The public opinion literature stresses the importance of source cues in determining which types of messages affect attitudes and which types do not. Building upon such research, we seek to determine if messenger ethnicity influences how individuals evaluate candidates speaking on immigration in the context of a campaign. Do Americans (and Anglo Americans in particular) view Latino candidates as more experienced, stronger leaders, more trustworthy, and more qualified on immigration than Anglo candidates? Moreover, do such relationships hold regardless of the valence of the message itself? Through an original survey experiment presenting subjects with immigration talk on the campaign trail, we find Latino candidates are reviewed more positively than Anglo candidates when it comes to the immigration messages they speak (especially when it comes to pro-immigration messages). Such findings give us insight into whether or not Latino candidates have the potential to “own” the issue of immigration, as well as offering another path by which Latino candidates can gain a strong foothold with the public in the context of a campaign.

In April 2019, the Japanese government officially legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people. Building on an institutionalist framework, the paper suggests that a phenomenon of institutional layering has taken place, resulting in tensions between the desire to preserve the legitimacy of old institutions and the pressure to develop more progressive policies. To explain this process, policy legacies, and institutional opportunities are relevant. First, the narrative that equality can be attained through assimilation, and the political construction of the “Ainu problem” as a regional one tied to Hokkaido pervade political imaginaries and institutions. Second, institutional opportunities have mediated the ways activists have sought to make their voices heard in the political arena. A focus on key historical segments illuminates the difficulty for activists to penetrate high-level political arenas while indicating the importance of agency, ties and interests in explaining major reforms and their limitations. The ambiguity that characterizes current policy framework points to the potential leverage that this policy configuration represents for the Ainu. At the same time, historical and institutional legacies that have shaped Indigenous politics continue to constrain, to a great extent, the possibilities for meaningful and transformative developments for the Ainu.

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.

In this paper, we consider the changing nature of today's protest–election connection by looking back to the Blue Wave of the 2018 midterm elections that led to Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives. We ask whether White voters' participation in the Blue Wave of the 2018 elections is related to the multi-racial participation in the #BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020. Could it be that White participation in both is symptomatic of a larger resurgence of racial liberalism that is likely to continue to play a significant role in our politics going forward starting with the 2020 election?

The question of how partisanship is influenced by exogenous factors has been vigorously debated, yet this debate is less frequently noted in the literature on Latino partisanship. This study analyzes the 2006 Latino National Survey with geographic identifiers to explore how the political context of a county influences Latino partisan self-identification. There are a variety of reasons why the political environment might influence Latinos’ partisan choice. First, a substantial proportion of the adult Latino population in the United States is foreign-born, potentially lessening the influence of parental partisan socialization. Second, increased migration to areas outside the Southwest has exposed Latinos to new and different social, political, and economic environments. Using subgroup analysis, interactive logit models, and regression discontinuity, we find that the local political context influences the party attachment of Latino immigrants in predictable ways. However, for Latinos born in the United States, our analysis does not provide evidence of a causal connection between partisan environment and an individual's partisan identification.

In settler societies like Canada, United States, and Australia, the bourgeoning discourse that frames colonial violence against Indigenous people as genocide has been controversial, specifically because there is much debate about the meaning and applicability of genocide. Through an analysis of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this paper analyzes what is revealed about settler colonialism in the nexus of difficult knowledge, curatorial decisions, and political debates about the label of genocide. I specifically examine competing definitions of genocide, the primacy of the Holocaust, the regulatory role of the settler state, and the limits of a human rights framework. My argument is that genocide debates related to Indigenous experiences operationalize a range of governing techniques that extend settler colonialism, even as Indigenous peoples confront existing hegemonies. These techniques include: interpretative denial; promoting an Oppression Olympics and a politics of distancing; regulating difference through state-based recognition and interference; and depoliticizing claims that overshadow continuing practices of assimilation, extermination, criminalization, containment, and forced movement of Indigenous peoples. By pinpointing these techniques, this paper seeks to build on Indigenous critiques of colonialism, challenge settler national narratives of peaceful and lawful origins, and foster ways to build more just relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

I examine perceptions of Barack Obama's ideological positioning from 2006 to 2016. White Americans perceived Barack Obama to be significantly more liberal than respondents from other racial groups, and whites scoring higher on measures of racial resentment saw Obama as more liberal than those scoring lower. Perceptions of Barack Obama's ideological positioning shifted leftward early in his presidency but shifted rightward after 2010. This rightward shift notwithstanding, Obama was perceived to be quite liberal from the start of his presidency, and perceptions of his ideological positioning were racialized from the beginning. There is some evidence that citizens' perceptions of Barack Obama's ideological positioning became more racialized between 2012 and 2014. Placements of Hillary Clinton were racialized in 2016, suggesting that the Obama presidency may have lasting effects on the ideological stereotyping of Democratic candidates. I discuss these findings in light of recent research on social sorting, affective polarization, and negative partisanship.

