Past research shows that candidates' racial identities influence the assumptions that voters draw about how they will behave in office. In a national survey experiment examining televised candidate advertisements, we find evidence that stereotypes differ both in their potency and how vulnerable they are to disconfirmation. Consistent with previous work, black candidates are broadly assumed to be more liberal than white candidates, although the effect is notably small in magnitude. Yet when it comes to more specific stereotypes—how black candidates will behave on individual issues—effects are not only much larger, but also more contingent on what information is available. We find that by providing a small bit of ideological information, black candidates can overcome the assumption that they will enact liberal policies as concerns taxation and non-racialized aspects of social welfare policy. But it is much more difficult for them to overturn the assumption that they will prioritize aid to minorities while in office.

The literature examining the effect of residential integration on political behavior primarily focuses on how whites react to the entrance of non-whites into their communities. Over the past few decades however, the process of “white return” to urban centers throughout the nation has created the opportunity to invert the standard approach to studying racial context by exploring how minorities react to the entrance of whites into their communities. We adapt realistic conflict theories to the case of gentrification, and offer a model of the effect of white in-migration on social capital (SC) and political engagement in black communities. We demonstrate that white population growth erodes SC in black neighborhoods only where the larger surrounding community is majority black, and where such growth is accompanied by rising housing costs. Further, we find that residing in a gentrifying context, by eroding social capital, ultimately results in the political demobilization of black citizens.

What explains why some Latinos feel strongly tied to their coethnics while others do not? Demographic context is one of the most cited predictors of identity strength, but the size and direction of its effects are disputed. Geographic differences in policy environments may explain the phenomenon. We argue that high levels of immigration enforcement indirectly lead to increased feelings of ethnic linked fate by determining where and how demographic context—in this case, the size of the immigrant population—will be salient. To test this, we combine information from local immigration-enforcement data (obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests) with the Latino Decisions' 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. The results suggest native-born Latinos have a stronger sense of ethnic linked fate when they live near large immigrant populations and rates of enforcement are high. When enforcement is low, the presence of immigrants has a negligible effect on native-born attitudes. Foreign-born Latinos' sense of linked fate is unaffected by policy context. These results suggest that as immigration enforcement becomes intensifies, conservative politicians may see increased backlash, at least in certain communities, from native-born Latinos. This is because feelings about ethnic linked fate correlate with increased participation and more proimmigrant policy stances.

This paper demonstrates that the relationship between wanting a descriptive representative based on gender, and giving that attitude weight in voting decisions, is weakest among White women voters. Among under-represented groups of voters, White women were uniquely positioned going into the 2016 presidential election—they had the option to choose “one of their own” in terms of race and gender. Yet, the majority did not vote for the White woman on the ballot, Hillary Rodham Clinton. This outcome is an opportunity to interrogate how descriptive representation functions in different ways across groups with distinct socio-political positions in American politics. I argue that the relationship between desiring descriptive representation, and giving it weight when deciding for whom to vote for, is different across groups. Using American National Election Survey (ANES) data, I show that this is the case in the 2016 election. Nearly two-thirds of White women who said that electing more women is important, voted for Trump. Moreover, White women's espoused belief in the necessity of electing more women had no significant effect on their ultimate vote choice. In contrast, the same desire for increased descriptive representation based on gender had large, positive, and significant effects on women of color's vote choice. This study bears on extant research considering descriptive representation's importance to voters based only on race, or gender, and on the broader literature linking group identities and voter behavior.

This article posits that the key to understanding the low levels of political involvement within contemporary immigrant communities, such as Asian and Latino communities, requires a closer examination of the partisan socialization process of the native-born children of immigrants. This article finds that many native-born children of immigrants, otherwise known as second-generation Americans, experience what I call a “prolonged partisan socialization process.” In the absence of parental partisan transmission, many second-generation Americans are left to find their own path to partisan attainment. The consequences of this are that many second-generation Americans eventually come to find their partisan identity outside of the home and much later in life. These findings disrupt the traditional partisan attainment story, which assumes that partisanship is the product of a process of socialization led by parents. Accounting for this prolonged socialization process provides significant insight into why partisan identification, and by extension political participation, among many second-generation Americans, such as Latinos and Asians appears muted. Therefore, while it will likely take some time for many within these contemporary immigrant communities to reach “partisan maturity,” we should not mistake the prolonged socialization process to mean that these individuals are destined to be politically disengaged.

