The 2016 presidential election was the first such contest since 1964 to take place in the absence of a key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, namely Section 5 of the Act. Since the Supreme Court controversially suspended implementation of Section 5 in 2013, many states and localities have been transforming the legal and administrative frameworks of their elections, with dramatic implications for voter turnout and access to the franchise, especially for racial and ethnic minorities. The stakes are high: along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act dismantled the legal foundations of white supremacy in the southern United States, and its vigorous enforcement enfranchised millions of black and poor white voters.

Section 5 required that covered jurisdictions obtain prior approval from the federal government for certain changes to its electoral institutions or election administration. In its 2013 decision, the Supreme Court overturned the formula for determining which jurisdictions were covered by Section 5. The coverage formula was originally based on the use of discriminatory “tests or devices,” and voter participation rates in the 1964 presidential election. The formula was renewed four times by Congress, with minor revisions. Overturning this formula in 2013, the Supreme Court in effect suspended the application of Section 5 across 15 states that were covered completely or in part. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that it was “irrational for Congress to distinguish between States in such a fundamental way based on 40-year-old data, when today’s statistics tell an entirely different story. And it [was] irrational to base coverage on the use of voting tests 40 years ago, when such tests have been illegal since that time” (Shelby County v. Holder 2013).

Do current “statistics tell an entirely different story?” This dissertation examines how Section 5 affected election-related outcomes in a single but important state, North Carolina. North Carolina is a critical case to investigate because it has a distinctive pattern and scope of Section 5 coverage and unusually rich registration and turnout records stretching back decades.

The findings are unambiguous. Section 5 had a positive, independent, and statistically significant effect on voter turnout and registration at its outset and also over time, including in the period just before its suspension. These effects were particularly strong among black North Carolinians. Moreover, the data show that suspending Section 5 in 2013 depressed turnout in the 2016 statewide elections in North Carolina, especially for black voters. The dissertation also investigates the mechanisms for the effectiveness of Section 5 coverage in protecting the franchise, including improved registration rates and polling places per 10,000 voting age persons. Submission patterns suggest that the frequency of county requests to the Department of Justice is positively associated with improved voter access in the covered jurisdictions. The findings of this dissertation have significant implications for theories of U.S. political development, democratization, political behavior, racial politics, and federalism.

How do various ethnic and racial contexts influence the adaptation trajectory of individuals from immigrant families? Immigration into the United States has grown rapidly since 1965 and large-scale changes in the demographic makeup of the country are expected to continue. This project focuses on how various contexts--ethnic and racial group concentration in space--affect the social and political incorporation of immigrants into American society.

This dissertation investigates how government policies influenced U.S. minority coalition formation in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that the key to explaining this puzzle lies in ethnic elites’ strategic calculations, as influenced by historical legacies, policy changes, and variations. Chapter 2 examines why American minority mobilization emphasized race so much in the 1960s and 1970s. In leveraging the Chinese immigrant communities along the U.S.–Canadian border on the West Coast, I found that what makes the U.S. unique is its immigration and segregation policies. Chapter 3 investigates why Asian and Latin American national origin groups joined forces as Asian Americans and Latinos in the 1960s and 1970s. I explain the welfare state as an underappreciated mechanism that mobilized these intra-racial coalitions. Chapter 4 examines why inter-racial coalitions were rare or short-lived in the 1960s and 1970s. I found that although racial minority groups are often described collectively as people of color, their issues varied because they faced different policy challenges. Additionally, the misalignment of political agendas made coordinating actions among them difficult. Taken together, these three chapters highlight how combining a historical perspective and strategic analysis offers new insights into the contingent nature of minority coalition formation in the U.S. and beyond. The rich archival, organizational, and text data I assembled provide an example of how to undertake historical research on marginalized groups in a data-intensive way.

In a 1968 survey of the enforcement of federal civil rights laws, the US Commission on Civil Rights declared that "Civil rights laws now apply in almost every area in which the federal government has responsibilities. It is not so much new laws that are required today as a strengthened capacity to make existing laws work." My dissertation shows that regulatory agencies are critical sites of policy-making, and even rights-making, for immigrants and non-English speakers and that they are instrumental to making civil rights laws work.

The dissertation asks how rights expand in the new civil rights era and why they expand to varying extents in different policy arenas. More specifically, it asks what politics and strategies are used to expand on existing civil rights statutes in order to create new civil rights. It uses the development of language rights as a lens into understanding processes of statutory interpretation and regulatory implementation directed at the political incorporation of immigrants. It compares the robustness of language rights produced by this politics of regulation by tracing the interpretation of "national origin" and "language minority" protections in education, employment, and voting.

The dissertation adopts a historical institutionalist perspective on legal change and path dependence and compares three case studies of policy innovation pertaining to language rights. First, the US Department of Education's interpretation of Title VI largely succeeded in its attempt to establish a right for national origin minority students with limited English proficiency to receive meaningful access to education regardless of language ability. Second, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was less successful in its efforts to find similar language rights for limited English proficient workers under Title VII. Third, in contrast to a regulatory approach, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to include express protections for "language minorities."

