This paper examines the effect of institutional contact on political participation among non-White communities. While both formal and informal institutions help shape community citizen participation, their effects vary on the historical inclusion (or exclusion) of certain racial groups. Formal institutions, like political parties, have historically excluded or neglected non-White and immigrant voters. We argue that for the excluded or neglected, non-traditional political institutions, like community based organizations, serve as supplements to facilitate political incorporation and engagement. These informal institutions help develop skills and resources among their constituents, and offer routine opportunities to participate. We use the 2008 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to test the differential effects of self-reported voter mobilization through nonpartisan and partisan institutional contact to explain variations among racial groups by the intensity of contact, occurrence of co-ethnic outreach, and type of institutional mobilization. We find that while contact by a partisan/political institution, like a political party or campaign, has an overall positive effect on political participation for all voters, contact by a nonpartisan/civic or community group is substantively more important for Latino and Asian American voter mobilization. Our analysis therefore offers cohesive evidence of how voters interact with and are affected by mobilization efforts that attends to differences across racial and ethnic boundaries, and variations in institutional contact.

Research on candidate evaluation has delved into questions of how voters evaluate women candidates, Black male candidates, as well as how candidates’ appearances may condition electoral opportunities. Combined, this scholarship has tended to focus on how race, gender, and skin tone privilege or undermine evaluations of Black male or White women candidates. We intervene to study Black women candidates and draw on research on colorism and Black women's hairstyles and ask: How does variation in skin tone and hairstyle affect Black voter evaluations of Black women candidates? We develop and test two hypotheses: the empowerment hypothesis and the internal discrimination hypothesis. We mostly find support for the latter. Importantly, we find that the interaction of dark skin and non-straight hair has mostly negative effects on Black men and women's trait evaluations, but a positive effect on Black women's willingness to vote for the candidate. Furthermore, this research shows that hair texture is an important aspect of responses to Black women candidates—hair is not just hair for Black women candidates. This research shows that understanding the effects of candidate appearance on voter behavior necessitates considering the intersection of racial and gender phenotypes.

This paper utilizes original survey data to examine whether individuals believe they share views on public policy with members of their own racial or ethnic group and whether they place an importance on living in legislative districts with people from their own racial or ethnic group. We find strong evidence that Latino and African-American respondents have a sense of shared policy preferences within their own group. Our results also indicate white Republicans are very likely to view themselves as having shared policy preferences within their group. Respondents who have a strong sense of shared policy preferences with their racial group are also the most likely to think it is important to live in legislative districts with others from their own racial or ethnic group. This paper affords a deeper understanding of the extent to which voters express commonality with their racial and ethnic minority group on matters related to public policy.

A growing body of work has examined the psychological underpinnings of conspiracy theory endorsement, arguing that the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories and political rumors is a function of underlying predispositions and motivated reasoning. We show, like others, that rumor endorsement can also be a function of individuals’ group attitudes. In particular, among white Americans, birther beliefs are uniquely associated with racial animus. We merge this finding with other work which shows that rumors are more strongly endorsed by the individuals most motivated and capable of integrating them among their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs. We find, therefore, that it is white Republicans who are both racially conservative and highly knowledgeable who possess the most skepticism about Obama's birthplace.

This paper examines the ways that social movement organizations affiliated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement use Twitter through three content analysis studies. The main finding presented in the paper is that the modal tweet generated between December 1, 2015 and October 31, 2016 was an emotional response—an expression of sadness, outrage, or despair—to police brutality and the killings of African Americans. The second key finding is that BLM organizations generated more tweets that framed the movement as a struggle for individual rights than ones that utilized frames about gender, racial, and LGBTQ identities. Finally, the paper shows that BLM activists urge their followers to pursue disruptive repertoires of contention less frequently than they encourage other political behaviors. These findings suggest that the BLM movement is intelligible through both the resource mobilization and new social movement paradigms within social movement studies.

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.

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.

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.

Extant scholarship on black politics has demonstrated the mobilizing effect that racial group consciousness can have on African American political participation. Few studies, however, test for or compare the political impact of group consciousness across national contexts. This paper presents an empirical comparison of group consciousness and its relationship with political behavior among black Americans and black Britons. Mobilizing two nationally representative surveys from the United States and Britain and a multi-dimensional measure of group consciousness, the findings presented here suggest that while elements of racial group consciousness are present among blacks in both societies, racial group consciousness is generally more prevalent and politically significant among blacks in the United States. For example, blacks in Britain are less likely to view blacks as occupying a fundamentally marginalized structural position and less likely to endorse race specific interventions that might address that marginalization. Results from regression analysis further suggest that while strong racial (rather than national) group attachment negatively affects the likelihood that blacks will vote in both countries, other elements of group consciousness are more strongly associated with participation among blacks in the United States than in Britain.

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.

This study evaluates the emergence and persistence of the racial divide on health reform in public opinion using survey data from 2008 through 2017. The findings support existing work showing a consistent relationship between racial resentment and attitudes on the Affordable Care Act among White adults. However, the study also builds on existing work by evaluating the relationship between strength of racial identity among Black adults and health care opinion during President Barack Obama's Administration. The paper investigates the implications of the findings for future health policy in the post-Obama era using survey data on the Republicans’ attempt to pass the American Health Care Act in 2017. The results underscore the conditions that make the “spillover” of racial attitudes into seemingly non-racial policy areas more or less likely to occur. The findings also provide suggestive evidence for how future health reforms may receive different levels of support from both White and Black adults.

Cathy Cohen’s (1999) theory of secondary marginalization helps to explain why the needs of some members of Black communities are not prioritized on “the” Black political agenda; indeed, some groups are ignored altogether as mainstream Black public opinion shifts to the right (Tate 2010). However, the contemporary movement for Black Lives calls for an intersectional approach to Black politics. Its platform requires participants to take seriously the notion that since Black communities are diverse, so are the needs of its members. To what extent are Blacks likely to believe that those who face secondary marginalization should be prioritized on the Black political agenda? What is the role of linked fate in galvanizing support around these marginalized Blacks? To what extent does respectability politics serve to hinder a broader embrace of Blacks who face different sets of interlocking systems of oppression, such as Black women, formerly incarcerated Blacks, undocumented Black people, and Black members of LBGTQ communities in an era marked by Black social movements? We analyze data from the 2016 Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to assess whether all Black lives matter to Black Americans.

Academics, practitioners, and community activists have hotly debated the effects, both positive and negative, of gentrification. Still, political scientists have yet to fully weigh in on the phenomenon. Here, we assess how gentrification affects descriptive minority representation. We find evidence that gentrification negatively impacts minority descriptive representation, specifically black descriptive representation. Gentrification that results in a growing white population negatively affects the election of black councilmembers, and the effect is particularly pronounced when the black population is close to losing its dominance (i.e., it comprises roughly half of the area's population). In contrast, the election of Latino councilmembers is not affected by a growing white population. This suggests that gentrification resulting in demographic shifts has varying effects on descriptive representation, depending on the race and ethnicity of the councilmember and neighborhood, and thus warrants greater attention from political scientists.