While the concept and measurement of race has been a longstanding focus of social science research, capturing its significance requires a broader notion than utilizing only racial group categories. More recently, race has been treated as both a “characteristic” and a set of experiences that affect a multitude of life conditions and outcomes. This discussion and analysis moves away from treating race as only a categorical and static characteristic to a multi-dimensional concept that is dynamic, relational, and represents the intersection of individual, ecological, and structural components. By exploring the data collection of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and studies that include race as a variable, we were able to trace how race has been used by social scientists over the past 60 years. Using an extensive coding protocol, we have attained key characteristics of the principal investigator(s) (PI), funders, scope of the overall study, and the use of different measures of race. As a result, this “meta-analysis” of social science surveys enabled this researcher to examine how these studies use a wide scope of racial “variables,” and the way in which PI characteristics affected the inclusion of race-related items. In addition, bivariate analysis is presented to examine social scientists’ tendencies in investigating race and inclusion of qualitative examples of item wordings and response categories. This overview of social science studies is placed in the context of conceptual and measurement issues surrounding the use and meaning of race. Hopefully this can serve to advance the discussion and strategic approaches in doing research about race and what should be incorporated in studying race as a lived experience.

History suggests that social movements for change are often met with powerful counter-movements. Relying upon movement counter-movement dynamics, this paper examines whether or not contemporary reactionary conservatism—in this case Donald Trump's candidacy in 2016, offers an opportunity for African-American mobilization. Today, the reactionary right presents a threat to racial progress and the black community as it has grown from direct opposition to the election of President Obama, immigration reform, and gay and lesbian rights. With conditions ripe for a movement in response to the right, we examine the mobilizing effect on African-Americans of the threatening political context symbolized by Donald Trump. If African-Americans are to retain political relevance beyond the Obama era, then black turnout will need to reach rates similar to the historic 2008 election. Using the 2016 Black Voter Project (BVP) Pilot Study, we explore African-American political engagement in the 2016 election, a time void of President Obama as a mobilizing figure. We find that African-Americans who hold strong negative opinions of Trump in 2016 voted at rates similar to the historical turnout of 2008, offering a possible strategy to mobilize blacks beyond Obama's presidency. Moreover, the threat that Trump represents significantly drives blacks to engage in politics beyond voting even after accounting for alternative explanations. In the end, Trump and the reactionary movement behind him offers a powerful mobilizing force for an African-American population that can no longer look toward the top of the Presidential ticket for inspiration.

Though African-American and Latino electoral success in state legislative and congressional elections continues to occur almost entirely in majority-minority districts, minorities now have new opportunities in districts that are only 40–50% minority. This success can primarily be explained in terms of a curvilinear model that generates a “sweet spot” of maximum likelihood of minority candidate electoral success as a function of minority population share of the district and the proportion of the district that votes Republican. Past racial redistricting legal challenges often focused on cracking concentrated racial minorities to prevent the creation of majority-minority districts. Future lawsuits may also follow in the steps of recent successful court challenges against racially motivated packing that resulted in the reduction of minority population percentage in a previously majority-minority district in order to enhance minority opportunity in an adjacent non-majority-minority district.

The literature on immigration is divided between theories that highlight the importance of prejudice and theories that emphasize realistic threat as the primary driver of anti-immigration attitudes. This study examines how prejudice and realistic threat impact White Americans’ attitudes toward accepting refugees and immigrants in general. Using data from the 2016 American National Election Study and the 2016 Chicago Council Survey, I show that even though refugees differ from other immigrants in terms of their legal status and the rhetoric pertaining to them, attitudes toward immigration policies relating to both refugees and immigrants in general are primarily driven by prejudice.

