Progress toward racial equality requires the engagement of the American state, centered in the presidency and the executive branch, and in fact is not possible without the state's direct and forceful intervention. The key to this transformation is what we call “Forceful Federalism,” a multidimensional understanding of the American state. Forceful Federalism has four essential dimensions: standard-setting, coercion, associationalism, and fiscal authority. These four processes rise and fall over time, each charting its own history and unfolding according to its own logic. These processes usually work against each other. But occasionally they align with each other so that the state can pursue and achieve even difficult and challenging policy aims in a focused way. We sketch the outlines of Forceful Federalism and demonstrate its explanatory power with a case study of Forceful Federalism in action: James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. The Meredith case exemplifies the convergence of the four dimensions of Forceful Federalism and marks the first time the modern American state was thus mobilized on behalf of civil rights. The case offers suggestive evidence that Forceful Federalism was a necessary condition for the emergence of the Civil Rights State.

This study examined the effect of perceived ethnic marginalization, perception towards Nigerian democracy, and socioeconomic condition on support for secession among members of the Igbo ethnic group. Perceived ethnic marginalization and negative perceptions toward Nigerian democracy were found to positively correlate with support for secession. Socioeconomic condition was measured at the household and communal levels. The household measure had no effect on support for secession, but the communal measure did: socioeconomic condition at the communal level positively correlated with support for secession. Igbo ethnicity increased the likelihood of supporting secession, while belonging to the Hausa/Fulani and Yoruba ethnic groups reduced the likelihood of supporting secession.

Election skepticism has become a persistent feature of American politics since the Obama era. Such beliefs are most prevalent among White Americans and especially Republicans, and they are resistant to change. Conspiracy theory studies have shown that such beliefs are linked to feelings of ingroup victimization, at times associated with election loss. We draw on theories of White ingroup processes to argue that White grievance—the belief that Whites are victims of discrimination—is a key correlate of election skepticism among White Americans. White grievance was employed in the Obama era, but it was weaponized by Trump in the 2020 election. Our results based on four national datasets (2012–2020 ANES, 2021 YouGov) show that controlling for negative outgroup attitudes and other factors, White grievance is a significant predictor of election skepticism in all four studies. In 2020, the effect is stronger among White Republicans and independents. We also show that White identity/consciousness has the opposite effect, generally boosting trust in elections. Furthermore, a lagged dependent variable model using the 2016–2020 ANES panel shows that White grievance remains significant even after an LDV is included in the model.

Minority voters have experienced a renewed effort to curtail their access to the ballot box in recent years. Although a host of research has examined the impact of election changes on Black and Latino voters, scholars have dedicated much less attention to the rights of Native Americans, even as they face challenges to voting in states where they comprise a significant portion of the population. Many of these states are likewise increasingly important to national elections. Such laws may impact Native Americans when they intersect with the political geography of living on a reservation, and voting rights advocates have challenged them in places like Montana, Nevada and North Dakota. This paper empirically evaluates how such laws might uniquely impact Native American voters. We draw on North Dakota's voter identification law as a case study, but our analysis has wider implications, since residency is the primary means by which election administration uniquely impacts this group. Drawing on two rich survey datasets collected in 2015 and 2017, we offer descriptive evidence of the barriers individuals may encounter while trying to obtain an ID under North Dakota's law, and find that Native Americans are statistically less likely to have access to an ID than are whites. This gap is largely due to the requirement that an ID has a physical address and attendant difficulties in obtaining such an ID, given the remote nature of reservations. We bring needed attention to the impact of carefully crafted electoral rules on this often-overlooked group.

Autonomy carries the promise of resolving longstanding distributive inequalities between indigenous and non-indigenous groups. Yet, contemporary autonomy arrangements have often been associated instead with a reduction in native communities' access to needed public goods and services. I situate these negative effects within a broader autonomy-representation dilemma: autonomy provides indigenous groups with more responsive coethnic leaders, but these leaders frequently face difficulties in collecting and deploying revenue. These capacity constraints often arise from the way national governments have recognized autonomy. As such, pursuing coethnic representation within the state might—under certain conditions—be more likely to provide indigenous groups with needed goods and services. Drawing on natural experimental evidence and an original survey of indigenous community presidents from Peru, I first demonstrate that achieving coethnic political representation within the state can expand indigenous groups' access to the public good they most need: water. I then illustrate how capacity constraints that arise from autonomy have prevented native groups in Bolivia's autonomous municipalities from achieving similar distributive gains. Ultimately, the findings provide insights for understanding the sources of—and potential institutional remedies for—indigenous groups' unequal access to local public goods in the Americas and beyond.

