The Quality of Black Legislative Life: Perceptions of Black and White City Councilors at the Beginning of the New Millennium

Although scholars have become increasingly interested in the black legislative experience, they have largely overlooked black city councilors and the environment in which they serve. I utilize two nation-wide surveys to address this gap in the literature. I sent one survey to black city councilors in 2002 and the other to their white counterparts in 2003. The two instruments were similar in content and question wording so that I could compare the two groups in terms of their perceptions and personal profiles.

My data show that the two sets of councilors generally have similar backgrounds and profiles. However, their perceptions of the black legislative experience are fundamentally different. White councilors overwhelmingly say that their black colleagues’ experiences are positive and, only on rare occasions, do they identify discrimination or report that race relations are impaired. Many black councilors concur with this assessment, but statistically significant differences still remain between the two groups. Blacks tends to be more cynical than whites about their legislative experience, and they are more likely to identify racial barriers that encumber their progress. Race seems to be the primary explanation for the perceptual gap since the differences remain when I control for alternate factors using bivariate crosstabulations.

Finally, I relied on dichotomous logistic regression with robust standard errors to explain the variance in how the black councilors assess the quality of their legislative experience. My analysis shows that contextual factors are more meaningful than individual-level factors. Gender, ideology, and perhaps education, are the only two individual-level variables that seem to matter. However, a lot of contextual variables are significantly related to at least some aspect of the black legislative experience. The most important of these contextual variables are the municipality’s electoral format (at-large vs. wards) and the quality of race relations within the city council.