The current constitutional partisanship is bad for courts because it undermines the apolitical commitment to law on which their authority depends. It is bad for the Constitution because it converts protections that should be points of unity into vectors of division. And it is bad for the polity because it risks undermining consensus support for the basic ground rules that a functioning political process requires. To interrupt this trend and forestall these bad outcomes, judges should embrace what this book calls constitutional symmetry.

Chapter 6 delves deeper into how the anger rule affects Black political decision-making by extending our analysis to three adult national samples of Black Americans. We investigate how Black Americans evaluate a Black and white male politician’s expression of anger. We expect Black Americans to abide by the anger rule in spaces controlled by whites. In our first experimental study, Black Americans evaluate a Black or white Democratic politician running for United States Senate. The results show some evidence that Black Americans are more supportive of a non-angry Black politician relative to an angry Black politician and an angry white politician. In the second study, we provide a clearer signal of the racial makeup of the voting population – majority Black or white Congressional district. We find that Black Americans only reward a non-angry Black politician relative to an angry Black politician when running in a majority white congressional district. Black Americans do not prefer this type of Black politician running in a majority Black congressional district. In the third study, we show that when Black Americans are encouraged to express anger, they gravitate toward politics challenging their group’s status.

Although the 13 United States courts of appeals are the final word on 99 percent of all federal cases, there is no detailed account of how these courts operate. How do judges decide which decisions are binding precedents and which are not? Who decides whether appeals are argued orally? What administrative structures do these courts have? The answers to these and hundreds of other questions are largely unknown, not only to lawyers and legal academics but also to many within the judiciary itself. Written and Unwritten is the first book to provide an inside look at how these courts operate. An unprecedented contribution to the field of judicial administration, the book collects the differing local rules and internal procedures of each court of appeals. In-depth interviews of the chief judges of all 13 circuits and surveys of all clerks of court reveal previously undisclosed practices and customs.

Our final chapter puts all of the results together and explores their implications. We revisit our argument in relation to our findings of how the “anger rule” sustains group-based inequality between Black and white Americans. We take up how the anger rule can apply to other groups in American society and hampers their ability to fight against injustice. We also evaluate spaces (e.g., counter-public) these groups have had to operate in to express themselves emotionally and challenge their group’s status.

Chapter 4 investigates if whites apply an “anger penalty” to a Black politician relative to a white politician. We examine if an angry Black Democrat politician is racially handicapped among racially prejudiced whites. We test our predictions using several survey experiments on adult national samples of whites. We uncover evidence of an anger penalty in that racially prejudiced whites evaluate an angry Black Democrat politician more unfavorably than a non-angry Black Democrat politician and an angry white Democrat politician. Additionally, we find a similar effect among whites oriented to supporting group-based social hierarchies (i.e., having a social dominance orientation). In another study, we examine if this anger penalty depends on the issue. We expect an anger penalty is greater when the issue implicates Black Americans than if it is unrelated to the group. The findings show that racially prejudiced whites penalize a Black politician only when the anger is related to a racialized issue and not when the issue is unrelated to race. In our final experimental study, we examine whether a Black female politician’s anger is treated differently than a Black male’s; the anger penalty does not appear to be conditioned on gender.

Primaries might also contribute to party transformation by incentivizing candidates to move position within an election cycle. Candidates might face a “strategic positioning dilemma” if they must first satisfy an extreme selectorate to earn the nomination before facing a comparatively moderate general electorate. This chapter therefore tests whether all candidates in a primary adapt their positions away from the center during the nomination phase of a single election cycle, presenting general election voters with polarized choices. To scale positions both during and after a primary it uses a text-as-data approach based on candidates’ communication on Twitter during the 2020 election cycle. It finds that Democratic candidates who lost primaries became significantly more moderate immediately after their defeat, especially if they lost in ideological or factional primaries. It does not observe this pattern among Republican losers. This chapter demonstrates a further way in which primaries may contribute to polarization, incentivizing candidates to adopt positions further from the ideological center during the nomination phase of the election cycle.

This chapter presents the descriptive argument that primary elections have undergone a fundamental transformation along several dimensions between 2006 and 2020. In particular, it presents evidence that during this period primary elections became factional, with candidates receiving support from distinct parts of their party coalition; and ideological, with candidates framing their candidacies in terms of positional differences from their intra-party opponents. These changes were associated with a higher rate of contested primaries.

The book concludes by considering the broader implications of the findings of the previous chapters to the study of congressional primaries and the institution of Congress. This chapter advocates that we need to rethink how primaries matter in influencing candidate positioning and elite party identity. It also considers the implications for the scholarly community, citizens’ representation, and practical applications given the current focus on primary reform. It suggests several avenues for further research that can build on the book, as well as identifying potential limitations of this work. It concludes by considering the implications of these findings for the two parties in 2023 and beyond.

Having shown that primaries can reorient parties in Chapter 4, this chapter tests the first mechanism through which primaries are said to contribute to partisan polarization: the selective effect of voter preferences. It therefore tests whether primary voters prefer noncentrist candidates, all else being equal. Through a set of four analyses it tests whether primary voters prefer candidates further from the center when they are presented with a comparatively moderate and polarized alternative, whether moderate incumbents are more threatened, whether candidates who emerge from (ideological and factional) primaries are more “extreme” than other candidates, and whether there is any relationship between turnout and nominee position. Taken together, the findings in this chapter demonstrate the absence of a select effect from primary voters in nonincumbent primaries and only a weak and substantively small effect when an incumbent is present, suggesting that the polarizing effect identified in Chapter 4 is largely independent from the preferences expressed by primary voters.