organized representation will have larger numbers of elected representatives, ceteris
paribus.
The Data
The thirty cities in the sample were randomly selected from the population of U.S.
cities ranging from 150,000 to 300,000 residents. Some of these mid-sized cities are
suburbs of larger metropolitan areas and do not serve as the center of political activity in
their region. Thus, I limited the population to cities which are designated as the “central
city” within their Metropolitan Statistical Area, according to the 2000 Census, and which
serve as the county seat.
These criteria ensure that the cities are comparable to one
another as centers for political activity in their respective metropolitan regions. Due to the
underlying population from which the sample was drawn and the randomness of the
sampling, the Southeast region is somewhat over-represented in the sample and the
Northeast is considerably under-represented.
For each city in the sample, I created a list of organizations representing racial
and ethnic groups that participate in local politics. The search for organizations in each
city included three steps. First, I searched for names of organizations in each city in the
online non-profit database, Melissa Data.
If the organization name or description
suggested that the organization was political or that it represented a race or ethnic group,
I recorded the organization’s name. Second, I searched the local daily newspaper in each
city for the names of organizations recorded from the non-profit database.
3
The group of mid-sized cities which are “central cities” is nearly the same as the group of mid-sized cities
which are county seats. Due to this overlap, the county seat criterion imposes few additional limits on
which cities qualify for the sample.
4
See Appendix A for a list of the thirty cities in the sample.
5
The Melissa non-profit database can be searched by zip code, making it well-suited to searches focused on
a specific locality. See Garson, G. David and Robert S. Biggs. 1992. Analytic Mapping and Geographic
Databases. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
6
Whenever possible, I searched the past 5 years of coverage in the local paper. For six of the cities in my
sample (Salinas, Lubbock, Winston-Salem, Mobile, Montgomery, and Tacoma), the newspaper’s online
database included fewer than five years of coverage. In these cases, I searched all of the years available in
the newspaper’s database. For a list of the newspapers used for each city, see Appendix B.
9
Convention