Recent election cycles show a reluctance among Black millennials to support the Democratic Party, which suggests that they are not captured by the party like their predecessors. While we know that African Americans have historically remained a loyal voting bloc, it is important to analyze whether there are generational differences with respect to Black Democratic Party loyalty. In this study, I analyze Black millennial partisanship identification and compare it to Black non-millennials (Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers). To test this, I employ a multi-method approach. My results show that while Black millennials continue to identify with the Democratic Party, they are not as loyal to the Democratic Party when compared to Black non-millennials. Further, I find that Black millennials are not changing loyalties to the Republican or a third party. Instead, Black millennials are willing to withhold their vote altogether if they are not satisfied with any Democratic candidates. My work has critical implications in how we understand Black politics and reveals that Democratic candidates will have to earn Black millennials vote going forward.

Political economy comparisons of Kenya and Tanzania have often found the political salience of ethnicity to be far higher in the former than the latter, with a negative impact on intercommunal trust. This difference has tended to be explained on the basis of the different kinds of leadership that the two countries experienced after independence. However, these findings have typically been demonstrated using aggregate or survey data. This paper assesses the salience of ethnicity at the individual level for the first time, deploying monetized two-round trust games in urban Kenya and Tanzania. The experimental games isolate the comparative impact of common knowledge of ethnicity and integrity among a quasi-random selection of 486 citizens. Verifying previous findings, we observe higher levels of trust and trustworthiness in Tanzania as compared with Kenya. Further, in comparison with Kenya, any shared knowledge of ethnic identities in Tanzania leads players to transfer fewer resources, while common knowledge that both players are “honest” led to higher transfers there than in Kenya. These results provide robust evidence of higher levels of trust in Tanzania, and of the negative effect in that country of common knowledge of ethnicity on levels of cooperation. The findings demonstrate the way in which political context can shape the impact of ethnic diversity, and encourage further experimental research that looks at the intersubjective dynamics of social cooperation.

Under what conditions does coethnicity undermine mutually beneficial collective action? One of the most enduring hypotheses in a comparative political economy decade is that ethnic diversity tends to undermine public goods provision. Ethnically homogenous communities are assumed to have a distinct advantage in local goods provision because shared identities tend to facilitate cooperation among coethnics. However, one can observe variation in the success of local goods provision across homogenous communities. To explain this puzzling occurrence, I explore the relationship between coethnicity and social capital, examining how they interact differently in different contexts. Empirically, I conduct an analysis of my own fieldwork on community policing efforts in two ethnically homogenous communities in Cape Town, South Africa. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that, in some contexts, coethnicity facilitates the development of bonding social capital, a type of social capital that constricts opportunities for individual action by creating certain expectations about behavior. In the context of community policing, those expectations can discourage individuals from participating in collective efforts.

How does the general public perceive immigrants, whom do they think of when thinking about “immigrants,” and to what extent are these perceptions related to the actual composition of immigrant populations? We use three representative online surveys in the United States, South Africa, and Switzerland (total N = 2,778) to extend existing work on the perception of immigrants in terms of geographic coverage and individual characteristics. We also relate these responses to official statistics on immigration and integration patterns. In all three countries, there are significant discrepancies between perceptions of immigrants and their real proportion in the population and characteristics. Although we observe clear country differences, there is a striking pattern of people associating “immigrants” with “asylum seekers” in all three countries. We consider two possible explanations for the differences between perceptions and facts: the representativeness heuristic and the affect heuristic. In contrast to previous research, we find only partial support for the representativeness heuristic, whereas the results are consistent with the affect heuristic. We conclude that images of “immigrants” are largely shaped by pre-existing attitudes.

Democratic institutions need a healthy “civic culture” to function well. Many worry that civic cultures today are decaying in the United States and other established democracies. We note two problems with these assessments. First, there are several ways to measure civic culture, but scholars typically focus only on their preferred approach. Second, most scholars assume a single civic culture, despite racial, ethnic, class, and other differences. So talk of “the” civic culture erases non-dominant groups. Without a framework to integrate different approaches and account for group variation, we cannot assess decline, nor specify for whom. And without those, we are unable to intervene to make things better. We introduce a theory of civic culture as a system of norms that integrates the main approaches to measuring civic culture and does so in a way that leads to a principled framework for understanding racial, ethnic, and other group variation within countries.

Discrimination is widely studied, with extensive research measuring discrimination on the housing and labor markets. This study examines how local governments address this well-documented issue, by conducting content analysis on 45 policy documents and by performing semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 alder(wo)men and diversity officers across nine Belgian cities. We introduce a temporal framework combining why, what, how, and when local anti-discrimination policy and actions are established. Such a framework is useful, as we do not approach policy as fixed, but pay attention to how actions evolve over time, even within one so-called anti-discrimination policy.This enables scholars and policymakers to identify decision-making patterns, predict changes over time, and understand contextual influences. Besides, unlike existing models rooted in integration or diversity policy, our framework captures the unique aspects of anti-discrimination policy, enabling a thorough understanding of the (non-)adoption of concrete anti-discrimination actions.

