A majority of recent studies finds that black members of Congress are more supportive of blacks' interests than are white members of Congress, even white Democrats. These results are limited, however, exclusively to the contemporary period as scholars have not studied how black members of Congress behaved during Reconstruction, the first era of blacks' descriptive representation. Although black representatives from this era are typically portrayed as having been responsive to blacks' interests, some recent studies suggest that they often supported whites' interests on issues important to their black constituents. Employing a measure of racial ideology as well as a measure of general ideology developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997), we investigate the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation in the U.S. House immediately after the Civil War, through the use of descriptive statistics, OLS regression, and forecasting techniques. We find that black Republicans during Reconstruction were more ideologically liberal on both general and racial issues than their white Republican colleagues in the South. These results suggest that the linkage between descriptive and substantive representation for blacks is not merely a recent phenomenon, but rather has more general applicability across time.
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