Through Another Lens: American Democracy Viewed through Race/Ethnicity and Subnational Institutions

Rodney Hero’s intellectual work tracks some of the most significant political, social, and economic changes in recent American life. While the work is broad in scope and analytically intensive, it consistently reflects his concern with the “American Dilemma”—the persistent if changing dynamics of race and inequality in a liberal polity. In addressing this question, his work thoughtfully re-examines basic assumptions about pluralism and inter group politics, federalism, political institutions, political culture, and social capital. With a wide breadth of knowledge and continuing curiosity, Hero has made significant scholarly contributions in a broad range of subfields in the discipline: racial and ethnic politics, state politics, urban politics, public policy, US Congressional politics, federalism, and more. In addition to his reputation for innovative theoretical development, his scholarly contributions are distinctly multimethod and theoretically grounded in the classic questions confronting political science: power, representation, equality, democratic practice.

2014–2015 APSA President Rodney Hero Professor, Political Science and Haas Chair in Diversity and Democracy University of California, Berkeley

Colleagues, coauthors, and students alike characterize Hero in vivid terms: a strong intellectual curiosity and insight, an understanding of the importance of asking big-picture questions and seeking answers through solid empirics, a contextualist and relational perspective, an open-minded and generous collaborator, and a committed, engaged mentor. As noted later in the text , when viewed in the context of exceptional service to his universities, communities, and the discipline, this presence and his scholarly contributions are remarkable.

TRAJECTORIES

Currently on the political science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Rodney Hero recently served as the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame (2000–2010), including two terms as chair of its political science department. In 2008, he was a visiting senior research scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University. He joined the faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder, department of political science (1989–2000), after holding positions at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Appointed in 2011 as the Haas Chair in Diversity and Democracy at University of California, Berkeley, Hero’s own higher education started in public institutions in Florida: St. Petersburg Jr. College (AA, 1973) and Florida State University (BS, 1975). (He was the first in his family to be a college graduate). His 1980 PhD in political science from Purdue University developed questions on federalism that became the core of his early publications and continue to be reflected in his research. The dissertation assessed the Nixon administration’s General Revenue Sharing (GRS) Program, seeking to place the program within the evolution of American federalism. The focus on the legislation’s civil rights provisions demonstrated how those provisions had implications for broadening federal involvement in this policy arena despite the common perceptions of GRS as a “decentralizing” program.

By the late 1980s, however, his research and publications began to resonate more directly with what were to become the signature themes of his intellectual career: the critical impacts of ethnoracial diversity and inequality, the institutional context shaping how these dynamics play out at multiple scales, and an appreciation of how the institutions and structures of a distinct American racial state modulate those relations, at times facilitating but often constraining egalitarian goals.

AMERICAN POLITICS‹–›LATINO POLITICS

An enduring theme of Hero’s work is that American politics research needs to be routinely attentive to concerns not only about the “accuracy” of its theorizing and findings, but also the “adequacy” and “appropriateness” of the scholarship, especially when thinking about race and politics. That is, without deliberate attention to dimensions of racial and economic inequalities that often shape political processes and outcomes—adequacy—and without sufficient consideration of whether theories and evidence “fit the groups” situations and issues at hand—appropriateness—our understanding will be incomplete and/or distorted.

Accordingly, Hero works from the premise that racial/ethnic politics and the study there of is integral to American politics and political science, as highlighted directly in his 2006 coauthored APSR article “Su Casa Es Nuestra Casa: Latino Politics Research and the Development of American Political Science.” As the authors powerfully assert “Thinking of ‘Latino politics’ and ‘American politics’ separately is misguided (516).” They track how empirical analyses of Latinos have compelled rethinking and revision of dominant assumptions and theories in five important areas of scholarship on American politics: pluralism, group identity and mobilization, political participation, institutions and representation, and assimilation. Similar to the belated “discovery” of gender by empirical social science researchers, the failure to incorporate the study of racial and ethnic minorities more generally into analyses of American politics yields underdeveloped theories and misspecified models.