My explanation for why rights expanded in all three policy arenas, albeit to different degrees in each of the institutional contexts, is that regulatory constructions of the civil rights requirements contributed to a transformation of norms and expectations surrounding language access. Bureaucratic entrepreneurs within civil rights enforcement agencies used informal policy guidance to construct regulatory rights. Deference from courts and other institutions to these regulatory assertions imparted legal effect to these regulatory constructions and contributed to variations in the strength of regulatory rights.

The United States’ population is rapidly changing, but the ways in which political scientists measure and understand representation have not kept apace. Marginal shifts in descriptive representation over the past two decades have run counter to widely espoused ideals regarding political accessibility and democratic competition. A central assumption often made by academics, and the public, has been that groups which are otherwise disadvantaged in politics may leverage their communities’ numerical size as a political resource to gain influence. To this end, many studies of racial descriptive representation find that a larger minority population is associated with a higher likelihood of a racial minority running for and/or winning. However, these positive relationships between population growth and descriptive representation are tempered by an extensive literature documenting limits on racial minority groups’ political incorporation. Moreover, current frameworks for understanding group competition or patterns of descriptive representation are silent about whether shifts in racial demographics may also have an effect on the balance of representation between women and men.

These contradictions in debates over representation, and how groups gain influence, undermine the notion that eventually, marginalized groups will be fully incorporated into politics. White women have had de jure access to the voting franchise in the United States since 1920. In the intervening period, women have made up approximately half the population, and outnumbered male voters in every presidential election since 1964. Yet, women have held a quarter or less of all state legislative seats across the country for well over two decades, and only reached 100 members of Congress in 2014.

The case for eventual incorporation is similarly dubious when we consider the racial composition of elected bodies. The racial balance of American communities is in flux largely due to Asian and Latina/o immigration, which will continue to be the case into the forecastable future. Presently, Asian Americans and Latina/os make up 23 percent of the U.S. population and are the two fastest growing racial groups in the country. Members of these immigrant communities hold less than ten percent of all state legislative seats, and a similar fraction of seats in the 115th Congress. Taken together, these yawning gaps between presence in the population and representation in elected office strongly suggest that “time” alone may be an insufficient remedy for underrepresentation.

Moreover, for those who are living in the United States now, the current demographic makeup of state legislatures—which includes over 7500 elected seats nationally—raises doubts about their representative legitimacy. Asian American and Latina/o women and men typically have socioeconomic experiences, political perspectives and policy priorities that are distinct from that of their most likely descriptive representative—a White man. At the same time, state legislatures have been veritable policy engines for bills and resolutions related to immigration and immigrants in recent years. The National Council of State Legislatures reports that in 2015 state legislatures enacted 216 laws and passed 274 resolutions related to immigrants and immigration. Even as these bodies write, debate, and pass legislation targeting immigrant communities, Asian Americans and Latina/os are rarely in the room. Researchers increasingly point to the scarcity of female or racial minority candidates as a key explanatory factor, but seldom examine issues related to race and gender at the same time. As a result, the extant scholarship obscures the outsized effects that White men’s candidacies have in defining American elections, and overlooks the distinct challenges that women of color face in getting on the ballot.

This dissertation examines the intersecting roles of race and gender in elections, with particular attention to how they may be changing as immigrant communities become a larger proportion of the American population. I analyze the Gender Race and Communities in Elections dataset, which encompasses all state legislative general election winners and candidates from 1996-2015, and includes demographic information for candidates and their district populations. This original dataset provides the first opportunity to simultaneously analyze descriptive representation in state legislatures, for women and men in the four largest racial groups, at the national level. I also present the results of a national survey of state legislators, and in-depth interviews with political elites, in order to reveal race-gendered, informal, processes of candidate development and deterrence.

I also show that practical opportunities to compete in elections are sharply, and simultaneously, constrained by candidates’ race and gender. These constraints are most evident in the lopsided distribution of racial populations across districts, the uneven candidate development efforts of civic and political organizations, and the dominance of men in elite political networks, across racial groups.

Based on my examination of Asian American and Latina/o candidates in elections, I advance a Race-Gendered Model for understanding the persistence of underrepresentation in state legislatures. I conceptualize elections as competitions for descriptive representation, and account for the disparate social and political experiences of women and men from different racial groups. Within this framework, race and gender simultaneously constrain potential candidates’ access to elections, producing a frequent absence of competition for descriptive representation. This model uses an intersectional approach to explain why Asian American and Latina/o women and men do not run more often, and why the majority of ballots are made up exclusively of White male candidates.

I demonstrate that the increasing “strength in numbers” of Asian American and Latina/o communities has primarily served as a resource for increasing the racial diversity of men in statehouses—to the limited extent that racial diversity has increased at all. I also show that the most advantaged descriptive group, White men, benefits from an absence of competition in most electoral contests. At the same time, the fastest growing groups of women—Asian Americans and Latinas—are also the groups most frequently excluded from competing.

