| Review of: | Changing White Attitudes toward Black Political Leadership by Zoltan L. Hajnal |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | John D. Griffin |
| Reviewed in: | The Journal of Politics |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 69, Issue 04, Pages 1210-1230 |
Book Reviews
In this imaginative and carefully argued book, Zoltan Hajnal contends that the election of African Americans to public office appears to have interesting and important effects on the behavior and attitudes of the white citizens the officials represent. First, focusing on mayors' offices, whites often become much more likely to vote for African Americans after the latter have assumed office. Second, whites' attitudes toward African Americans improve when they are represented by African Americans. Key in Hajnal's account of these phenomena is the role of information. Specifically, when African Americans gain office and the city functions well whites learn that their fears about the consequences of having an African-American mayor are unfounded or at least wildly exaggerated.
These patterns are important for at least two reasons. That whites' support for African-American candidates improves once African Americans become incumbents suggests that whites are willing to support African-American candidates under some circumstances and that minority majority districts might be reconfigured to improve the influence of African Americans without risking the political futures of African-American representatives. That whites' attitudes toward African Americans improves when whites are represented by African Americans points toward one novel way to improve the welfare of African Americans. Namely, the goal might be to elect African Americans not only because these officials will often represent African Americans' preferences better than nondescriptive representatives will (Lublin 1997; Canon 1999; Griffin and Newman 2008), but because these representatives might lead to a conversion of whites' attitudes toward African Americans and the perhaps even the policies this group favors.
Chapter 2 of the book focuses on variation in white voters' support of African-American candidates. It shows, first of all, that African-American incumbents are much more popular among whites at the voting booth than when they challenged the previous, white incumbent. Consistent with Hajnal's information model, whites tend to rely on their racial attitudes rather than conventional factors such as candidate quality and newspaper endorsements when making voting decisions in African-American challenger races. However, once African Americans gain office whites turn to conventional factors to evaluate them in the next race.
Chapter 3 turns to differences in whites' attitudes. It shows that white affect toward African Americans and whites' general positions on race-related questions are more favorable toward African Americans in municipalities where African-American mayors have served (even though these attitudes have not changed nationally). This is true for all cities examined as well as among cities that at some point in their history have had an African-American mayor. Continuing to focus on the latter group of cities shows that the duration of African-American political leadership also positively affects whites' attitudes. Significantly, both the voting and attitudinal effects of African-American leadership are only observed among Democrats in the electorate, who would tend to favor African-American leaders policies, so long as they are not too extreme (Rabinowitz & Macdonald, 1989). Because Republicans' behavior and attitudes are not affected by having an African American in the mayor's office, black leadership leads to a partisan polarization of whites' attitudes and behavior toward African Americans.
The next two chapters relate whites' experience with African-American political leadership in Los Angeles and Chicago. These case studies allow readers to see the information model at work. In Los Angeles, Hajnal shows that whites overwhelmingly came to support Mayor Tom Bradley in the 1970s and 1980s, principally because whites evaluated Bradley the challenger based on their concerns about racial implications, and evaluated Bradley the incumbent based on city conditions. In contrast, whites in Chicago never embraced Harold Washington as a candidate. Hajnal contends that this is attributable to the balanced racial makeup of the city, which did not permit Washington to implement his agenda and thus prevented white learning.
Finally, there is a discussion of possible parallel effects for African Americans in Congress, of the effects of electing African Americans on African Americans, and to the generalization of the approach to study Latino and Asian-American incumbents.
This study opens several lines of investigation for future research. First, it admirably grapples with the difficult question of directionality-whether it is the election of African Americans that is affecting whites' voting behavior and attitudes or whether whites' behavior and attitudes are responsible for electing African Americans. However, more might be done to understand how much each mechanism might be at work, perhaps by relying on panel data. In addition, the text carefully wrestles with the possibility that the gains realized by African-American incumbents might be owing to general incumbency effects rather than learning among whites. Future studies might compare the gains realized by African-American incumbents to those of white incumbents to gain additional leverage on this question.
Appropriate for use in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on race and ethnicity and urban politics, this thought-provoking book is highly recommended.