Hero’s work on pluralism and institutions is particularly salient in light of what Jacobs and Soss (2010) characterize as a “recent upsurge of interest in the politics of inequality” within the discipline. Some years before this renewed attention, Hero situated his work within the debates on inequality, analyzing Latino and multiracial politics, including economic dimensions and implications, at multiple levels of American society. His pathbreaking books on Latinos and the U.S. Political System: Two-tiered Pluralism (1992), Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics (1998), Racial Diversity and Social Capital: Equality and Community in America (2007), Newcomers, Insiders and Outsiders: Immigrants and American Racial Politics in the Early 21st Century (2010) and Black-Latino Relations in National Politics: Beyond Conflict or Cooperation (2013a) are essential for understanding contemporary American politics.

These scholarly contributions have been recognized through multiple awards, including the 1999 APSA Woodrow Wilson Book Award for Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics (also named an “Outstanding Academic Book” for 1999 by Choice magazine), the 1993 APSA Ralph Bunche Book Award for Latinos and the U.S. Political System: Two-Tiered Pluralism and the 2014 Latino Politics Best Book Award given by APSA’s Latino Caucus for Black-Latino Relations in U.S. National Politics: Beyond Conflict or Cooperation ( 2013). This scholarship brings a new and critical understanding of the changing American political landscape, along with his work on the Latino National Survey (LNS) and subsequent publications with his LNS collaborators (Fraga et al. 2010, 2012).

A RELATIONAL APPROACH TO DIVERSITY, INSTITUTIONS, AND INEQUALITY

In contrast to views of Latinos as the “Sleeping Giant” in American politics, whose very numbers promise future political influence and power, Rodney Hero’s work is more nuanced, relational, and critical. At the heart of his work is the effort to understand American politics through the lens of group politics, particularly the social, legal, and political status of racial/ethnic minority groups. Given how this pluralist dynamic contributes to persistent racial inequalities, much of his work examines how this inequality is manifest and how/why this occurs, within and across institutions, especially the institutional contexts emerging from the American federal structure. As such, it is difficult to parse his work into categories, for example, on “diversity” or “coalitions” or “institutions.” Hero’s work over time reflects an evolving analysis of the intersection of ethnoracial group politics with American political structures, always seeking the prospects for greater equality. Essentially he acknowledges the possibility of the influence and impact of minority groups but also cautions that and demonstrates how these possibilities are often limited by social differences along with structural features of the US political system.

In the scholarly conversations on inequality, this “relational” approach appreciates the “open-ended nature of transactions in the political economy and the potential for actors to make creative use of agency in ways that exploit or run contrary to the logics implied by structural arrangements” (Jacobs and Soss 2010). Rather than an individualist account of Latino behavior or a structural reading of ethnoracial minorities’ positionality in state and market relations, Hero’s relational perspective emphasizes the contingent nature of interactions between ethnoracial groups and a racialized, federal American political structure.

In doing so, he contributes two key elements to this scholarly project: an argument for the ethnic and racial sources of these economic and political inequalities and a recognition of the contextual variations in these relations over time and space. Decades of distinguished scholarly work document and analyze the ethnic and racial roots of inequality in the United States. Hero’s research builds on this understanding by recognizing that power relationships concerning racial groups and politics share some broadly similar attributes but that the presence and configurations of racial/ethnic groups themselves differ across this landscape. As Hero sees it, when the “scope” of politics varies in combination with the different racial constellations, an array of unique dynamics are possible, and likely, and hence deserve attention. But these spatial and temporal variations are not unique or idiosyncratic. Institutions can shape these relations of power and influence in ways that can be discerned but are sometimes not immediately apparent. A relational perspective incorporating group relations and institutions, and being careful about “where’”and “how” we look, can provide fuller explanations that are often, as he puts it, “hidden in plain sight” if we focus on one at the expense of the other.

For example, Hero’s 1992 book Latinos and the U.S. Political System: Two-Tiered Pluralism examined Latinos politics from a distinct theoretical standpoint and across the arenas and institutions of the American political system. At one level, this book stands as an important work on political behavior that analyzes the origins and formation of groups and identities among Latinos in the United States, along with their political consequences. In itself, this provides a virtual roadmap for alternative ways of understanding Latino politics. But noting the inadequacy of existing theoretical frameworks to understand the emergence of Latino urban political coalitions in the 1980s, Hero developed his distinctive concept of two-tiered pluralism.

The two-tiered pluralism concept recognizes the agency and mobilization of minority groups but places this pluralistic dynamic in a two-tiered system in which a top tier of political and socioeconomic privilege dominates. As a result, racial and ethnic minorities experience formal equity but not substantive equity. Blacks, Latinos, and Asians hold different positions in the second tier of two-tiered pluralism but the efficacy of their political efforts is constrained by the first tier. While Hero begins with an interest group pluralism assumption, and acknowledges the extent of political activity among ethnic and racial groups, he hews closer to Stone’s (1980) view of “systemic power.” This is not an antipluralist stance but one incorporating the limits on pluralist energies built into a capitalist, liberal democratic system. Two-tiered pluralism, therefore, challenges the conventional assumptions of democratic representation; it brings together a more structuralist account of the political histories shaping ethnic and racial mobilization and representation with a recognition of the possibilities for agency and democratic voice. It is a generative concept: Hero’s introduction of the notion of two-tiered pluralism formed the intellectual grounding for subsequent scholars to analyze the causal mechanisms, such as representation or institutional arrangements, that link racial and ethnic diversity to policy decisions.

“The importance of the theory and the empirical evidence presented cannot be overstated.”

Hero’s Racial Diversity and Social Capital (2007) exemplifies his contextual viewpoint. Here he critiques the social capital concept as analytically inattentive to racial and ethnic diversity as experienced in the United States. While there is a long tradition critiquing pluralism, Hero, drawing on his work that preceded the development of the social capital concept in the United States, was among the first to raise questions about its adequacy and appropriateness when the concept’s popularity was almost universal. Racial Diversity and Social Capital is the most fully developed statement, of course, but his Perspectives piece in 2003 (“Social Capital and Racial Inequality in America”) was a breakthrough in identifying and developing a critique of social capital’s frequent negative effect on ethnoracial equality in the American case. Juxtaposing the social capital thesis with the racial diversity thesis, he argued that state-level configurations of racial and ethnic groups provide more powerful explanations of political behavior and policy choices than patterns of social capital, in substantial part because levels of social capital are themselves importantly shaped by America’s racial legacies. While social capital remains an important concept for understanding political processes, Hero’s work underscores that social capital is both a product of and shaped by demographic diversity across states and localities.

INSTITUTIONS AND INEQUALITY

Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity and American Politics (Hero 1998) takes an institutional turn, arguing that variations in politics, policies, and the institutions that make them across the United States can be accounted for in part by the level and nature of the racial and ethnic diversity of their population. Much of the groundwork for this argument was set out in earlier articles analyzing the influence of ethnoracial diversity configurations at the state and county levels. Tolbert and Hero (1996), for example, analyze the role of racial/ethnic diversity in county-level support for California’s illegal immigration initiative (Proposition 187). Their findings indicate that racial/ethnic context is critical beyond individual-level factors, economic conditions, and party: bifurcated counties with large Latino populations strongly supported Proposition 187, as well as homogeneous counties with predominately white and very small minority populations. Testing these arguments at multiple scales and across issue areas (see Hero and Tolbert 2004) confirms the robustness of the theoretical argument and the reliability of the empirical patterns.

Faces of Inequality forced reconsideration of staid notions of “political culture” along with the conventional “determinants” models of state policy choices: it examines state politics and policies in light of dynamic contemporary changes in the ethnoracial composition of the state population rather than residual notions of historic cultural patterns. This concern with race and culture in American politics goes back to V.O. Key (1949), of course. But the significance of race was largely overlooked or obscured in the state politics research for about 50 years, and Hero’s work reasserts its place as fundamental to state politics. He emphasized the important of race in general, rather than as just one among many variables, and as relevant across all the US states, not only in “the South.”

At a minimum, this work turns notions of political culture on their head: rather than distant waves of immigration accounting for values, attitudes, and policy differences at the subnational level, Hero demonstrates that the often historically inegalitarian as well as volatile racial and ethnic changes in subnational communities are better explanations of policy choices. In addition, he tracks the relationships between ethnoracial diversity, state political institutions, and public policies. One of the most compelling findings is that relative racial group outcomes are often substantially worse in environments that are on the whole homogeneous although outcomes may be “better” in some absolute sense. Conversely, in racially “bi-furcated” environments the reverse is the case. There are problematic normative implications of each setting, but delineating how often these overlooked outcomes occur is an essential aspect of grappling with those implications. While Hero’s goal is not to reject alternative frameworks—he even acknowledges that his “homogenous” states parallel Elazar’s Moralistic and Moralistic/Individualistic states—he does make a persuasive argument that his contextualist view of ethnoracial diversity must be accounted for in any analysis of state politics and policy.

In the view of Andrew Aoki, a younger scholar collaborating with Hero, “this work reawakened an intellectual focus on the primacy of race and ethnic politics in understanding state politics and American politics more generally. It encouraged a new generation of scholars to detail the causal mechanisms that underlie the relationships between ethnoracial diversity and inequality so elegantly laid out in his theoretical frameworks.” In supporting Hero’s nomination for APSA president, Valerie Martinez-Ebers speaks for the Latino Caucus in referring to this work: “The importance of the theory and the empirical evidence presented cannot be overstated.” Hero provides clear and persuasive evidence that subnational political institutions often respond to minority populations in an adverse and biased way. Future analyses of political culture—and state politics—that fail to take into account racial and ethnic configurations are insufficient.

FEDERALISM AND INEQUALITY

Evidence of the evolution of Hero’s work is suggested by the juxtaposition of the coauthored book Multiethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban School Reform (Clarke et al. 2006) that examined intergroup relations, including black-Latino, at the urban level with regard to local education policies, on the one hand, and the recent coauthored book, Black-Latino Relations in National Politics: Beyond Conflict or Cooperation (Hero and Preuhs 2013a), on the other, which sheds light on the largely understudied question of minority intergroup relations at the national level. Both give credit to pluralist perspectives on American politics while demonstrating that coalition politics between groups, interminority as well as minority/nonminority, must fully appreciate the distinct American racial state and how federal institutions and structures modulate those relations, at times facilitating but often constraining egalitarian outcomes.

Multiethnic Moments (Clarke et al. 2006) builds on the two-tiered pluralism framework by integrating it with the work of Heclo and others on the interplay of interests, ideas, and institutions. The analysis centers on the 1980s and 1990s, suggesting that the increasing controversy about local school integration initiatives and demands for lifting federal court orders for desegregation created a “window of opportunity” in which reforms more attentive to the needs of racial and ethnic groups could be pushed onto the local education policy agenda. Working from a contextualist perspective, it was anticipated that this “multiethnic moment” took different forms within each of the four cities studied (Denver, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles). Because each city had sizeable, if different, school-age minority populations, there were grounds to anticipate some form of voice. But the analysis offers few instances of effective ethnoracial voices nor little evidence that multiracial coalitions on school reform are likely. Indeed the reforms currently in play have little resonance with the priorities of African American or Latino parents in these cities: equity as a value is displaced by framing education in terms of choice and competition. In part, the differences among racial and ethnic groups in terms of how they frame educational issues limits coalition building and therefore hampers the prospects for multiethnic constituencies’ interests and ideas becoming a driving force in urban educational reforms. A similar finding of tacit support emerges in their analysis of roll call votes in the US House of Representatives: black member of Congress votes support Latino policy priorities and Latino member of Congress votes, more modestly, support black policy priorities often independent of party (Hero and Preuhs 2010).

As his coauthor Rob Preuhs describes it, the award-winning book Black-Latino Relations in National Politics: Beyond Conflict or Cooperation (Hero and Preuhs 2013a) “actually started as a conversation about interest groups in Hero’s office more than a decade before it was published. It was a typically long conversation about ideas, data, and a simple question. Over the years, more questions, data analysis, recrafting ideas, all occurred … He is…always asking more questions and providing broad themes from which we develop theoretical and empirical questions.” This exemplifies Hero’s approach to collaborative scholarly work and the careful development of a groundbreaking argument. And notably, this book portends an emerging scholarship on black and Latino (and other) relations based on newly available data on minority relations. In their Perspectives on Politics article, Hero and Preuhs (2009) asked whether congressional scorecard data reflected competition or cooperation of black and Latino advocacy groups across issue areas. In contrast to the local competition and conflict portrayed in Multi-Ethnic Moments (Clarke et al. 2006), there is some overlap in issues identified as salient at the national level but little congruence on preferred policy positions. This does not reflect opposing viewpoints or positions; rather it indicates a divergence in priorities and advocacy efforts. Overall, Preuhs and Hero characterize these intergroup relations at the national level as “tacit non-cooperation” and independence rather than conflict and competition.

To Larry Dodd, Black-Latino Relations articulates Hero’s concerns with the “very special ways in which American federalism shapes the character and impact of ethnic politics. In so far as federalism privileges the role of localism and the power of local politics, it tends to set African American and Latino leaders and groups against one another, in their competing efforts to consolidate local power and specialized policy influence. On the other hand, the central role of national institutions within the federal system then provides incentives for ethnic minorities to band together at the national level, cooperating within Congress for example in efforts to push forward the collective interests of ethnic minorities. “ Michael Leo Owens notes that this concern with “ theories of ….power and responsibilities across scales and space generally set him apart from most scholars of urban politics and racial and ethnic politics.”

Further attention to these multilevel differences is provided in an edited collection, The Politics of Democratic Inclusion (Wolbrech and Hero 2005). The concept of “democratic inclusion” facilitates analyses of a range of institutions affecting ethnoracial incorporation and representation at the national, state, and local levels. Wolbrecht and Hero’s charge to the authors emphasized the empirical assessment of how well particular institutions bring in or incorporate marginalized groups along with the normative consideration of what democratic inclusion in these institutions might look like. More coherent than most edited volumes, the democratic inclusion concept opened discussions of institutions ranging from social movements to judicial systems to local governments. Moving away from an overt relational perspective to a more inclusive institutional view indirectly confirms Hero’s earlier thoughts on the need for linking institutions and group dynamics.

NEW IMMIGRANTS IN AN OLDETHNORACIAL ORDER

Hero collaborated with an impressive set of senior and younger Latino scholars in developing, gaining funding for, and analyzing the 2005–2006 Latino National Survey. This project is distinctive for the multilevel sampling and extensive array of contextual data which provides meaning to individual observations. On these grounds alone, it is one of the most sophisticated and well-designed political surveys available. To date, the Latino National Survey is the basis for two coauthored books, Latino Lives in America: Making it Home (Fraga et al. 2010) and Latinos in the New Millennium: An Almanac of Opinion, Attitudes, and Policy Preferences (Fraga et al. 2012). Latino Lives in America: Making it Home, coauthored with the other principal investigators from the survey, brings together both quantitative and qualitative data to show the multiple types of Latino political identities in play. In addition to a representative survey of 8,000 self-identified Latinos living in 15 states and the District of Columbia, the data includes results from 14 focus groups (150 participants in 10 cities) to track the complex trends and conditions of contemporary Latino life. Remarkably, this is the first comprehensive overview of Latinos in the United States since de la Garza et al’s Latino Voices in 1992. Of the many insightful findings, the counterintuitive argument that continued transnational ties between Latinos in the United States and their home communities leads to greater identification with the United States has attracted the attention of comparative politics and international relations scholars. Given the heightened tension about immigration reforms during the survey period, the data on individual-level identification and political action is especially rich and complex.

Hero’s agenda-setting work shapes an intellectual community around the normative and empirical issues involved in understanding race and inequality in American politics.

Latinos in the New Millennium: An Almanac of Opinion, Attitudes, and Policy Preferences presents the Latino National Survey findings on group characteristics, attitudes, behaviors and perspectives on an array of issues. It is the most recent and most comprehensive dataset on Latinos in the United States; it will enable new generations of scholars and students to develop original analyses and cutting-edge theoretical frameworks. While not a longitudinal study like the GSS, the Almanac provides a core set of data on Latino demographic, attitudinal, and behavioral attributes that has been one of the best sources of data on trends in the Latino community and is widely used by political scientists, sociologists, and scholars from other social science disciplines.

In his Annual Review of Political Science article on immigration and social policy Hero (2010) contends that “the new immigrants find themselves in an old ethnoracial order.” This assertion is central to his work on the incorporation of immigrants into contemporary American politics. Given his relational approach to questions of inequality, it centers the analysis on how immigration has further affected and complicated theoretical understanding and real world politics of American racial group relations. One of the most important empirical contributions is an American Journal of Political Science article in which Hero and Preuhs (2007) examined questions raised in studies of comparative and American politics about support for welfare and “the welfare state” in the context of “multi-culturalism.” In the article, they develop an innovative and powerful “Multicultural Disposition” index that allows them to measure state policies indicating a responsiveness to cultural minorities across policy areas. While this measure did not appear to affect state’s willingness to expand eligibility for welfare benefits to recent immigrants under federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act discretion, it suggests that states make distinctions between citizen minorities and recent immigrants; that is, greater inclusion of immigrants leads to lower welfare benefits in states with the most inclusive immigrant eligibility provisions. As Hero and Preuhs point out, this echoes historical patterns of Southern blacks and low welfare allocations but indicates that immigrants introduce a new political dimension to these state policy decisions.

Hero’s recent coauthored Newcomers, Insiders and Outsiders: Immigrants and American Racial Politics in the Early 21st Century (Schmidt et al. 2010) addresses the tensions of immigrants and racial politics in the United States. It considers four alternative futures of ethnoracial politics in the United States, contending that ethnoracial stratification will persist even with the introduction of diverse newcomers blurring existing racial and ethnic categories. Of equal importance, the findings detail how post-1965 immigration has shaped the political goals and strategies of existing ethnoracial groups. It certainly rebuts any “melting pot” view of recent immigration while underscoring the increasing complexity of the emerging political terrain.

COLLABORATION AND STEWARDSHIP

As Hero’s many collaborators, colleagues, and students attest, the openness and respect for different viewpoints evident in his scholarly work also marks Hero’s work with others on research, teaching, and disciplinary stewardship. Ron Schmidt, Sr., a recent collaborator, notes “from the beginning, Rodney has demonstrated a willingness to be eclectic in posing research questions that are important in the political world, and then being equally eclectic and creative in finding rigorous methods for finding answers to those questions… Rodney has consistently had the courage, wisdom, and intellectual capacity to be both inventive and rigorous in developing new ways to address important questions in the political world.” This is echoed by his many collaborators, all of whom call attention to his intellectual leadership and inclusive style. In many ways, a defining feature of Hero’s work is that it creates a standard for future generations of scholars by opening new doors to important questions and research agendas and modeling research collaboration.

Now on the faculty at the University of Iowa, Caroline J. Tolbert began authoring scholarly articles with Hero while she was still a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As she tells it, “the best part was that every paper and research project was like a new puzzle, a story to be told where we didn’t know the answer before the project began. It was exciting, interesting, and rewarding. Rodney was an excellent mentor in that he treated a graduate student, like myself, as an equal partner. My opinion and my voice mattered. I’ve tried to model this practice of coauthoring with graduate students throughout my own career. I am grateful for what Rodney shared with me when I was a young scholar starting out.”

This same inventiveness and energy characterizes his work in university settings. He is an exceptional departmental citizen, an extraordinary mentor to graduate and undergraduate students, and a model of personal integrity, modesty, and humane values. As one colleague put it, “He is always curious about other faculty and student research, always asking the right questions to help you rethink your own work.” This generosity of spirit and energy is well known within the discipline where Rodney has been a strong and attentive supporter of junior scholars in several fields. His high rate of scholarly activity is not at the cost of departmental citizenship and stewardship within the profession.

These contributions within the profession include Hero’s continuous and active involvement in the APSA Urban Politics and the Race and Ethnicity Organized Sections (president, 2010–11). In 2011, the Urban Politics Organized Section awarded him the Norton Long Career Achievement Award for distinguished contributions to the study of urban politics over the course of a career. In all, he has served on more than a dozen committees and/or served in other capacities in the APSA. In addition, he served as president of the Midwest Political Science Association (2007–08), as a vice president of the American Political Science Association (2003–04), and president of the Western Political Science Association (1999–2000). Additional recognition of his professional contributions includes his leadership role in the Latino National Survey, the APSA Ralph J. Bunche and Woodrow Wilson awards, endowed chairs at University of California, Berkeley and Notre Dame University, and numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and other major foundations. Hero also served on the editorial board of every major political science journal: American Political Science Review, 2012–2015; 2001–2007, American Journal of Political Science, 1994–1997, Political Behavior, 2005–2009, Political Research Quarterly, 2000–2006, 1994–1996, 1987–1989 , Journal of Politics, 2001–2004; 1991–1993, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, 2000–2002, and Urban Affairs Review, 1998–2000.

LOOKING AHEAD

Overall, Rodney Hero’s agenda-setting work shapes an intellectual community around the normative and empirical issues involved in understanding race and inequality in American politics. As APSA president, he plans to go further by creating a Presidential Task Force to examine “Race and Class Inequality in the Americas,” considering North America and Latin America to understand the complexities of racial categories and whether and how they interact or intersect across and within various countries in the hemisphere. The central goal of the task force is to investigate the connections between racial and ethnic identities and class status within the Americas.

Typically, a wide array of questions are identified: Are racial and ethnic hierarchies and class status generally understood as mutually constitutive within the countries of the Americas or are they regarded as largely separate phenomena? Because they are analyzed separately in political science research, does the adoption of a particular epistemological standpoint—focusing on class or race/ethnicity—prime researchers to ignore certain questions, evidence, and outcomes in their research on inequality? Does an analytical approach that brings race/ethnicity and class together lead to better understandings of politics in the Americas and the sources of inequalities in these countries? Continuing the focus on inequality and ethnoracial diversity while extending the analytic scope, the Task Force’s efforts and report promise to enhance the intellectual conversation on inequalities and enrich our understanding of inequality and ethnoracial diversity under common conditions of globalization and fiscal crisis. Hero is currently involved in research with collaborators that explores such questions in the U.S. case.

As APSA president, he is planning to visit and make presentations, tentatively titled “The Promise of Political Science,” at a number of colleges/universities that have especially large student bodies from groups that are underrepresented in the discipline, such as historically black colleges and institutions with large Latino enrollments.