Voting for Welfare

For over a century, the Supreme Court has characterized the franchise as instrumental—a right that is preservative of all other rights. Statistics confirm that federal protection of the right to vote has produced higher levels of minority electoral participation and greater shares of minority politicians over the past half century. To voting rights advocates, indicators of progress in the electoral arena justify continued franchise protections to preserve or expand on these gains. Opponents use the same numbers to argue that aggressive political protections are no longer necessary. Largely absent from this discussion, though, is evidence of whether the right to vote, as the primary formal tool for democratic accountability, can and should be viewed as a tool that can actually shift policy toward improving the welfare of minority citizens and communities.

In this Article, I answer that question in the affirmative. First, I discuss historical evidence indicating that the nation’s most critical law expanding and governing the right to vote, the Voting Rights Act (VRA), was intended to ensure that elected officials would appropriately address ethno-racial minorities’ policy concerns— particularly those relating to the group’s socioeconomic disadvantages. I then review social science literature, which suggests these aspirations of ethno-racial minority political power were realized. I also offer new empirical evidence that the voting rights protections promulgated in the VRA not only changed the political landscape of the South, but also improved Black Americans’ socioeconomic well-being by initiating a redistribution of government resources toward Black communities. In addition to other important effects documented by quantitative social scientists, Black political empowerment during this period is associated with sizable reductions in poverty among historically marginalized ethno-racial minorities.

By recognizing the right to vote as more than just a formal protection of Election Day participation or descriptive representation, we can acknowledge the franchise as a tool designed to promote social welfare through government action. With this idea in mind, I consider the implications of accounting for the franchise’s economic worth to Black Americans in the 1960s—particularly with an eye toward today’s rising economic inequality.