Black lives matter: Differential mortality and the racial composition of the U.S. electorate, 1970–2004

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.04.014Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We estimate effects of black excess deaths on the composition of the US electorate.

  • Excess mortality reduced the 2004 black voting age population by 1.7 million.

  • In 2004, Kerry lost 900,000 votes and Bush lost 100,000 to black excess death.

  • Outcomes of 7 senate and 11 gubernatorial races could have been reversed.

  • Excess mortality among blacks in the United States dampens blacks' political voice.

Abstract

Excess mortality in marginalized populations could be both a cause and an effect of political processes. We estimate the impact of mortality differentials between blacks and whites from 1970 to 2004 on the racial composition of the electorate in the US general election of 2004 and in close statewide elections during the study period. We analyze 73 million US deaths from the Multiple Cause of Death files to calculate: (1) Total excess deaths among blacks between 1970 and 2004, (2) total hypothetical survivors to 2004, (3) the probability that survivors would have turned out to vote in 2004, (4) total black votes lost in 2004, and (5) total black votes lost by each presidential candidate. We estimate 2.7 million excess black deaths between 1970 and 2004. Of those, 1.9 million would have survived until 2004, of which over 1.7 million would have been of voting-age. We estimate that 1 million black votes were lost in 2004; of these, 900,000 votes were lost by the defeated Democratic presidential nominee. We find that many close state-level elections over the study period would likely have had different outcomes if voting age blacks had the mortality profiles of whites. US black voting rights are also eroded through felony disenfranchisement laws and other measures that dampen the voice of the US black electorate. Systematic disenfranchisement by population group yields an electorate that is unrepresentative of the full interests of the citizenry and affects the chance that elected officials have mandates to eliminate health inequality.

Introduction

In the United States, after centuries of de jure and de facto disenfranchisement of black Americans, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 resulted in a mass enfranchisement of poor and black Americans. Today, however, erosion of these rights is a great and growing concern. Although the US government acknowledges political participation to be a universal human right, several governmental decisions and practices, often at the state level, appear to be selectively undermining the prohibition against voting rights discrimination on the basis of race, first set forth in the 15th amendment to the US Constitution. Felony disenfranchisement laws in many states have a significant discriminatory impact on voting outcomes given race/ethnic variations in prosecution and sentencing of drug-related crimes (Manza and Uggen, 2006, Uggen et al., 2012). Partisan legislative redrawing of electoral boundaries that concentrate racial/ethnic groups into minority districts also has been shown to reduce their political influence (Epstein and O'Halloran, 1999, Trebbi et al., 2008). The trend toward shortened poll hours and more stringent voter ID policies in several states have had or are anticipated to have disproportionately negative effects on voting among the nonwhite and the poor (Barreto et al., 2009). US racial inequalities in excess mortality are another possible threat to the relative voting power of blacks compared to whites, but how important are they? In this analysis we begin to answer that question by estimating the cumulative impact of mortality differentials between US blacks and whites from 1970 to 2004 on the racial composition of the electorate in the general election of 2004 and in close statewide elections during the study period.

While voting behavior is influenced by a range of forces, it is certainly true that the longer a person lives, the greater their opportunity to vote over their lifetime. Throughout the 20th century, the mortality rate of US blacks was, on average, about 60% greater than that of US whites (Kaufman et al., 1998). Although measureable improvements in black excess mortality were seen mid-century, black-white mortality disparities have changed little over recent decades. For instance, the age-sex standardized mortality rate for blacks was 1.47 in 1960 and 1.41 in 2000 (Satcher et al., 2005). These statistics suggest that significant black-white mortality differentials are important social forces shaping the composition of the US electorate.

