Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become a flashpoint of elite political discord, yet how Americans actually perceive CRT is unclear. We theorize that Republican elites utilized a strong framing strategy to re-define CRT as an “empty signifier” representing broader racial and cultural grievances. Using a survey and a pre-registered experiment among U.S. adults (N = 19,060), we find that this strategy worked. Republicans exhibit more familiarity with CRT and hold more negatively valenced (and wide ranging) sentiments toward CRT, relative to Democrats. Moreover, compared to teaching the legacy of racism in schools, Republicans are significantly more opposed to teaching CRT while Democrats express greater uncertainty. Our findings suggest that by framing CRT as a broad term that envelopes many grievances (including those beyond the scope of CRT), Republican elites have shaped a subset of Americans’ understanding of and attitudes toward CRT.

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.

Thousands of Latin Americans migrate to the United States every year. This article seeks to understand how immigrants’ premigration political experiences influence the acquisition of party identification upon arrival in the United States. This research proposes that premigration political experiences influence the acquisition of party identification among Latino immigrants in the United States. Utilizing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) and Proyecto Élites Parlamentarias Latinoamericanas (Latin American Parliamentary Elites Project), this paper analyzes how the ideology of the government in power in the immigrants’ country of origin influences party identification among Latino immigrants in the United States. Employing multinomial regression analysis, I demonstrate that the ideology of governments in power in Latin American countries when Latinos migrate influences the party identification of those immigrants in the United States. The results of this study contribute to the conversations on premigration experiences and challenge the applicability of classical theories of party identification for immigrants.

How do Asian Americans think about their ethnic origin? How do ethnic identities affect political preferences? Drawing on interviews with a diverse group of Asian Americans, I provide a nuanced understanding of how they think about their ethnic origin and pan-ethnic identities. The findings reveal that ethnicity plays a significant role in shaping electoral preferences, as Asian Americans exhibit coethnicity preferences, conditional on partisanship. Moreover, I uncover several factors that have been underexplored in the existing literature, including transnational ties, news consumption, and political preferences on foreign policies related to their home country. This article provides a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of Asian American identities by showing that the ethnic origin roots of Asian Americans can have significant influence on their political interests and candidate preferences.

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.

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.

In any racialized social system, a dominant racial ideology will emerge to uphold it, but it is always contested by and in dialog with others. This article leverages conversations around Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, and Blue Lives Matter as a site of racetalk. By moving beyond narrow conceptualizations and measures of racial attitudes, this paper pinpoints a myriad of racially based frameworks, or ways of talking and thinking about structural racism, white grievance, state-sanctioned social control, and the matter of Black lives. It analyzes 1,000 Americans’ open-ended responses to a question around these contested mantras with the Fightin’ Words algorithm alongside an inductive analysis to illuminate the use of circulating racial ideologies. In addition to outlining the components of four racial ideologies—colorblind racism, diversity ideology, white protectionism, and anti-racism—the article assesses how they are deployed among Americans to uphold or challenge the racial status quo.

While there is considerable research on the role racial attitudes play in shaping white political preferences, relatively little is known about how racial attitudes influence white participation in democratic politics. We present a model examining the relationship between racial attitudes and political participation in the 2016, 2018, and 2020 U.S. national elections. Using a variety of measures of political participation, our analysis presents a clear finding: the direction of the relationship between latent conservative racial attitudes and political participation is asymmetrical among partisan sub-groups, with conservative racial attitudes motivating participation among white Republicans and, to a greater degree, depressing participation among white Democrats. This finding has stark implications for how racialized appeals are likely to be deployed in an era of increasing affective partisan polarization.

While there has been work on whether women are more tolerant of outgroups, the ethnic politics literature has generally overlooked the role of gender in explaining interethnic trust. Whatever attention exists often focuses on the gender of the subject—that is, who is doing the trusting—with mixed results. One reason is that the object being entrusted is either not specified or assumed genderless. In this paper, we call attention to the gender of an important entrusted object in interethnic relations: children. We argue people are less willing to have their daughters—compared to their sons—marry an ethnic outgroup. Additionally, this willingness declines as the cultural distance widens. We test this using a survey experiment in Romania where we leverage the diversity in ethnicity and a gendered language structure. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for gender-based differences in studying interethnic trust.

Interactions between social identity groups can reduce perceptions of threatening out-groups and improve inter-group attitudes. But these interactions have an inevitable side effect: while an interaction may improve attitudes among its participants, the same interaction can increase exposure to out-groups in the proximity of the interaction, leading to increased perceptions of threat among those not participating in the interaction. With such negative externalities in mind, this paper argues that the presence of a large number of out-group members both improves and aggravates native attitudes toward out-groups in the same area, which may, in the aggregate, conceal a hot spot of anti-immigration attitudes. This study examines the effects of interaction and exposure through a series of surveys of native attitudes toward Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. While the exposure effect was not observed, empirical analyses suggest that brief interactions tend to worsen negative attitudes toward Muslims, possibly due to their physical and religious appearances. This highlights the importance of visual cues in shaping inter-group relations, as these visual cues may prompt natives to sort out interactions based on appearance, hindering efforts to promote inter-group contact between Muslims and non-Muslims.

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.

The covid-19 pandemic has revived a longstanding, and understudied, trope in American politics: the association of immigrants with disease. There has been a great deal of scholarship on the economic, cultural, and criminal threat frames attached to immigrant groups in media coverage, but little to date has specifically examined how national and local sources have framed covid-19 in the context of immigrant communities. In this paper we analyze the prevalence of two different framings of the pandemic in national and local online news outlets over the first year of the pandemic: immigration as a public health threat to the nation, and covid-19 as a threat to immigrant communities within the nation. We find significant differences between national and local coverage, with the former more likely to frame immigration as a covid-19 threat, while local news outlets were more likely to discuss the threat the virus posed to already marginalized immigrant communities.

