Our concluding chapter examines race, civil society, and social movements. What do political actors do when the chain of democratic accountability and responsiveness is broken? How do we understand the origins of protest movements and more radical forms of political participation? How do ordinary citizens in a diverse democracy contest and claim power for the people and effect change?

How can institutions be “racist?” What additional challenges are posed when bias is produced and reproduced by everyday institutional practices? This chapter traces the historical evolution of institutional discrimination from Reconstruction to the present, highlighting explicit legal and implicit policy-level discrimination in the Jim Crow era, the New Deal, and historical immigration policy. It also provides more in-depth analysis of the role of race in the present-day housing market, in the criminal justice system, and in election administration.

This framing chapter focuses on the nation’s founding and the salience of inequality and race that is baked into our founding documents. It also discusses the concept of democracy that prevailed at the time of the founding and why it represented a radical departure from the past influences of Anglo and French political thought. It introduces the concept of multiple political traditions within American democracy.

Here we first highlight the central role played by the vote and political participation in the democratic process. We then look at who votes and who participates in politics. The chapter underscores severe racial imbalances across most types of participation—both conventional and less conventional. It then seeks to explain these imbalances through a rigorous examination of factors like socioeconomic status, group identity and consciousness, institutions, and mobilization. We also look at the impact of uneven participation on outcomes in American democracy and introduce potential solutions for existing inequities.

This chapter considers the impact of expanding national power and the configuration of the federal government’s constitutional power in the exercise of the police power by state governments. It considers (and rejects) the claim of a national police power. It proceeds to discuss the ways in which the nature and scope of the police power does contribute to a dynamic federalism, thereby augmenting not supplanting federal power, all in the service of a successful and basically progressive approach to regulation and regulatory power generally.

Our next task is to delve more deeply into inputs into our system of government from public opinion to the media, parties, and elections. All of this, we hope, will inform us about the openness of our democracy and about the desires and actions of the public.

Chapters Ten through Fifteen ask: who wins office? What policies do they pursue? Whose voices are heard and whose are ignored? And ultimately how are these patterns of inclusion and exclusion reflected in core policy areas like criminal justice, voting rights, and social rights?

To what extent does race predict vote choice in the array of American elections? How does the impact of race compare with class, gender, age, and other demographic factors? And how has racially polarized voting changed in the face of the growing diversity of the American electorate? After demonstrating an increasingly close connection between race and the vote, this chapter seeks to explain the link between race and vote choice. Although we note that a series of nonracial factors account for some of the racial divide in the vote, research also clearly shows that racial considerations and increasing concerns about immigration greatly shape both sides of the vote. We also focus on the rise of nonpartisanship among the minority population and on the role that parties have played in the past and could play in the future in incorporating immigrants.

The chapter begins with a brief introduction to different conceptions of representation. It proceeds to focus on descriptive representation and the degree to which elected leaders in this nation have demographically mirrored the public over time. Despite enormous gains, it is clear that the halls of power remain overwhelmingly White. The text assesses the implications of the dearth of minorities in office for both policy and minority wellbeing. Next, we seek to understand the causes of the underrepresentation of minorities. We assess the role that institutions, financial resources, candidates, and, perhaps most importantly, White voters play in limiting minority representation.

This chapter covers the media, race, and politics. It begins by introducing the key concepts of priming, framing, and agenda-setting. It then offers a history of the use of race in electoral campaigns highlighting the difference between racially explicit and racially implicit frames on crime, welfare, and other policy areas. That history includes the progression from a Republican ‘Southern Strategy” focused primarily on race and African Americans to one increasingly focused on immigration and religion in recent years. The chapter then turns to different assessments of the impact of these campaigns. Excerpts cover media conglomeration and the debate over whether the media has a liberal bias and/or an anti-minority bias.

How has discrimination changed over time? What does discrimination look like today? This chapter begins by highlighting severe and systematic acts of discrimination throughout American history. It then assesses contemporary discrimination through a range of audit studies and other methods and then delves into individual perceptions of discrimination.

In Part Two, we proceed to try to understand how race is lived in America, with two chapters that focus on the role of discrimination in our individual lives as well as in our institutions:

This chapter explains different definitions of citizenship including citizenship as status, as rights, as participation, and as identity. It highlights key immigration laws and periods of immigrant inclusion and exclusion. The chapter also presents basic data on demographic change through American political history.

Beginning after the end of Reconstruction, this chapter looks at the ways in which the police power emerged to facilitate an increasingly bold project of regulation. Key Supreme Court decisions supported the use of the police power to undertake and implement the objectives of a growing economy and a widening sphere of government. State power accompanied expanding national power and all levels of government tackled myriad persistent and new problems. In a case from the early twentieth century, for example, the Court upheld a vaccine requirement as a reasonable exercise of the public health authority of the state. Regulatory power was called into question by the Supreme Court’s Lochner-era decisions, but even this two-decades-long movement did not seriously threaten the ability of state governments to carry out ambitious regulatory agendas. Significantly, the Court put its imprimatur on the government’s zoning power in key cases from the late 1920s. And though the Court would message to the states that there were limits on how far they could go in restricting property rights, through doctrines such as “regulatory takings,” what emerged by the end of World War II was a robust conception of the state police power, one that gave government a wide sphere of action and authority to protect the general welfare.

This chapter lays out the perplexing neglect of the police power in contemporary discussions of constitutional governance and public law. It explains some of the reasons for this neglect, and turns to a set of reasons why a richer understanding of modern constitutional governance requires more scrupulous attention to the police power as a tool of regulatory policymaking.