Achievement

Trainee Tom Vogl examines the unprecedented rise of black mayors after the civil rights era. Using regression discontinuity methods, he focuses on the persistence of black victories--the phenomenon in which a city's first election of an African-American unleashes a long era of black representation. In the South, where African-Americans faced political exclusion, narrow victories by black candidates were extremely likely to be followed by subsequent black victories, whereas narrow losses always resulted in subsequent losses. This pattern is absent in the North. Vogl advances a theory of voter mobilization in which black and white candidates have differing capacities to increase voter turnout. Threshold turnout was more persistent in the South because its history of political exclusion made black turnout especially sensitive to mobilization efforts. These results are of immense interest in the current era of racial transformation in politics.