Problems with the Concept of Descriptive Representation

In order to address the question “Does government work,” in relation to congressional representation, I’d like to examine the idea of descriptive representation and its effectiveness in practice. The textbook defines descriptive representation as “the degree to which the composition of a representative body reflects the demographic composition of the population as a whole,”—that is, how well the demographics of congress match the demographics of the nation. I will argue that descriptive representation ought to be a secondary consideration to ideological representation due to the problems with its implementation.

The authors note that in 1982, in order to increase the representation of ethnic minorities in congress, amendments were made to the Voting Rights Act that encouraged states to create districts in which ethnic minorities were a majority. These districts are called majority-minority districts. This legislation had its intended consequence: minority representation in Congress increased and came closer to matching the demography of the nation (closer still not close). 

I’d argue that this is good, even if only from an equal opportunity perspective. One of the ways to see institutional inequalities of opportunity is to look at the disparities between the demography of the population under consideration and the population selected. Anything that can close that gap without harming the formal competitiveness of others is a good thing in my mind, because it brings us closer to the ideal of equality of opportunity.

However, this legislation, as you can imagine, also had negative unintended consequences. Encouraging states to create district boundaries which made minorities a majority also had the seemingly obvious consequence of concentrating minority voters into one district. The concentration of minority voters into single districts led to less competitive elections overall and maybe even worse representation for the minorities the legislation tried to help. By concentrating minority voters, this legislation allowed non-minority voters to dominate even more districts. This led to the election of more Republicans, especially in the South. Now I don’t want to say that one party favors minorities more than the other, but in the public opinion chapter we learned that at least a couple of minorities favor one party over the other (and they don’t favor Republicans). So, the legislation that intended to improve minority representation in Congress descriptively actually harmed minorities’ ideological representation.

This is one reason why I’d argue that we should not care primarily about descriptive representation. Yes, it’s important that everyone has an equal opportunity to become a political representative, and the descriptive representation of Congress ought to reflect equal opportunity. However, when we make descriptive representation our main goal, as with the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, we actually harm those we intend to help. Instead, I’d argue that we should care more about ideological representation—whether representatives have the same or similar ideologies as the people they represent. While ideological representation likely still occurs even with legislation pushing descriptive representation, making descriptive representation a primary goal has essentially promoted gerrymandering by encouraging the concentration of people who belong to the same ethnic group and tend to share the same opinion.