This paper utilizes original survey data to examine whether individuals believe they share views on public policy with members of their own racial or ethnic group and whether they place an importance on living in legislative districts with people from their own racial or ethnic group. We find strong evidence that Latino and African-American respondents have a sense of shared policy preferences within their own group. Our results also indicate white Republicans are very likely to view themselves as having shared policy preferences within their group. Respondents who have a strong sense of shared policy preferences with their racial group are also the most likely to think it is important to live in legislative districts with others from their own racial or ethnic group. This paper affords a deeper understanding of the extent to which voters express commonality with their racial and ethnic minority group on matters related to public policy.

Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party are among the many movements that have reignited media attention to protest activity. Yet, there is much to learn about what this media coverage conveys. In particular, how much does who is protesting matter for how the media portray protesters and their objectives? In this paper, we draw on an extensive content analysis of cable and broadcast news media coverage of protest activities to demonstrate substantial differences in how protests are covered depending on the race and objective of the protesters. We find that media are much more likely to depict protests by people of color using language that evokes a sense of threat by using anger- and fear-laden language than comparable coverage of protest activity involving mostly White individuals. Our results demonstrate that racial biases in news coverage are much broader than previously thought. In doing so, our work highlights the powerful role that a protester’s race plays in whether the media will condone or challenge their political voice.

How well do we understand the political moment in which we find ourselves in the wake of the Trump presidency? The United States has long failed to keep up with its democratic peers on a wide range of social outcomes but the struggle to keep a pandemic at bay, coupled with increases in social violence and new uprisings over state violence have exposed the failures of the American state in a stark manner. While research on political attitudes continues to offer crucial insights into what Americans want from government and how race, class, and gender are formative dimensions of public opinion, we know considerably less about how these attitudes intersect with the highly fragmented and decentralized nature of U.S. political institutions. In this essay, I offer a framework for understanding our current moment through the lens of racialized anti-statism and state failure. I focus on the intersection of two reinforcing and overlapping features of the U.S. political system: the highly fragmented, veto-laden structure of American politics and the persistence of anti-egalitarian movements. By situating our analysis at this intersection, we observe the convergence of racial and economic power in an anti-statist alliance that undermines American state-building, even when large majorities of Americans favor it.

This article identifies the justification frame as a common narrative used by public officials to justify the use of lethal force by police. Officials deploy the justification frame to obfuscate the use of force or claim that victims posed a threat to officers in order to justify civilian deaths. I examine initial statements given in the aftermath of officer-involved deaths in 2016, focusing on incidents where an on-duty officer used force against victims who did not pose a threat when they were killed. I find that elements of the justification frame appear frequently in the explanations issued after these incidents. Statements about Black decedents are more likely to deploy the justification frame.

Scholars have credited the victory of Edward Brooke, America's first popularly elected black U.S. senator, to a “deracialized” or “color-blind” election strategy in which both the candidate and the electorate ignored racial matters. This article revises this prevailing historical explanation of Brooke's election. Drawing from the historical-ideational paradigm of Desmond King and Rogers Smith, this paper argues that Brooke was much more of a “race-conscious” candidate than is generally remembered. Primary documents from the 1966 campaign reveal that Brooke spoke openly against racial inequality, argued in favor of racially targeted policies, and called for stronger racial equality legislation. In addition, this paper argues that Brooke's appeals were not targeted primarily to the state's small black population but to liberal whites. Far from ignoring race, internal campaign documents and interviews with campaign staff reveal that Brooke's campaign strategists sought to appeal to white desires to “do the right thing” by electing an African American candidate. Internal polling documents from the Brooke campaign and newspaper commentaries further demonstrate that a proportion of the white electorate cited Brooke's race as the reason for supporting his candidacy. This paper suggests that Brooke's election was extremely well timed—coming soon after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act but before the urban riots of the “long hot summer of 1967”, the King assassination riots, and anti-busing riots in Boston. The first half of Brooke's 1966 campaign slogan “Proudly for Brooke: A Creative Republican” signals the race-conscious dynamics of his candidacy.