A growing body of research suggests that proximal exposure to immigration enforcement can have important social and health-related consequences. However, there is little research identifying the impact of proximal contact with immigration policy on political attitudes and behaviors, and still less investigating the underlying mechanisms that might connect contact and political dispositions. Drawing on insights from criminal justice, we argue that proximal immigration contact influences political behavior via a sense of injustice with respect to the discriminatory application of immigration enforcement. The impact of a sense of injustice should primarily hold among Latinos, who are targeted on the basis of race, ethnicity, accent, and skin color. Nevertheless, it may also hold among Blacks, whose communities are targeted more generally, and Asians, to whom issues related to immigration are likewise important. In order to assess this theory, we leverage a survey with nationally representative samples of four different racial groups. We find that proximal contact motivates participation in protests, and does so indirectly via a sense of injustice for white and Asian respondents. Latino and Black respondents are primarily motivated by injustice irrespective of contact. In sum, the results suggest that immigration enforcement and non-immigration-related criminal justice policies may have similar political effects on those who are proximately affected.

What shapes Americans' attitudes toward and about Native Americans? Public opinion research acknowledges that race and ethnicity are a factor in shaping US public opinion. Native Americans have been almost entirely excluded from this research. But we do know that, despite being a relatively small population, the general public holds stereotypes and false narratives about Native Americans that have been perpetuated by popular culture, education curriculum, and national myths. In this paper, we use new and original data collected under the Reclaiming Native Truth project to examine the factors that shape attitudes toward Native Americans. More specifically, we examine individual and contextual factors that shape views of discrimination against Native Americans and resentment toward Native Americans. We find that political ideology (liberal versus conservative) and the reliance on Native American stereotypes are factors most consistently associated with resentment and attitudes about Native American discrimination, although direct personal experiences and factual knowledge also matter. Our findings contribute to conversations about attitudes toward racial and ethnic minority groups and emerging scholarship on the role of political attitudes in settler-colonial societies.

In this research note, we explore compare and contrast three methods for measuring race. We utilize as our baseline, or “true”, measure expert coded racial categories, and to this compare two alternatives. The first is a hybrid Bayesian analysis of racial/ethnic surname lists and population distributions, which allow us to develop a race probability score for each candidate. The second is a novel and innovative crowdsourcing method that allows many contributors to classify the racial identity of candidates. We analyze and discuss the potential benefits, pitfalls, and tradeoffs of each method. We conclude with the implications of these new measures for future election research as well as race and politics scholarship more broadly.

One of the long-standing puzzles in the political behavior literature is about immigrants' low level of political participation: after achieving comparable and sometimes even higher levels of socioeconomic status relative to the native-born citizens, why do immigrants still participate less in politics? We argue that the different formative years experiences associated with immigrants who moved to the United States at an older age is the key that explains the participation gap between immigrants and the native-born population. Using the 1994–2016 Current Population Survey and their Voting and Civic Engagement Supplements as data sources, we develop a hierarchical model that simultaneously accounts for region-, country-, and individual-level variables. The results are striking. We show that immigrants who move to the United States at a young age participate in politics at a rate that is indistinguishable from the native-born population; those who migrated at an older age participate less. The fact that over 60% of the immigrant population moved to the United States as adults is a main factor that contributes to the political participation gap between immigrants and the native-born population.

The American public's beliefs about the causes of social inequality vary greatly, with debates over the causes of racial inequality tending to be the most salient and divisive. Among whites in particular, liberals tend to see inequality as rooted in society's ills, whereas conservatives tend to see inequality as rooted in individuals’ shortcomings. Given this, many infer that white conservatives are more likely than white liberals to adopt the controversial view that racial inequality is “natural,” i.e., due to genetically inherited characteristics. We argue that genetic explanations for racial inequality, in and of themselves, offer little appeal to white conservatives. However, when white citizens are exposed to media messages that emphasize the egalitarian implications of genetic similarity between racial groups, those on the left and right engage in biased assimilation, resulting in a “nature” (conservative) versus “nurture” (liberal) divide. Data from two studies of white Americans—one representative survey and one experiment—support this theoretical framework.

