Between 1964 and 1968, Congress enacted three far-reaching civil rights statutes banning racial discrimination in voting, employment, and housing. Not all were equally effective, however. Civil rights policy scholars concur that voting rights was by far the most successful of the three; that fair housing policy was a general failure; and that equal employment policy achieved a moderate level of effectiveness. This proposal is thus motivated by a straightforward research question: why did each of these major civil rights laws experience such divergent outcomes?
The investigator proposes to answer this question by conducting a comparative analysis of voting rights, equal employment, and fair housing enforcement. Challenging conventional political institutional theories of civil rights policy outcomes, the author proposes a law-centered explanation derived from on-going disputes within law and society scholarship. The author argues that how the text of each statute was legally constructed and interpreted by lawmakers, agency administrators, and federal courts holds the key to understanding why some civil rights policies did better/worse than others. Specifically, the author proposes the following core hypothesis: divergent outcomes in voting rights, equal employment, and fair housing policy can be explained by the extent to which each policy incorporated and codified the group-centered "effects test" for defining, proving, and remedying unlawful discrimination. The group-centered effects test focuses on systemic group disadvantage rather than individual complaints, discriminatory consequences rather than discriminatory intent, and substantive group results rather than formal procedural justice. The data will consist predominantly of primary historical documents - both governmental and nongovernmental - to be collected at various archives in the Washington, D.C. area. The data will be analyzed with the use of analytic narrative to guide empirical and theoretical comparisons across these three cases of civil rights policy outcomes.
This research will illuminate the connection between legislative intent and legislative effects. The findings will contribute to a better understanding of how the design of legislation matters for insuring implementation that achieves the legislative purpose.
Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact of my comparative study of U.S. voting rights, equal employment, and fair housing: 1. A deeper theoretical understanding on why some state laws designed to improve the opportunities and life-chances of disadvantaged social groups succeed where others fail; 2. My historical findings have a direct bearing on current developments in U.S. civil rights law including, but not limited to: --current debates about terminating Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; --current political debate over the recent enactment of "voter ID" laws and whether such laws illegally discriminate against particular social groups; --recent S. Court rulings restricting disparate impact claims in situations involving employment tests and "reverse discrimination." My major findings directly pertain to arguments outlined in the proposal. Specifically, unlike voting rights and equal employment policy, fair housing failed to develop and institutionalize an 'effects' based administrative and legal approach to civil rights enforcement and thus best explains why fair housing policy fared so much worse than the voting rights and equal employment law. However, my research has revealed that things were more nuanced than I originally hypothesized: Nixon’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) originally pushed very hard for an effects-centered enforcement; one that was far more aggressive than I earlier believed and which was for several years kept secret from Nixon himself; Once Nixon found out about HUD’s activities, he shut it down and severely narrowed the scope of his administration’s fair housing efforts; I originally (and mistakenly) hypothesized that the ‘effects test’ was nowhere to be found in the Fair Housing Act between 1968-80. My research showed that this was an inaccurate claim. In the mid-to-late 1970s, Fair Housing Enforcement did move slightly towards an effects model, even if it never dominated the enforcement landscape. Generally speaking, however, these new findings did NOT generally alter my original hypotheses, only overstated it. Armed with my newfound knowledge on what actually happened, I am in a position to offer a more historically accurate, and thus theoretically precise, account of how and why fair housing compared in its effectiveness to voting rights and equal employment policy.
