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"Political inequality is a major issue in American politics, with racial minorities and low-income voters receiving less favorable representation. Scholars argue that this political inequality stems largely from differences in political participation andthat if all citizens participated equally we would achieve political equality. Daniel M. Butler shows that this common view is incorrect"--
List of contents
1. Representatives as the source of bias; 2. When can representation break down?; 3. Details of the constituency-service field experiments; 4. Bias in the way officials process constituents' opinions; 5. Information costs and officials' proactive effort levels; 6. Direct discrimination; 7. Bias in politics.
About the author
Daniel M. Butler is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a resident Fellow at the institution for social and policy studies at Yale University, Connecticut. His work has been published in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis, and the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. Butler is a cofounder and co-organizer of the Symposium on the Politics of Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity (SPIRE), a biannual meeting of scholars doing research in race and ethnic politics in the United States, and the founder and director of the Laboratories of Democracy (labsofdemocracy.org), a network of academics who collaborate with nonprofits and public officials to design and conduct randomized experiments aimed at maximizing policy effectiveness. He earned a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University, California, where his research was supported by a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
