MinE Best Paper Award

In 2022, the Hub co-created and co-sponsored with the EEA the MinE Best Paper Award, given to the best paper presented in the annual EEA congress whose focus is on the study of LGBTQ+, Race-Ethnicity-Religion and/or Disabilities. The inaugural prize was awarded to Federico Ricca and Francesco Trebbi for their paper Minority Underrepresentation in US Cities. This paper investigates the patterns of Minority representation and voter registration in U.S. municipal governments. For the period 1981-2020, they report substantial levels of strategic underrepresentation of African American, Asian, and Latino voters in U.S. local politics. Disproportionality in the representation and in voter registration rates of Minority groups are widespread, but stronger when racial or ethnic minorities are electorally pivotal. Underrepresentation is determined by the combination of several institutional features, starting from systematic disparity in voter registration, strategic selection of electoral rules, city’s form of government, council size, and pay of elected members of the council. They also provide causal evidence of the strategic use of local political institutions in reducing electoral representation of minorities.

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