We can learn some interesting things about politics and race in America when Jake Mueller and DeShawn Jackson each contact their state legislators to seek help in registering to vote.

The short version: White lawmakers are more likely to respond to Jake and minority lawmakers are even more likely to respond to DeShawn. At least that's what two Yale University researchers - one from Austin - found when they invented Jake and DeShawn.

The political science experiment was dastardly simple. In October 2008, the researchers sent emails to 4,859 state legislators from 44 states, including Texas. Just over 2,700 replied. Some of the emails asked for help registering for the Democratic primary, some sought help registering for the GOP primary and some made no mention of party.

The genius of the study was the use of the names DeShawn Jackson and Jake Mueller.

"Among individuals named DeShawn, almost all are black; among individuals named Jake, almost all are white," the report said, noting similar characteristics for Mueller (white) and Jackson (black).

The study was done by Yale political science professor Daniel Butler and Yale student David Broockman (an LBJ High School alum and son of my friends Eric and Susan Broockman). Readers of this newspaper first were introduced to Broockman in December 2003 when, as a 14-year-old high school freshman, he so impressed fellow Howard Dean backers that he was picked to file Dean's paperwork for the Texas Democratic presidential primary.

Broockman gets his Yale degree this month and then heads to Cal-Berkeley for graduate studies in political science. I'm not sure what happened to Dean.

The study - titled "Do Politicians Racially Discriminate Against Constituents? A Field Experiment on State Legislators" and to be published in the American Journal of Political Science - found, to a statistically significant degree, white lawmakers were more likely to respond to Jake and minority lawmakers were even more likely to respond to DeShawn. See the article at tinyurl.com/jake-and-deshawn.

The researchers noted that while they believe the results are statistically significant, they cannot "robustly attach causality" to the race component. In other words, there's no telling why a particular lawmaker (or his or her staff) did or did not respond to a particular email.

But the results are the results. When the email request made no mention of party, white Democratic legislators were 6.8 percentage points less likely to respond to DeShawn than they were to Jake. Minority Democratic lawmakers were 16.5 percentage points more likely to respond to DeShawn than Jake.

White Republicans were 7.6 percentage points less likely to reply to DeShawn. There are too few minority Republicans to test responses from them.

The overall conclusion is that a legislator's race - not party - "is more important in predicting discrimination." "Once race is taken into account, white Democrats discriminate at a rate similar to white Republicans," the researchers concluded.

Some other bottom lines:

Legislators from both parties, by a margin of 4.5 percentage points, were more responsive to folks of their own party.

By 8.1 percentage points, GOP legislators were less likely than Democrats to respond to DeShawn.

White Democrats and Republicans "discriminated" against DeShawn "at nearly identical and significant levels," a 6.8 percentage point difference among Democrats and 7.6 points among Republicans.

But the discrimination (the researchers' term, not mine) among white lawmakers was less than the discrimination among minority lawmakers, who responded to DeShawn 16.5 percentage points more than they responded to Jake.

That 16.5 number caught my eye. Broockman cautioned against reading too much into it.

"Some people read that and say it's clearly reverse discrimination. Some people read that and say minorities are behaving as they should to counteract discrimination. We have nothing to say," he said, declaring the researchers "academically agnostic" on that finding.

What's it all mean?

"Our results raise concerns that regardless of their party, the very legislators responsible for crafting the ways that citizens interact with nearly all American political institutions display a willingness to discriminate against minorities when they seek access to these institutions," Butler and Broockman wrote, adding, "our results also indicate that white legislators of both parties, and not just Republicans, might be inclined to limit minority turnout for reasons unexplained by these groups' partisan preferences."

What do we learn from Jake and DeShawn?

"While the election of Barack Obama as the United States' first black president is an auspicious development for race relations in America, our politics are still not color blind."

I'm not sure we needed Butler and Broockman - or Jake and DeShawn - to remind us of that.

kherman@statesman.com; 445-3907

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