Research has shown that white Americans oppose welfare spending in part due to their racial prejudices. Yet, this conventional wisdom ignores the importance of local geography in determining whether whites are likely to view welfare in racialized terms. This article demonstrates that the effect of prejudice on whites’ welfare preferences depends on the salience of welfare's racialized image in a given geographic context. I present a novel application of the racial threat hypothesis—conceptualizing both prejudice and place as multidimensional—to argue that the racial geography of an area amplifies the effect of traditional racial stereotypes on welfare preferences, whereas economic geography amplifies the effect of symbolically racist attitudes. I test these propositions using geocoded data from the years following the 1996 U.S. welfare policy reforms. My analysis reveals that racial attitudes are more predictive of welfare preferences not simply where the stigmas of welfare are salient due to a large black population or high poverty rate, but more specifically where residential segregation makes black or poor households more visible from the viewpoint of whites. These findings highlight the subjectivity of the white perspective, and call for more scholarship theorizing whites’ agency in seeing racialized issues as threatening to white interests.

The undocumented youth movement is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and immigration status. I argue that racial and immigration status diversity has a direct impact on the movement's ability to “expand the scope of conflict,” that is to say recruiting new members, reaching out to elected officials, and establishing representative leadership—elements that are critical to the sustainability and effectiveness of a movement. Findings also indicate that immigration status diversity plays a complex role. The presence of citizen allies brings both risks and benefits to the movement, as they reinforce the electoral connection sought by elected officials while at the same time jeopardizing the authenticity of the movement. Results are based on field research conducted between 2012 and 2015 in NJ and NY, including participant observation in state-level campaigns and interviews with over 130 immigrant youths, allies, and elected officials. This article contributes to the social movement literature by providing empirical evidence of the challenges present within diverse coalitions. It addresses the question of immigration status diversity, an issue that affects the immigration movement but speaks more broadly to the role of allies in social movements.

Ethnonationalist politics have been on the rise in the United States since the 2008 financial crisis, culminating with the rise of Donald Trump. We examine why two seemingly unconnected things—economic crises and prejudice—so often arise simultaneously. Combining theories of economics and emotions, we connect economic crises and prejudice through the role of emotional response to crises, namely anger and anxiety. We use two survey experiments in the United States to test various theories of how emotions might connect economic threat to negative intergroup attitudes. We find that economic concerns increase both anger and anxiety among individuals, but that these emotions have distinct effects on prejudice. Angry individuals show increased prejudice, but only towards groups one is ideologically predisposed to be prejudiced towards. In contrast, anxiety exhibits few consistent effects on prejudice.

Existing accounts of ethnic mobilization have focused on the role of group size or state policy. This paper suggests that narrow identity activism was also non-linearly related to education since poorly-educated groups are unlikely to have an educated elite to participate in activism, while in very educated groups this elite existed but participated in the colonial state or anti-colonial nationalism. This theory is tested using a historical panel dataset of Indian caste groups, with petitions to the colonial census authorities being used as an index of caste activism.

Previous research on the voting propensity of young Americans has largely treated the effects of state electoral laws as homogenous, despite today’s youth belonging to the most racially and ethnically diverse age cohort to date. Research has documented differences in participatory resources across racial, ethnic, and age groups, with recent work also suggesting differences in racial and ethnic identity influences across age groups. These factors may lead to significant differences in voter turnout under different state electoral environments. Using the Current Population Survey (2000–2016), national voter rolls (2012), and the Cost of Voting Index, this study investigates how the intersectionality of age and racial/ethnic identification affect voting decisions across state electoral environments. Whether comparing young voters across racial/ethnic identifications or comparing young voters to their older racial/ethnic counterparts, results strongly support the assertion that young voters are affected to differing degrees by increased costs to vote along racial/ethnic lines.

In an effort to address the dearth of literature regarding how African American political theorists have historically interpreted the meaning of Native political experience to make sense of their own, we chart what four influential New World Black writers, from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, say about Native Americans. While there is some diversity among the particular interpretive foci of these historical works, each generally invokes Native Americans as having a shared experience of oppression with Blacks that warrants resistance; being crushed by circumstances in which African-descended people have survived and thrived; exemplifying oppression that has no redemptive power; providing evidence of the ongoing possibility of Black extinction; and as racially inferior to Blacks and thus in need of Black ladies’ supposedly civilizing qualities. This paper uses these historical Africana perspectives on Indigenous and Black relations to explore the political implications of forging individual and shared identities at the intersection of race and gender.

We analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consensual and primary values of equal opportunity and political equality. References to racial inequality have been few and far between since the height of the civil rights era. By contrast, another primary value in the American political tradition—economic individualism are a major focus in these SOTUs. We trace the scant presence of equality talk in these speeches to the ambiguous scope of egalitarian goals and principles and their close tie-in with race in America. We rely on automated text analysis and systematic hand-coding of these speeches to identify broad thematic emphases as well as on close reading to interpret the patterns that these techniques reveal.

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.

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.

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.

This article seeks to illuminate the relationship between two of the most important figures in American political thought: the pragmatist philosopher William James, and the pioneering civil rights leader and intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. As Harvard's first African American PhD, Du Bois was a critical figure in theorizing about race and identity. His innovative take on double consciousness has often been attributed to his contact with James who was one of Du Bois's most critical graduate professors at Harvard. But beyond the view of the two thinkers as intellectual collaborators, is the fraught history of liberal racial fraternal pairing and its role in shaping national identity. This article examines Du Bois and James's relationship in the context of that history, one marked by troubled associations between friendship and race.