We examine the historical effects of ethnic and racial diversification among legislators on identity group mobilization and the hiring of nonwhite lobbyists. We propose that diversification among legislators encouraged identity groups to lobby, that these groups hired lobbyists who reflected their members’ identities, and that all interests also hired lobbyists who reflected the identities of new legislative targets. We apply a Bayesian estimation approach to infer the identities of lobbyists who were active in the American states over several decades. We find that the election of African Americans to state legislatures encouraged black identity groups to lobby, that all identity groups, including those representing Hispanics or Latinos, generally hired lobbyists who reflected their members’ identities, and that the election of Asian Americans to state legislatures encouraged interests generally to hire Asian-American lobbyists. Hispanic or Latino lobbyists gained clients in response to diversification in more Democratic legislatures.

Politicians carefully construct a public persona that is authentic to who they are as individuals but also addresses voter expectations. Many Black candidates follow a deracialization strategy in which they downplay their racial identities to seek voter support while some follow a racial distinction strategy in which they highlight their racial identities but situate them within hegemonic national narratives. But questions remain about whether a candidate’s decision to use one strategy over another is shaped by national context, partisanship, political position, and riding competitiveness. This paper thus asks the question: How do Black candidates in Canadian elections deploy race in their campaign communications, and what factors might explain any differences in their strategies? To answer this question, we analyze how Black candidates used Twitter during the 2021 Canadian election. Our analysis reveals that Black candidates generally used a deracialization strategy when communicating on Twitter, opting to celebrate the many cultural groups in their riding rather than casting their appeal only to Black voters. They only highlighted their racial identities or racial issues when world or campaign events gave them the political cover to do so. But the degree to which Black candidates engaged in (de)racialized communications differed by party.

The goal of this research is to provide a diaspora-centered analysis of Black identity politics by illustrating how African populations navigate their diasporic identities and imposed racial boundaries when engaging with social movements like #BlackLivesMatter. Extending scholarship on Black immigration and Black politics, the present study highlights the processes by which racial histories, U.S. racial hierarchies, and gender hegemony guide African immigrants’ and children of African immigrants’ individual conceptions of Blackness as well as their political engagements. Using a qualitative design (N = 28 semi-structured interviews), I examine first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Africans’ connections to #BlackLivesMatter, a racial justice social movement mobilized in response to the police killings of African American men and women. Findings illustrate that while all participants express an implicit connection to #BlackLivesMatter by drawing attention to the visual aspects of their superordinate Black racial identity, there are certain sources of diasporic fragmentation that lead to racial distancing, intraracial group contention, and subsequent disconnections from the movement. Deconstructing the notion of Black political behavior as homogeneous, findings also suggest that political solidarity does not require uniformity in interests: when engaging in collective action, it is possible to express racial linked fate while also expressing substantial differences in culture and knowledge systems.

Asian Americans became targets of increasingly hostile behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. What motivated this? Fears of contagion arising from a behavioral immune system may have motivated hostility toward Asian Americans, especially among those Americans vulnerable to COVID-19. Additionally, stigmatizing rhetoric from right-wing figures may have legitimated anti-Asian behavior among those Americans who held stronger anti-Asian sentiments to begin with or who were more receptive to right-wing rhetoric. We explore these possibilities using a behavioral game with a representative sample of Americans at two points: in May and October 2020. Participants were partnered with a U.S.- or Chinese-born American in a give-or-take dictator game. The average American discriminated against Chinese-born Americans in May but not October 2020, when China was no longer a COVID-19 hotspot. But among Republicans, who may have held stronger anti-Asian sentiments to begin with and who were likely more receptive to right-wing rhetoric, discrimination—that is, differential treatment—was both stronger in May compared to non-Republicans and persisted into October 2020. Notably, Americans who were more vulnerable to COVID-19 were not especially likely to discriminate.

Macropartisanship is a measure of aggregate trends in party identification in the mass public that allows researchers to track partisanship dynamically. In previous research, macropartisanship was found to vary in concert with major political events and forces like presidential approval and the economy. However, studying macropartisanship as an aggregate trend assumes that group dynamics within the measure are equivalent. We present a series of new measures of macropartisanship using Stimson’s (2018) dyad ratio approach disaggregated by race and ethnicity. We detail the creation of measures for White, Latino, and Black macropartisanship from 1983 to 2016 using more than 500 surveys from CBS News and CBS/New York Times. The resulting data collection is publicly available and can be downloaded in monthly, quarterly, or yearly format. Our initial analysis of these data show that thinking about macropartisanship as a single aggregate measure masks important and significant variation in our understanding of party identification. Change in the measures are uncorrelated. Latino macropartisanship is more volatile and responds more to economic conditions, Black macropartisanship is very stable and has become more Democratic in response to increased polarization, while White macropartisanship has become less responsive to economic conditions as has become more Republican as Republicans have moved to the right.

A rich literature documents the effects of survey interviewer race on respondents’ answers to questions about political issues and factual knowledge. In this paper, we advance the study of interviewer effects in two ways. First, we examine the impact of race on interviewers’ subjective evaluations of respondents’ political knowledge. Second, we substitute measures of respondent/interviewer racial self-identification with interviewer perceptions of respondent skin tone. We find that white interviewers subjectively rate black respondents’ knowledge lower than do black interviewers, even controlling for objective knowledge measures. Moreover, we identify a negative relationship between relative skin tone and interviewer's assessment of knowledge. Subsequent analyses show a linear relationship between subjective knowledge assessments and the difference between respondent and interviewer skin tone. We conclude with a discussion of the impact of colorism on survey administration and the measurement of political attitudes and democratic capabilities.