This paper explores the ways in which neoliberal policies enacted by elites across the Northern Triangle have led to increased violence in Central America, a lived experience that continues as individuals migrate to Mexico and the United States. In this work, I examine how neoliberal polices in the region have created limited economic opportunities and means of subsistence for the poor in Central America, as well as the rise of extra-legal actors and criminal enterprises. Together these conditions leave Central Americans with no choice but to migrate north. This paper then explores the violence migrants experience as they move through Mexico. In this stage of the journey, migrant bodies are objectified and then commodified as cheap labor for the global market as well as local economies of violence. Lastly, I discuss the multiple zones of violence that migrants experience at Mexico's border with the United States. This project relies on in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n = 99) with Central American migrants over the course of 4 years (2014–18). Ultimately, I find that for Central American migrants, violence can be a seemingly inescapable reality as neoliberal forces maintain and normalize violence in order to preserve an established social order at the expense of these migrants.

To contain the spread of COVID-19, experts emphasize the importance of wearing masks. Unfortunately, this practice may put black people at elevated risk for being seen as potential threats by some Americans. In this study, we evaluate whether and how different types of masks affect perceptions of black and white male models. We find that non-black respondents perceive a black male model as more threatening and less trustworthy when he is wearing a bandana or a cloth mask than when he is not wearing his face covering—especially those respondents who score above average in racial resentment, a common measure of racial bias. When he is wearing a surgical mask, however, they do not perceive him as more threatening or less trustworthy. Further, it is not that non-black respondents find bandana and cloth masks problematic in general. In fact, the white model in our study is perceived more positively when he is wearing all types of face coverings. Although mandated mask wearing is an ostensibly race-neutral policy, our findings demonstrate the potential implications are not.

The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 and subsequent military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq created a sharp increase in expressions of national pride and the invocation of “nation” in political discourse. Using the 1996 and 2004 General Social Surveys, we document these changing patterns of national pride, and ask how they affect conceptions of national identity. We report three main findings. First, the data corroborate the conventional wisdom that there was a greater expression of national pride than before September 11, 2001. Second, conceptions of American national identity became more nativist. Finally, the conventionally accepted distinction between patriots and nationalists has shrunk; patriots, like nationalists, are more likely to express nativist conceptions of national identity during a time of threat than they were pre-9/11. Our findings have important implications for research on group identification and national identity formation.

In addition to being the most racially and ethnically diverse generation, millennials comprised an equal number of the voting-eligible population as baby boomers in 2016 and are projected to become the largest share of the American voting-eligible population by 2018. Drawing from several distinct datasets, this study explores three primary topics: (1) examining how race influenced the vote choice of millennials in the 2016 presidential election; (2) comparing partisanship and vote choice among white millennials to older whites; and (3) identifying differences between white millennials who voted in 2016 to those who did not cast a ballot. The study finds that young whites are the outlier category of their age group; being white is associated with a higher probability of voting for Donald Trump, even when accounting for the effects of racial resentment, partisanship, ideology, and other factors. While white millennials appear conservative relative to their peers of color, however, the preferences of young whites are more Democratic than older whites. Non-voting white millennials are more likely than their voting counterparts to identify as independents and ideological moderates, making them a political swing bloc as white millennials age. While political observers are quick to point to the liberal-leaning preferences of young people as a whole, disaggregating the 18–30 age group by race as this study suggests that the Democratic preferences displayed by millennials in the aggregate are largely driven by the cohort's racial and ethnic diversity.

Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts. We develop a novel theory that roots these two trends in historical changes in party coalitions. Changing racial compositions of the two major parties led to the formation of racialized images about Democrats and Republicans in people’s minds—and these images now structure Americans’ partisan loyalties and policy preferences. We test this theory in three empirical studies. First, using the American National Election Studies we trace the growing racial gap in party coalitions as well as the increasing overlap between racial and partisan affect. Then, in two original survey studies we directly measure race–party schemas and explore their political consequences. We demonstrate that race–party schemas are linked to partisan affect and issue preferences—with clear implications for the recent developments in U.S. politics.