Party Control Shapes Racial Representation in U.S. Lawmaking, Study Finds

When Republicans control the presidency or the U.S. Senate, white Americans are significantly more likely than Black or Latino Americans to have their policy preferences represented by the laws passed by the federal government, according to a new study supported by the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

For a paper published last month in the American Political Science Review, the researchers analyzed policy preferences from 520,000 people surveyed from 2006 to 2022 and compared them with actual legislative outcomes on 134 major bills.

“There has been a lot of research on the differences in voting behavior and in the sociological outcomes of different racial groups in the United States,” said Mackenzie Lockhart, an external postdoctoral fellow with ISPS. “We were really interested in understanding whether we can see these differences reflected in the behavior of members of Congress and in the lawmaking process.”

The researchers found that across all issues and all years, respondents saw their policy preferences passed into law at similar rates regardless of their race or ethnicity, though with a relatively low frequency of around 50% of the time.

But when Republicans controlled the presidency, the “win rate” for white Americans was about 8 percentage points higher than it was for Black Americans, and 7 percent higher than it was for Latino Americans.

Under Democratic control, these gaps shrank or even reversed slightly. Even though the gaps disappeared, white Americans actually saw their win rates improve by about 4 percentage points compared to their rate under Republican presidents.

Party control of the Senate has the strongest effect on racial disparities. Under Republican Senate control, Black Americans’ win rate dropped to 40%, compared to 56.5% under Democratic control.

Latino Americans’ win rate also dropped, and the researchers found a similar statistically significant effect of Republican Senate control on Asian Americans’ win rate.

“These are not small differences, and they occur on highly salient issues where we might expect party-based representational disparities to be modest,” the authors wrote. “As such, they raise serious concerns about political inequality.”

And while the researchers found evidence of a racial divide, they were surprised by the relatively equal responsiveness of government to all citizens over time, which they ascribed to the repeated partisan turnover, as well as the greater frequency of Democratic party control, during the period they studied.

“While our findings suggest that American democracy is failing to provide citizens with equal opportunity to influence national lawmaking, regardless of race or ethnicity, they also provide a more hopeful message,” said Jacob Hacker, Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, ISPS faculty fellow, and co-author of the study. “We find that racial and ethnic disparities in responsiveness vary based on which party controls the federal government, and that implies that they are neither inevitable nor immutable.”

In addition, the researchers found the disparities persist even after controlling for income, education, age, gender, and ideology. Partisanship accounts for some — but not all — of the differences, suggesting race plays an independent role.

“This is not an income story, not an education story, not an ideology story,” Lockhart said. “This is about race.”

However, the authors could not determine a definitive source of the disparity.

In addition to investigating overall policy outcomes, they also looked at whether members of Congress were responsive to their own constituents, and they found Republican members were less responsive to their constituents of color, particularly Black constituents. This was true even for their Black Republican constituents, and it also showed up when they compared Senators of different parties representing the same states.  

Across the nation, the gaps between Republican and Democratic Senators were particularly notable in states where survey evidence showed high racial resentment among white Americans towards Black Americans, suggesting some role for White racial attitudes.

“We don’t have good evidence to say why Black Americans are represented better under Democrats and worse under Republicans,” Lockhart said. “But we have good evidence to show it’s happening based on data spanning 16 years and four presidents.”

Lockhart said any claims about racial prejudice fall beyond the scope of the study and would be difficult to determine given how deeply race intertwines with so many aspects of life in the country.

“We cannot and would not try to say that Republicans vote against the interests of Black, Asian, and Latino Americans because they are racially biased,” he said. “But we can say that in the places where white Americans hold disproportionately high levels of racial resentment, Black Americans receive worse representation.”

The study’s authors also include Zoltan Hajnal, professor of political science at University of California, San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, and Agustin Markarian, assistant professor of political science at Loyola University.

Lockhart suggested it would be ideal if an individual’s satisfaction with results of the lawmaking process did not depend on that individual’s race. And he echoed Hacker’s more optimistic perspective.

“I think a positive takeaway is that these gaps don’t exist when you average the data across time,” he said. “It suggests that voters are ultimately being represented by the parties in Congress — even if the level of responsiveness varies over time and isn’t impressively high.”