Do at-large elections reduce black representation? A new baseline for county legislatures

Much work has shown that, at all levels, Black citizens tend to be descriptively underrepresented in government. We take up the question of Black descriptive representation at the level of the county legislature, gathering data on the composition of North Carolina’s 100 county commissions. We propose an alternative measure of descriptive representation, termed “seats above expectation”, and apply a counterfactual simulation approach to gauge the effects of at-large and ward-based elections. We find that Black citizens are underrepresented statewide: there are four fewer Black county commissioners than we would expect, based on the current county board sizes, demographics, and institutional arrangements. However, we find that universal implementation of ward-based elections would increase the statewide total of Black county commissioners by 20 in expectation, a 17% increase over the baseline. Because our methodological approach does not require a natural experiment or policy change, scholars can estimate average treatment effects (ATEs) of ward-based elections on minority descriptive representation across a wider array of locales.