Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

I found Gardner Selby’s Politifact Texas article in Sunday’s Austin American-Statesman interesting and decided to do some of my own checking. The article assessed whether Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector Bruce Elfant’s statement that Texas ranked near the bottom in registered voters was accurate. There are various ways to compute the percentage of registered voters. Most commonly, the percentage of registered voters is calculated by dividing the number of registered voters by the voting age population (VAP) –residents who are 18 years-old and older. For example, if the number of registered voters is 14,025,441, and the voting age population is 18,915,297, then the percentage of registered voters is 74.15 percent.   These are the figures used by the Texas Secretary of State to calculate percentage of registered voters. This is problematic as some of the voting age population may not be qualified to vote because they are not citizens of the United States o

Serendipitously, I recently came across a capstone report by Jason Malinowski entitled “Campaign Spending in City Council Elections: A Comparison of At-Large and District Contests.”   In it, Malinowski examines the relationship between campaign spending in City Council elections and the type of electoral system—at-large, mixed, or single-member district—employed by the city. One of the arguments for single-member district electoral systems is that candidates do not have to raise and spend as much money as they do in a city with an at-large electoral system. This increases the opportunities for candidates to run for city council seats. But is it true that winning a city council seat in a single-member district electoral system is less expensive than competing for a city council seat in an at-large electoral system? Malinowski notes that there are few studies comparing campaign spending and type of electoral system. He provides the table below comparing three empirical studies:

Zoltan Hajnal ( America’s Uneven Democracy , pages 76-78) argues that higher voter turnout is conducive to ethnic minorities’ representation on city councils. He states that it is more advantageous for Hispanics and Asian Americans than for African Americans. The Austin City Council election in November 2014 provides an opportunity to test whether Hispanics and African Americans benefitted in districts where those minorities constituted either a substantial percentage of the population of the district or constituted a majority of the district.  District 1, located in northeast Austin, is considered an opportunity district for African Americans. Although African Americans do not constitute a majority of the voting age population, their percentage of the population is considered large enough to allow an African American candidate an equal opportunity to win the election in the district. According to the 2010 census, African Americans constituted 29.68 percent of the district’s v