Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:16:20.176Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Are Black state legislators more responsive to emails associated with the NAACP versus BLM? A field experiment on Black intragroup politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2021

Jeron Fenton  and
LaFleur Stephens-Dougan Open the ORCID record for LaFleur Stephens-Dougan [Opens in a new window]
Jeron Fenton
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA
LaFleur Stephens-Dougan*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

We fielded an experiment on a sample of approximately 400 Black state legislators to test whether they would be more responsive to an email that mentioned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) relative to an email that mentioned Black Lives Matter (BLM). The experiment tested Cohen's theory of secondary marginalization (1999), whereby relatively advantaged members of a marginalized group regulate the behavior, attitudes, and access to resources of less advantaged members of the group. We expected that Black legislators would be less responsive to an email that referenced BLM, an organization that is associated with more marginalized members of the Black community. Contrary to our hypothesis, Black legislators were as responsive to emails referencing inspiration from BLM as they were to emails referencing inspiration from the NAACP. Thus, we do not find any evidence of intragroup discrimination by Black state legislators. To our knowledge, this is the first field experiment to test Cohen's theory of secondary marginalization.1

Keywords

Black Lives MatterBlack politicsfield experimentsrespectability politicssecondary marginalization
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , July 2022 , pp. 203 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This study received approval from the Princeton University Institutional Review Board in 2017.

References

Benjamin, A (2017) Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781108233644CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bond, J (2000) SNCC: what we did. Monthly Review 5, 14–28.10.14452/MR-052-05-2000-09_2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broockman, DE (2013) Black politicians are more intrinsically motivated to advance Blacks’ interests: a field experiment manipulating political incentives. American Journal of Political Science 57, 521–536.10.1111/ajps.12018CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burden, BC (2007) The Personal Roots of Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.10.1515/9781400866939CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, DM and Broockman, DE (2011) Do politicians racially discriminate against constituents? A field experiment on state legislators. American Journal of Political Science 55, 463–477.10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00515.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, C (1999) Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226190518.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comenetz, J (2016) Frequently occurring surnames in the 2010 census. Census.gov.Google Scholar
Dawson, MC (1994) Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fryer, R and Levitt, S (2004) The causes and consequences of distinctively Black names. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 119, 767–805.10.1162/0033553041502180CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaines, KK (1996) Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and the Culture of the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.10.5149/uncp/9780807845431CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffin, H (2000) Their own received them not: African American lesbians and gays in Black churches. Theology and Sexuality 2000, 88–100.10.1177/135583580000601206CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffin, JD (2006) Electoral competition and democratic responsiveness: a defense of the marginality hypothesis. The Journal of Politics 68, 911–921.10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00479.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haines, HH (1984) Black radicalization and the funding of civil rights: 1957–1970. Social Problems 32, 31–43.10.2307/800260CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, RL (1996) Participation in Congress. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, FC (2012) The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199739677.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Higginbotham, EB (1993) Righteous discontent: The women’s movement in the Black Baptist church, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jefferson, H (2019) Policing Norms: Punishment and the Politics of Respectability Among Black Americans. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Lopez Bunyasi, T and Smith, CW (2019) Do all Black lives matter equally to Black people? Respectability politics and the limitations of linked fate. Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 4, 180–215.10.1017/rep.2018.33CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McAdam, D (1999) Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226555553.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minta, MD (2011) Oversight: Representing the interests of Blacks and Latinos in congress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Morgan, I and Davies, P (2012) From Sit-ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.10.5744/florida/9780813041513.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, AD (1984) The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. NY: Free Press.Google Scholar
Obasogie, OK and Newman, Z (2016) Black lives matter and respectability politics in local news accounts of officer-involved civilian deaths: an early empirical assessment. Wisconsin Law Review 2016, 541–574.Google Scholar
Plutzer, E (2002) Becoming a habitual voter: inertia, resources, and growth in young adulthood. American Political Science Review 96, 41–56.10.1017/S0003055402004227CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, CW (2018) The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shear, MD and Stack, L (2016) Obama urges activists to do more than ‘Yelling’. New York Times.Google Scholar
Smith, R (1996) We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Spence, L (2015) Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books.Google Scholar
Swain, C (1993) Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tate, K (2010) What's Going On? Political Incorporation and the Transformation of Black Public Opinion. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Tillery, AB (2019) What kind of movement is Black lives matter? The view from Twitter. Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 4, 297–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitby, K (1997) The Color of Representation: Congressional Behavior and Black Interests. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.10.3998/mpub.14985CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, IK (2007) When race matters and when it doesn't: racial group differences in response to racial cues. American Political Science Review 101, 339–354.10.1017/S0003055407070177CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, AR, Nathan, NL and Faller, JK (2015) What do i need to vote? Bureaucratic discretion and discrimination by local election officials. American Political Science Review 109, 129–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar