Although scholars of representation have examined variation in voter support conditional on shared demographic traits, we know little about how voters respond to candidates who belong to multiple racial categories. Multiracial candidates challenge how we think about and study representation. I theorize that multiracial categories provide mixed information about how well a candidate adheres to group norms of identity, resulting in a multiracial advantage across groups, but a disadvantage within groups. A conjoint survey experiment on 786 White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters and a separate analysis of support for a multiracial candidate in a real-world election support these claims. Thus, multiracial candidates have the advantage of building coalitions with voters from other groups, but they are disadvantaged when appealing to co-racials with strong racial identities. These findings demonstrate that future research on representation must engage multiracial elites.

In recent years, a growing body of political science scholarship has shown how territorial expansion and Indigenous dispossession profoundly shaped American democratic ideas and institutions. However, scant attention has been paid to Indigenous thinkers and activists who have reshaped the colonial and imperial facets of democracy. I reconstruct the writings of the Oneida thinker and activist Laura Cornelius Kellogg (1880–1947). I contend that Kellogg offers a political theory of “decolonial-democracy,” which challenged settler-imperial domination by bringing together a project of Indigenous self-determination with reimagined democratic narratives, values, and institutions. The first and second sections place Kellogg in pan-Indigenous debates within the Society of American Indians and among non-Indigenous Progressive reformers, in order to show how she brings together a pan-Indigenous and social-democratic critique of American democracy. The third section interprets her landmark 1920 pamphlet Our Democracy and the American Indian as a counter-narrative of the American founding read through the disavowed influence of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, a return to which she casts as a basis for democratic and Indigenous renewal. The final section outlines her vision of Indigenous self-government as “Indian communism” in the form of her “Lolomi Plan.” In sum, I trace a counter-politics envisioning a form of relational self-determination within a confederated, multinational political order, as well as the difficulty of bringing decolonization together with democracy in practice.

Scholarship concerning American government visibility has focused on the state’s growing submergence, yet these accounts contrast with racial and ethnic politics research focusing on the American state’s conspicuousness in the lives of people of color. Attending to this disconnect, I ask how government visibility varies across racial groups. Combining interviews and quantitative analysis within a policy feedback framework, I argue that five public policy trends have created a racial split in the American state’s visibility. For whites, submerged state policies have grown alongside the rising visibility of racialized poverty policies and taxation. As a result, whites are less aware of how government benefits them and more aware of how government uses tax dollars to fund programs perceived as solely benefitting racial others. For people of color, the decline of civil rights legislation has contrasted with criminal legal policies that have made the criminal legal system a uniquely visible manifestation of government in their lives. To demonstrate the political importance of this racial divide, I uncover a racial heterogeneity in people’s political trust attachments, wherein white trust is connected to welfare attitudes, while trust among people of color is associated with feelings about the police.

How do resource-poor Black populations participate in the policy process? And what are the interpretive impacts of their participation? Using multiyear qualitative data on mass school closures in two large U.S. cities—in which nearly 90% of the population targeted were Black and low-income—I investigate how 1) the school district and local organizations provide resources for those affected to participate in the policy process; 2) affected participants interpret their engagement as contributing positively to the development of civic skills and perceptions of internal efficacy but negatively to their perceptions of politics, policy, and future participation; and that 3) these negative attitudes persist even among those who secure success in fighting the policy. I conceptualize this last phenomenon as indicative of “collective participatory debt” and raise serious questions about the utility of participating while poor and Black in American democracy.

How does surveillance shape political science research in the United States? In comparative and international politics, there is a rich literature concerning the conduct of research amid conditions of conflict and state repression. As this literature locates “the field” in distant contexts “over there,” the United States continues to be saturated with various forms of state control. What this portends for American politics research has thus far been examined by a limited selection of scholars. Expanding on their insights, I situate “the field” in the United States and examine surveillance of American Muslims, an understudied case of racialized state control. Drawing on qualitative data from a case study of sixty-nine interviews with Arab and Black American Muslims, I argue that surveillance operated as a two-stage political mechanism that mapped onto research methodologically and substantively. In the first stage, surveillance reconfigured the researcher-researchee dynamic, hindered recruitment and access, and limited data-collection. In the second stage, surveillance colored the self-perceptions, political attitudes, and civic engagement of respondents, thereby indicating a political socialization unfolding among Muslims. The implications of this study suggest that researchers can mitigate against some, but not all, of the challenges presented by surveillance and concomitant forms of state control.

Threatened reactions to news about the approach of a racial majority-minority society have profoundly influenced Americans’ political attitudes and electoral choices. Existing research casts these reactions as responses to changing demographic context. We argue instead that they are driven in large part by the dominant majority-minority narrative framing of most public discussion about rising racial diversity. This narrative assumes the long-run persistence of a white-nonwhite binary in which the growing number of Americans with both white and non-white parents are classified exclusively as non-white, irrespective of how they identify themselves. Alternative narratives that take stock of trends toward mixed-race marriage and multiracial identification also reflect demographic fundamentals projected by the Census Bureau and more realistically depict the country’s twenty-first century racial landscape. Using three survey experiments, we examine public reactions to alternative narratives about rising diversity. The standard majority-minority narrative evokes far more threat among whites than any other narrative. Alternative accounts that highlight multiracialism elicit decidedly positive reactions regardless of whether they foretell the persistence of a more diverse white majority. Non-white groups respond favorably to all narratives about rising diversity, irrespective of whether they include the conventional majority-minority framing.

