there has been no systemic attention paid to the opinions of the RGV residents regarding the proposed wall and other related immigration policies. This article, therefore, aims to fill this gap by comparing immigration policy attitudes in the borderland communities to both the national Hispanic and the general national populations. By utilizing original data from an RGV public opinion survey we conducted in 2018, our analysis shows that RGV residents hold more lenient immigration attitudes than do both the national Hispanic and the general populations. We utilize logistic regression analysis to further our understanding of the correlates of these attitudes across different samples. Our findings provide important policy and political implications.

Scholarship rightfully emphasizes how electoral institutions affect minority representation and policy outcomes. But how do racial and ethnic environments shape institutions? We address this question by examining how support for Latino candidates affects attempts to modify rules regarding governance and elections. To do so, we rely on new data from the Local Elections in America Project and the International City/County Management Association. We find that the percentage of votes that go to Latino candidates, as well as changes over time in Latino vote share, predicts the probability that a reform effort will take place. Both relationships are nonlinear and suggest a high degree of strategic behavior on the part of elite actors within cities.

Racial attitudes toward African American candidates are partially explained by symbolic racism, which has replaced overt racism in responses to these candidates. However, as typically operationalized, symbolic racism as applied to candidate assessments fails to account for the emotions generated by a political campaign. Symbolic racism’s effects are moderated when emotional responses to Barack Obama are included in a candidate evaluation model, while emotions remain an important predictor. While symbolic racism and negative emotions lower evaluations, the presence of the positive emotions generated by the 2012 campaign counteracted both. Inclusion of both symbolic racism and emotion is necessary to understand perceptions of Obama as a black presidential candidate.