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.

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.

How do legislators respond to coethnic and cominority constituents? We conduct an audit study of all state legislators to explore white legislators’ responsiveness to different minority groups and minority group legislators’ responsiveness to each other. Black and Latino Americans currently make up about one-third of the overall U.S. population and an even larger share of some state populations. In light of this growing diversification of the American electorate, legislators may have incentives to appeal to a broad racial constituency. In our experiment, state legislators are randomly assigned to receive an email from a white, Black, or Latino constituent. Our findings suggest a lack of legislators’ discrimination, on average, against Black relative to white constituents. Instead, we find that all legislators, on average, respond more to both white and Black constituents relative to Latinos. The evidence suggests that Black legislators do not exhibit coethnic solidarity toward their Black constituents or cominority solidarity toward their Latino constituents; however, Latinos do exhibit coethnic and cominority solidarity (though there are too few Latino legislators to definitively establish this claim). We also estimate effects among white legislators by party and racial composition of districts in order to provide suggestive evidence for white legislators’ intrinsic vs. strategic motivations.

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.

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.

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.

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.