Can racial representation in local government impact individual migration decisions, public goods provision, and residential segregation in the city? By tracking individual migration patterns within and across cities using North Carolina voter registration records, and combining this with data from closely contested mayoral elections, I establish causal links between the election of a Black mayor and changes in individual location decisions. The analysis reveals that the election of a Black mayor leads to a 4.5% net increase in the population of majority-Black neighborhoods and a 2.8% increase in white neighborhoods in North Carolina. These findings are supported by tract-level data from 120 major U.S. cities. By examining individual migration decisions, I further demonstrate that these net population changes result from reduced out-migration among both Black and white residents, as well as a modest increase in in-migration from outside the city. The net effect of these changes is an increase in racial segregation, driven by the greater concentration of Black individuals in majority-Black neighborhoods. Further analysis of the underlying mechanisms reveals that Black representation reduces the disparity in amenities between majority-Black and white neighborhoods and shifts local media focus toward Black neighborhoods.

Sesame Street’s representation of minority characters, egalitarian minority-white interactions and portrayal of working women was distinctive in the mass media landscape of 1969, when it started airing. By exploiting both age variation and technological variation in broadcast reception, this paper contributes to the media and contact theory literatures by showing that positive representations of minorities via mass media can reduce long-run prejudice and impact voting, an important societal outcome. We find that for preschool-age children, a 20 percentage point (1 standard deviation) increase in Sesame Street coverage reduced adult measures of implicit racial biases for white respondents and increased reported voting for minority and women candidates by 13 % and 9.7 % respectively. Voter turnout also increased by 4.4 %. Voting for Democratic candidates increased because of the increase in voting for diverse candidates. When the sample is restricted to ballots featuring white men, turnout gains are split between parties.

We draw on statewide data from North Carolina to examine the impacts of racial and ethnic representation in city councils on policing. Specifically, we focus on outcomes of traffic stops; e.g., whether a driver receives a warning or a citation after being stopped. We first document large Black-white and Latino-white disparities in the likelihood of consequence (arrest or citation) after a traffic stop. We then use a difference-in-differences design, focusing on changes following (narrow) elections of nonwhite (rather than white) councilmembers, and find that increased nonwhite council representation significantly reduces Black-white gaps in stops and actions taken after a stop. The magnitude of the reduction is similar with and without officer fixed effects, suggesting that results are largely driven by individual officer-level behavior change rather than a change in the composition of the police force.