Browsing by Author "Miller, Renita"

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    Minority Voices: The Representational Roles of African American and Latino Legislators during State Legislative Deliberations
    (2013-09-16) Miller, Renita; Hamm, Keith E.; Jones, Mark P.; Marschall, Melissa J.; Byrd, Alexander; Meier, Kenneth
    In this dissertation I systematically examine African-American and Latino legislator behavior in a legislative setting. The project specifically examines whether and how minority legislators represent and influence African American and Latino policy interests during the legislative process. I perform an analysis of minority legislator participation rates on bills and develop an original measure of substantive representation using patterns in legislative speech of state representatives’ language during committee hearings. I build on existing theory in the representation literature and offer new hypotheses for expanding the scope of how substantive representation is defined and investigated, namely through an empirical investigation of the link between deliberation and descriptive representation. Second, I collect an original data set and develop an original measure of substantive representation to test these hypotheses with participation rates and a linguistic frame based content analysis approach of minority and non-minority representatives’ language on bills for racial perspectives during state legislative committee hearings on several policy issue areas including, but not limited to education, healthcare, and immigration. Third, I offer a critical test of hypotheses to test whether African American and Latino representatives’ (1) participate more when the legislation is deemed minority interest in comparison to their non-minority counterparts? (2) their behavior (or deliberation style) is different from non-minority legislators? (3) impact the deliberation style of non-minority legislators? The analysis draws on original data collected through committee hearing tapes and online video archives of Texas committee hearings in multiple policy areas, and the findings indicate that minority legislators do indeed provide a voice for minority constituents, providing more minority interest language on minority interest bills in comparison to their non-minority colleagues, especially when the legislation is threatening to minority populations. These results support the argument that minority legislators do indeed substantively represent minority constituents at levels greater than non-minority representatives during the legislative process.
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    What should be done with Illegal Immigrants? The Views of Americans
    (Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2013) Miller, Renita; Emerson, Michael O.
    Examining the same adult Americans from 2006 to 2012, this report explores how Americans have changed and stayed the same in their religious beliefs and practices. We find that 15% of adult Americans switched religious traditions during this period, with nearly 40% of those switchers exiting religious traditions altogether. The next most common move was to Evangelical Protestantism from other faith traditions, including some who in 2006 were not in a religious tradition. We also find substantial volatility in worship attendance and congregational switching. Only 45% of adult Americans attend worship with the same frequency in 2012 as they did in 2006, and over one‐third switched congregations. Other changes identified in this report are a declining confidence in clergy, an increased confidence in faith and God’s care, and a substantial jump in the proportion of Americans who view all religions with equal respect.