The Catholic Church currently sits at the forefront of U.S. demographic change as a prominent institution that is working on how to positively respond to a growing Latino population. Understanding the factors that either complicate or facilitate that endeavor may help other institutions in their future efforts to likewise integrate and serve Latino communities. Further, there may be broader implications for the success of Catholic churches to serve as research has found that participation in church activities is positively related to increased rates of civic and political engagement. However, these positive effects cannot be felt if churches fail to present the opportunity to participate in the first place. To that end, this study examines the relationship between Latino population density, the presence of a Latino minister, and the likelihood a church would offer Spanish mass or any other service relevant to the Latino community. I find these factors are useful in predicting service provision to a limited degree, and that individual leaders’ initiative and decision making also play a role in determining institutional responsiveness.

While popular narratives regarding the destiny of demographics assume Latino interstate migrants will alter destination state politics as Latinos disperse across the states, no studies directly assess the empirical validity of the underlying assumption of migrant's political preferences. Moreover, established theories of domestic migrant preferences suggest a variety of potential individual-level behaviors that often diverge from the underlying assumption of a uniform introduction of more liberal voters. Employing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, this study presents an analysis on Latino interstate migrant voting behavior, while also overcoming a variety of data limitations in existing studies. Countering some previous findings that homophily, adaptation, or even a static liberal orientation describes migrant voting behavior, the results suggest that Latino interstate migrant preferences vary by the political context of their previous state of residence. The results imply that the destiny of demographics will be conditioned, to some extent, by the migratory patterns of Latinos and the dyad of departure and destination states. When Latinos leave liberal (conservative) states, they bring more liberal (conservative) policies. In short, Latinos seem to pack their politics when moving across state lines.

This paper explores the dynamics of presidential attention and rhetoric on Native issues and peoples during the self-determination era. Using data from all public statements and papers of the presidents from 1969 to 2016, the work analyzes the level of attention and rhetorical frames of each president from Nixon to Obama, with additional comments on Trump. The analysis reveals that most presidents have given relatively little attention to Native issues compared to their overall volume of public statements, with Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama offering the most attention. In addition, presidents have used very different rhetorical frames to address Native issues and peoples in their public statements. Presidential rhetoric has been characterized by fluctuating attention and frames, and presidents have not consistently supported Nixon's “new and coherent strategy” throughout the self-determination era.

This study asks if Black mayors’ individual and collective responses to George Floyd’s killing were qualitatively different than mayoral reactions to the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Specifically, I examine whether Black mayors rejected the “timeworn” tradition of respectability politics in favor of a new paradigm in 2020. I also consider the characteristics of mayors, cities, and media that may explain this change. My original dataset includes 232 public statements issued by 31 Black mayors during either the Obama administration (2014–2015) or Trump administration (2020). I find that the cohort of Black mayors leading large cities during Era 2 were demonstrably less likely to activate respectability politics when talking about Floyd’s murder than their predecessors. I discuss the implications of these observations considering the political climate mayors are confronting at the time of writing, around the 2-year anniversary of Floyd’s death.

How do White Americans evaluate the politics of belonging in the United States across different ethnoreligious identity categories? This paper examines this question through two competing frameworks. On the one hand, given the salience of anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States, we consider whether White Americans penalize Muslim immigrants to the United States regardless of their ethnoracial background. On the other hand, Muslim identity is often conflated by the general public with Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) ethnoracial identity. We argue MENA-Muslim identity should be understood through the lens of intersectionality. In this case, White Americans may penalize MENA-Muslims immigrants to the United States more than Muslims from other ethnoracial groups. We test these two frameworks through a conjoint experimental design wherein respondents are asked to evaluate immigrants and indicate to whom the United States should give a green card—signaling legal belonging—and how likely the immigrant is to assimilate into America—signaling cultural belonging. Although White Americans believe White Muslims may assimilate better to the United States relative to MENA-Muslims, race does not moderate how White Americans evaluate who should be allowed to belong in the United States.

In the aftermath of the United States’ 2020 presidential election, state legislatures have introduced and passed an unprecedented number of restrictive voting bills. While past research has looked at the state-level drivers of restrictive voting legislation, this project explores what factors predict which legislators within states push for these laws. Specifically, I ask whether district-level characteristics predict when lawmakers use bill sponsorship to send messages about their positions beyond those sent by simple roll-call votes. I use theories of geographical threat and racial resentment to predict where sponsorship of these bills is most likely. My results tie these theoretical expectations to observed legislative activity: the whitest state legislative districts in the least-white states were the most likely to be represented by lawmakers who sponsored restrictive bills, as were districts with the most racially resentful white residents. I conclude that, despite lawmakers justifying these restrictive laws by claiming that fraud is a major problem, race and racism are inherently tied to the introduction and passage of these bills. This raises important questions about commitments to multiracial democracy.