“Minority Voices: The Representational Roles of African Americans and Latinos during State Legislative Deliberations”.
My dissertation is an exciting project that develops an original measure of substantive representation using frame-based linguistic content analysis to explore differences in the deliberations of minority and non-minority legislators during committee hearings. My core argument is that the race of public officials influence their behavior during the policy making process and motivates their efforts in working on issues that come before the legislature, particularly minority interest legislation. The discoveries are intriguing and make theoretical and empirical contributions to the representation and deliberative democracy literature in unanticipated ways, particularly in ways that expand the scope of how substantive representation and deliberation is defined and investigated.