Congress in Black and White

“Grose shows how African-American and white members of Congress, both in the South and elsewhere, have developed new ways to reach out and respond to constituents of all races. These findings, based on a careful, multi-method research design, provide new, fundamental, and important insights into the role of race in contemporary American politics, the politics of civil rights, and debates over redistricting strategies and the value of majority-minority districts.” —William Bianco, Indiana University
“Armed with fresh interview data and strong statistical approaches, Grose takes on the main controversies in the race and representation literature and offers a new perspective. I was keen to read it.” —Katherine Tate, University of California, Irvine
“The author addresses a complicated array of research areas and questions, and successfully integrates discussion of the theoretical issues that have generally resided within rather than across these subfields. He also incorporates a rich variety of research methods and types of data to explore how substantive representation occurs in Congress. I advise those with an interest in the historical evolution of voting rights law, in the impact of roll call voting, in a review of the multi-layered literature on the growing participation of African-Americans in national legislative representation and issues of substantive representation, in the complex debates about the appropriate strategies for racial redistricting and in the impact of majority-minority districts, to read this book. Grose has successfully integrated his discussion theoretically, methodologically, and empirically across areas that were previously only loosely or in some cases largely unconnected…This is an important book, and it will be widely read and recognized.” - Dianne M. Pinderhughes, Univeristy of Notre Dame, Congress & the Presidency