Do Legislators Represent Racial Minority Opinions? Evidence on Disparities at the Congressional District Level

Abstract A large body of research shows that members of Congress disproportionately represent the interests of copartisans and affluent Americans. Is there also racial disparity in representation? I draw on three standards of political equality—proportionality, race-conscious egalitarianism, and pluralism—and assess the extent to which minority representation satisfies each. To do so, I match roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives to survey data fielded prior to each vote (2006–2016) and use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate racial subgroups’ opinions. I then examine how closely House members’ voting aligns with these opinions, focusing on districts where White and minority preferences differ. My analysis rules out “coincidental representation’ driven by similar opinions across groups and accounts for how much of each racial group’s national population resides in each district. Among districts where racial group opinions differ, I find strong support for the proportionality over the race-conscious egalitarian standard: Racial minority representation is substantially greater in majority–minority districts than in those that are not. However, I find strong evidence for the race-conscious egalitarian standard among Democratic legislators and moderate evidence for the pluralist standard among all legislators, as voting tends to align with racial minority opinion on explicitly race-targeted bills.