Gender, Ethnicity, and Support for Bilingual Education: Will Just Any Woman or Latino Do? A Contingent “No”

Among the most well-established consequences of the election of minorities to public office is an increase in the degree to which minority interests are substantively represented. Recent work argued that minorities also benefit from the presence of female legislators; however, it remains unclear whether minorities can expect to benefit from the presence of all women or solely women of color. Susan Dovi has argued that descriptive representatives are more likely to be effective if they possess strong mutual relationships with disposed subgroups of historically disadvantaged groups. In this piece, we argued that one implication of Dovi's argument is that women of color will be more effective descriptive representatives than their male counterparts. We examined this hypothesis by focusing on the effect of Latino/a school board members on education policies in Texas school districts. The results suggested that while the presence of Latinos on school boards is associated with increased district financial and institutional support for bilingual education, the presence of Latina board members results in much more substantial levels of support. We found no evidence for the notion that the substantive representation of Latino/as is facilitated by the presence of non-Latina women on the board.