Redistricting poses a potential harm to American voters in limiting choice and accountability at the polls. Although voters still retain their right to contact their representatives, research shows that the confusion created when redistricting divides ZIP codes confounds the constituent–representative link. We build on existing research that shows splitting ZIP codes across multiple congressional districts leads to harms in representation. Specifically, we examine the role of splitting ZIP codes on the recognition of the racial group membership of one’s Congressional representative, a foundational component of the descriptive representation of racial minority voters via minority–majority districts in the United States. We find that citizens living in split ZIP codes are significantly less likely to know the race of their member of Congress. This occurs even when controlling for a host of factors including the race and partisanship of the constituent, the tenure of the member, and the amount of time a constituent has lived in their congressional district. Our work provides further evidence of the democratic harms experienced by American citizens living in ZIP codes that are split between multiple congressional districts. This work also points to the representational harms produced by poor district design on the representation of American voters.

How does context influence individuals’ misinformation about socially marginalized groups? Scholarship has long found that one’s geographical and social environment are important determinants for one’s political attitudes. But how these contexts shape individuals’ levels of misinformation about stigmatized groups remains an open and pressing question, especially given the swift rise of misinformation in recent years. Using three original surveys, we find that individuals who report more contact with a diverse group of individuals were significantly less likely to be misinformed. These findings are particularly pronounced among white Americans. Moreover, contrary to the popular belief that where one lives is a strong determinant of racial attitudes, we also find that partisan and racial context did not meaningfully shape misinformation. These findings shed light on the factors that helps us to understand the misinformation that exists about this sizable share of U.S. society.

The majority of protests in support of racial justice are peaceful. However, since the racial reckoning of 2020, there has been debate about when and how exposure to violent or disruptive protest activities can shift public opinion towards a social movement. Using the Black Lives Matter Movement as a lens, we design a survey experiment to test the causal effects of different protest tactics on support for protesters and the movement itself among Black and white Americans. We include a control condition with no protest and manipulate the level of disruption in each treatment condition, ranging from a simple march in response to the police killing of an unarmed Black man to a protest in which participants set fire to an empty police headquarters. We use OLS regressions to estimate average treatment effects. Overall, we find that both Blacks and whites react negatively to more disruptive protests but whites tend to react more negatively than Blacks. Conversely, we also find that whites overall report more confidence in the ability of Black Lives Matter to facilitate racial equality after exposure to a protest, even when that protest employs disruptive tactics. We also test for the moderating effects of racial identity and racial resentment. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the broader literature on social movements and public opinion.

The study of American racial politics has long focused on the conditions that activate racial animosity. A central line of research demonstrates that campaign messages that highlight negative stereotypes of African Americans can activate whites' racial attitudes. However, little is known about whether this activation can be overcome. I develop a theory of racial deactivation and test its predictions with two survey experiments. I find that explicitly criticizing the racial nature of an attack restores support for white candidates, but not African American candidates. However, African American and white candidates fare equally well using two rebuttal styles: a credible, non-racial justification of the attacked action or an explicit racial critique combined with the justification. The results have implications for how race affects campaigns, the susceptibility of the American public to racial cues, and campaign strategy.

Most states acknowledge the significance of Indigenous rights to rectify past injustices. Yet, on the domestic level, the realization of these rights depends on national policies. For democratic societies, questions about public opinion toward Indigenous policies are thus of great interest but remain largely unstudied. To what extent does the ethnic majority support policies conducive to Indigenous rights realization? And how different are the Indigenous population’s policy preferences? I use original experimental data from a vignette study to investigate these questions in the case of the Sámi people in Norway and Sweden. I hypothesize that groups’ attitudes are shaped by policies’ potential to alter the social status hierarchy between the majority and Indigenous populations. The results provide a nuanced picture. The ethnic majority shows significantly less support for policies facilitating Sámi linguistic, self-governance, and territorial rights. While the Sámi have, in general, more positive attitudes toward such policies, their support seems to be less pronounced than the majority’s resistance. Moreover, as attitudes are surprisingly similar when compared between Norway and Sweden, a country’s existing policy context does not appear to be crucial in the formation of these preferences.

Since 2014, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has worked to initiate police reforms designed to increase accountability and reduce the extrajudicial killing of Black and brown people. However, policy designs are typically congruent—meaning the allocation of benefits and burdens is generally aligned with how the target group is perceived by society. How could the movement motivate policy noncongruent action that would likely burden police—a group privileged by their position within a congruent, punitive, and racialized criminal justice policy culture? An examination of the innovation and diffusion of 12 noncongruent police reforms from 2014 to 2020 suggests the movement’s demands (1) reoriented the political and social contexts that fueled past diffusion processes, (2) activated key institutional actors—Black lawmakers—who served as entrepreneurs in state institutions, and (3) reactivated innovative states to serve as “leaders” in a new wave of noncongruent reform. This analysis provides a useful framework to understand how marginalized communities and their allies can exact real policy change in a political environment known for its unresponsiveness to the demands of marginalized groups.