Following racially charged events, individuals often diverge in perceptions of what happened and how justice should be served. Examining data gathered shortly after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri alongside reactions to a novel officer-involved shooting, we unpack the processes by which racial divisions emerge. Even in a controlled information environment, white Americans preferred information that supported claims of a justified shooting. Conversely, Black Americans preferred information that implied that the officer behaved inappropriately. These differences stemmed from two distinct processes: we find some evidence for a form of race-based motivated reasoning and strong evidence for belief updating based on racially distinct priors. Differences in summary judgments were larger when individuals identified strongly with their racial group or when expectations about the typical behaviors of Black Americans and police diverged. The findings elucidate processes whereby individuals in different social groups come to accept differing narratives about contentious events.

Amid growing inequality within racial and ethnic groups, how do Americans decide where to live, where to work, and for whom to vote? While previous research has examined racial patterns in voting decisions, it provides less insight into individual-level decisions about neighborhoods, candidates, and employment—even while these decisions also organize the political world. We theorize about the role of a key variable stratifying these individual-level decisions: education. To test our argument, we analyze nationally representative survey data and a new survey experiment that varies incentives to leave one’s racial group environment. We find that among Blacks and Latinos, but not whites, those with higher levels of formal education are disproportionately likely to respond to incentives to leave their own group. We conclude with reflections on the implications of this educational divide for intra-racial inequality.

The concept of rural consciousness has gained a significant amount of traction over the past several years, as evidenced by hundreds of citations and its inclusion within the most recent pilot of the ANES. However, many have questioned whether rural consciousness is appreciably different from racial prejudice. We assessed this issue by distributing a survey study to Wisconsinites living in rural and urban communities, and by examining the relationships between rural consciousness, racial resentment, and political attitudes in the ANES 2019 Pilot Study. The survey study revealed that participants living in rural parts of Wisconsin—unlike those living in urban parts—tended to think of city dwellers as possessing more negative attributes. In addition, the survey study revealed that rural participants thought of Milwaukeeans, specifically, as possessing stereotypically Black attributes. Moreover, this tendency was starker among those who scored higher on a measure of rural consciousness, suggesting that rural consciousness is related to racial stereotyping. Finally, in an analysis of the ANES 2019 Pilot Study, we found that rural consciousness correlated with racial resentment, and that controlling for racial resentment dramatically reduced the extent to which rural consciousness could predict political preferences (e.g., approval for Donald Trump). Thus, while white rural consciousness may not be reducible to racism, racism certainly plays a central role.

Flint’s drinking water crisis has brought renewed⸺and needed⸺attention to the importance of safe drinking water in the United States. The Flint water crisis was the result of a confluence of factors operating at multiple scales in time and space. My aim is to draw out more explicitly the role of policy, and specifically rationalized policy, in incentivizing and allowing the mistakes and decisions that most proximately led to the Flint water crisis. I build on and extend existing analyses of the Flint water crisis, drawing on thirteen semi-structured interviews and publicly available reports, testimony, newspaper articles, and secondary data. My analysis brings to the fore the particular vulnerability to the marginalizing effects of rationalized policy and its implementation of poor and minority communities in the United States, and it reveals the stickiness and entrenchment of these rationalized policies. The response to the Flint water crisis, both in Michigan and nationally, has centered on renewed commitment to risk-based standards and rulemaking for safe drinking water protections, and maintains interventionist approaches to municipal financial distress. I discuss important alternatives that are emerging and indicate areas for future research on the politics of safe drinking water.

During the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. policymakers adopted draconian criminal justice polices including widespread use of extremely long sentences, including life without parole. The country is now coming to face the consequences of these policies: a new class of geriatric prisoners posing little threat to public safety as they age into their seventies and beyond. Using a perspective drawn from bounded rationality, framing, and agenda-setting, we recount how policymakers adopted these policies, with key blind spots relating to obvious consequences of these harsh laws. We show how political leaders can over-respond to a perceived public policy crisis, particularly when powerful frames of race, fear, and dehumanization come to dominate the public discourse. We show how these trends are radically changing the demographics and needs of prison populations through a chronological review, mathematical simulation of the prison population, review of statistics about prison population, and personal stories illustrating these themes drawn from inside prison.

In recent decades, public prisons and jails have increasingly outsourced operational functions by “turning over the keys” to private business and, more recently and specifically, to private equity. By the early 2000s, private equity-owned corporations had entered the core sectors of prison and jail operations, creating “markets behind bars” in telecommunications, commissary sales, health provision, and a range of other services. Two decades later, they have become a quasi-oligopolistic market force across the carceral economy. Reacting to these developments, scholars and activists have explored how private firms generate profits by extracting resources from families of the incarcerated. Less explored is the fact that it is often and particularly private equity firms that partner with public carceral institutions in these extractive practices. In this reflection, we propose a three-part schematic for understanding how such partnerships, with their attendant predation on the poor and people of color, have become normalized. We focus, first, on the mechanism of bureaucracy through which mutual profit-making by public and private entities becomes regularized; second, we explore the legal mechanisms—the apparently small but potent and politically unexamined legal maneuvers—that enable the redirection of family resources beyond the support of a loved one to the operational needs of jails and prisons; finally, we trace the role of gender as a social mechanism through which private equity and its prison/jail partners rely simultaneously on women’s traditional role as caretaker and non-traditional role as primary breadwinner. We show that all three mechanisms are crucial to the economic functioning of the carceral state.