Voting after Shelby: Did pre-clearance matter?
Ariel White, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract: Nearly five decades after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the law was dramatically changed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The court effectively removed the “preclearance” process that had required places with a history of racial discrimination to get Justice Department approval before changing their voting procedures. Dissenting justices and voting-rights advocates feared that this decision could lead to massive changes to election administration and ultimately to lower rates of voter participation in minority communities. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of this decision on election practices and on Black and Hispanic voter registration and turnout. We use a combination of administrative data on registration and voting, survey data on mobilization and local election administration, and state legislative records to examine different facets of the voting rights landscape after the Court's decision.
Bio: Prof. White research focuses on voting and voting rights, race, the criminal justice system, and bureaucratic behavior. Prof. White's work uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences, and to shed light on people's everyday interactions with government.

Cecilia Menjívar, UC Los Angeles

Bio: Prof. Menjívar is a Professor and Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair, her research focuses on the structural roots of inequalities and on how individuals’ social locations shape their responses to such conditions.

Mario Luis Small, Harvard University

Bio: Pro. Small is the author of award-winning books and articles on networks, poverty, organizations, culture, methods, neighborhoods, institutions, and other topics. He is currently using large-scale administrative data to understand isolation in cities, studying how people use their networks to meet their needs, and exploring the epistemological foundations of qualitative research. His latest book is Someone To Talk To (Oxford). A study of how people decide whom to approach when seeking support, the book is an inquiry into human nature, a critique of network analysis, and a discourse on the role of qualitative research in the big-data era.

Mushfiq Mobarak, Yale University

Bio: Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He holds other appointments at Innovations for Poverty Action, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE.

Erica Field, Duke University

Bio: Erica Field is a Professor of Economics and Global Health at Duke University specializing in the fields of Development Economics, Health Economics and Economic Demography. She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research affiliate of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, and a member of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT.

David Brady, UC Riverside

Bio: David Brady is a Professor in the School of Public Policy, and Director of the Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty at the University of California, Riverside. At UCR, he teaches classes on poverty, public policy analysis, and statistics.