Beyond the compositional impact, a contraction in black voting-age adults might also affect partisan politics and policy, and thereby influence structural inequality. Abundant evidence indicates that race and racial prejudice affect political attitudes (Henry and Reyna, 2007, Sears and Kinder, 1971), candidate preferences (Bobo and Dawson, 2009, Valentino and Sears, 2005), political behavior (Enos, 2011, Sidanius and Pratto, 2001), political ideology (Lane et al., 2011, Pratto et al., 1994), public opinion (Mendelberg, 2008, Valentino et al., 2002), political inclusion (Lavariega Monforti and Sanchez, 2010, Massey and Denton, 1989), and race-based policy preferences (Rabinowitz et al., 2009, Tesler and Sears, 2010). Other evidence ties these racialized political processes to broad social inequalities (Bonilla-Silva, 2013) including race-based geographic or residential segregation (Dawson, 1995), incarceration rates (Caplow and Simon, 1999), and access to and the quality of structural resources such as medical care and welfare (Gilens, 1995) – all factors connected to health outcomes. In the US, where populations with different voting preferences face systematically unequal life chances, population health inequalities could affect not only the composition of the electorate, but election outcomes and subsequent policy, including policy that influences the health disparities that lead to excess mortality (Blakely et al., 2001, LaVeist, 1992, Purtle, 2013, Rodriguez et al., 2013).

Differential mortality by social group has been found to be associated with the composition of the electorate in the United Kingdom (Dorling, 1998, Dorling, 2010, Smith and Dorling, 1996). For example, individuals living in working class areas in the UK live an average of one general election less than those living in middle or upper class areas (McCartney et al., 2010). Many national UK general elections have been very closely fought battles and so this difference could have been influential on past electoral outcomes in the UK. However, the possible impact of black excess mortality relative to whites on US election outcomes has not been examined.

In this analysis, we estimate the impact of excess deaths among blacks on the racial composition of the electorate in the US presidential election of 2004. Because felony disenfranchisement is widely considered significant enough to have changed electoral outcomes, especially in local elections (Manza and Uggen, 2006, Uggen and Manza, 2002), we also explore the impact of black excess mortality on close statewide elections during the study period.

Section snippets

Theoretical framework

The social, economic and geographical inequalities in mortality found in the US are remarkably large by international standards (Marmot and Bell, 2009) and disproportionately disadvantage blacks relative to whites. And much evidence suggests that US black-white health disparities are persistent at all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum (Pearson 2008), and far higher than in other affluent countries with less of a history of racial discrimination. Popularized images portray excess US black

Racial mortality gaps and electoral politics

The effects of black-white differential mortality on electoral participation are dynamic and influence the demography of politics in at least three quantifiable ways. First, individuals who die before the age of 18 never have the opportunity to vote. Second, individuals who die after the age of 18, but before the age of life expectancy of their cohort have a shorter “electoral life” than those who culminate their normal life span. And third, premature death prevents individuals from voting not

Research design

We evaluate a counterfactual: What would have been the effect on the 2004 general election if blacks had survived at the same rates as whites between the years 1970 and 2004? Considering that differential mortality effects are cumulative, the case study of the 2004 general election allows for the full electoral cumulative effects of excess mortality in the time range of the available data. Because the mortality files we use are only available on the state level until 2007, the 2004 general

Results

As shown in Table 1, implementing our methods, we calculate 2.7 million excess deaths among US blacks (ages 0–84 years) from 1970 to 2004 in the 32 study states plus the District of Columbia (for additional estimations see Appendix Table A2). Considering that the total US black population was 22.6 million in 1970 and 36.1 million in 2004, this number represents 20% of the total national black population growth in this period.

The total number of black deaths would have been reduced from 8.5

Discussion

In this study, we provide the first estimates of the impact of racial mortality differentials on political participation in the US. We find that premature deaths among blacks have had a significant impact on the racial composition of America's electorate and, during the study period, may have been a key influence on several state election outcomes. State level findings suggest that our estimated effects could have had political potency at the national level, as well, given that the predicted

Funding

This research was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant #T32 HD007339) and by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge helpful conversations with James DeNardo, Teresa E. Seeman, Mark Q. Sawyer, David O. Sears, and Peter M. Bentler, the support of Libbie Stephenson and Jamie Jamison at the UCLA Social Science Data Archive, and the editorial assistance of N.E. Barr. The findings and conclusions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of Mathematica Policy Research.

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