The Race-Gendered Model expands the intellectual terrain available to answer longstanding questions in the study of women and racial minorities’ underrepresentation. Along the way, I argue that it is necessary to simultaneously consider why White men’s overrepresentation is similarly persistent. More broadly, the theory of competition presented in this dissertation shifts away from a central focus on the advantages and disadvantages groups face during election campaigns. Instead, I argue that the choices voters face in electing a descriptive representative are limited long before election day.

This dissertation provides three studies on the state’s treatment of noncitizens in the United States, focusing on two groups in particular: asylum seekers and farmworkers. Together, these three chapters probe decisionmaking in each branch of the government, with particular attention to the interplay between them. The first chapter examines decisionmaking within the federal courts and considers their role in reviewing decisions of the immigration agency, the second explores how support for the detention of asylum seekers evolved within the executive and the legislature, and the third explores how the administrative state engages with a particularly vulnerable population: migrant farmworkers.

Chapter 1 considers appeals of asylum claims from the immigration agency to the United States Courts of Appeals. While there is consensus among attorneys and scholars alike that immigration adjudication is in a state of crisis, very few studies have examined how federal courts are reviewing this agency in crisis, and what role they play (or ought to play) through their review. This chapter focuses on asylum appeals at the federal appellate level, and builds an original database of asylum cases across five circuits over seven years. As it reveals, the Courts of Appeals have created a wide variety of court-fashioned rules that serve to either expand or constrict the scope of their review of asylum appeals. As it demonstrates, the elasticity of the appellate review model permits this wide variation. I argue that the more expansive approach to review is normatively beneficial, as we ought to have an appellate review model that permits courts to be responsive to evidence of an agency in crisis. Since larger changes aimed at addressing the underlying flaws at the agency level are unlikely to be forthcoming soon, federal courts may be the only institutions equipped to meaningfully address problems within asylum adjudication.

Chapter 2, co-authored with Smita Ghosh, traces the institutional history of the mass detention of noncitizens in the United States. Drawing upon an analysis of congressional records and media coverage from 1981 to 1996, it examines the growth of mass immigration detention. It traces an important shift during this period: while detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative that was received with skepticism from the legislature, Congress was ultimately responsible for entrenching the system over objections from the agency. As Chapter 2 reveals, a critical component of this evolution was a transformation in the legislative perception of asylum seekers: while lawmakers initially decried their detention, they later branded them as dangerous. It illuminates how elements of the new penology, such as the rhetoric of risk, were also critical in transforming the perception of asylum seekers.

Chapter 3 turns to the institutional treatment of another vulnerable group of noncitizens, farmworkers, and considers the failure of the administrative state to protect them. While the administrative state is said to pervade nearly every aspect of modern life, it has largely failed this population. Despite a robust regulatory framework governing the treatment of farmworkers, these laws are rarely enforced. One agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), has emerged as a leader in enforcing the rights available to farmworkers, and won millions of dollars in settlements and verdicts and secured a wide range of injunctive relief. Chapter 3 explores the process by which the EEOC became much more assertive in enforcing its mandate to protect farmworkers. While its progress was slowed by its initial hesitation to view its civil rights mandate as encompassing farmworkers, it eventually changed course, and began to pursue discrimination claims on behalf of farmworkers. This runs contrary to the narrative often told about the agency, and suggests that the EEOC has employed non-bureaucratic, carefully tailored ways of achieving structural reform in the context of farmworkers. While far from perfect, the EEOC’s trajectory provides a model for other agencies that are poised to have a much larger impact in enforcing the rights of farmworkers.

The study of Black representation has focused largely on the relationship between formal congruence between having a descriptive representative and their commitments with respect to serving Black interests. But because the suite of tools that any individual Congressman has at their disposal are so often tied to factors beyond their control, the field has usually measured the quality of representation through formal measures such as roll-call votes and agenda setting rather than in terms of material outcomes. This dissertation attempts to re- center the study of material outcomes for understanding the impact of Black representation by looking at major changes in the institution of Congress and within the polity. In Chapter 1, the history of representation in the Courts is discussed to illuminate how the contempo- rary epistemological understanding of representation within political science was established, which is termed the comparative framework of representation. In Chapter 2, it is argued that the dynamics of the Congressional policymaking process have shifted the focus of Black lawmakers from being primarily concerned with legislating around issues chiefly relevant to Black communities and more so concerned with being party loyalists. Building on that, it is then argued that the nature of contemporary political science has shifted away from analysis of institutions and, in doing so, obscures the ways in which incentives of members across racial lines are circumscribed in ways that hamper the chances for substantive policies benefiting Black people to pass, a phenomenon called “anti-Black governance”. In Chapter 3, federal award funding sent home by Members of Congress is used to argue that Black members compensate for their legislative constraints through disproportionate effort in non- legislative activity, a strategy called representational triage. Finally, in Chapter 4, the desire for descriptive representation within Black communities is discussed as a counterweight to a more critical vision that would call for its elimination as a political tool.