Ethnic movements continue to challenge state governments globally, with many ethnic conflicts revolving around the status of groups’ territories. Yet, politically mobilized ethnic groups vary considerably in their territorial demands: some press for increased autonomy or even outright secession, while others do not make such demands at all and prefer integration in the existing state. What explains this divergence in ethnic group demands with respect to the group's territorial status? We argue that the expected benefits of ethno-regional autonomy or secession compared to integration in a centralized state differ across distinct segments within the group as a function of three structural factors: heterogeneity in the group's income sources, cultural divisions, and territorial fragmentation, leading to disagreement over self-determination demands between different political organizations representing the same ethnic group. We test our argument using an expanded version of the Ethnic Power Relations–Organizations (EPR-O) dataset. Our pre-registered study finds support for one of our hypotheses: heterogeneity in groups’ income sources increases disagreement over self-determination demands. This finding sheds new light on the structural sources of internal divisions within ethno-political movements.

Across a series of experiments, I show that racial threat from a stereotypically nonthreatening racial minority group, Asian Americans, has a direct impact on white Americans' views of discrimination toward the group. When white Americans learn the group is growing, they feel a distinct racial threat which decreases support for the idea that Asian Americans experience discrimination while simultaneously increasing support for policy which actively discriminates against Asian Americans. I show this concept to be portable over context, examining support for discriminatory policy toward Asians in education policy and COVID-19 policy. I conclude by discussing the implications for how racial threat can drive more racial conflict while simultaneously decreasing the perception that this discrimination is occurring.

Travel bans were a globally prevalent policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, travel bans against China and European countries proved a broadly popular mitigation tool among Americans. Why did Americans support COVID-19 travel bans? We fielded two novel survey experiments, surveying 3000 American citizens across five waves (between March 2020 and March 2021). In randomizing the country of origin of those potentially subject to travel ban measures, we find consistent evidence that racial attitudes drive support for travel bans. The strength of this relationship varies across political parties and across hypothetical target countries but is not explained by objective caseloads that change across countries and over the course of the pandemic.

Did the 2008 United States presidential election produce stronger future mobilization for Blacks than non-Blacks? First-time voting influences long-term political behavior, but do minority voters see the most powerful effects when the formative election is tied to their group's political empowerment? I test this hypothesis in the context of the election of the first Black president in United States history, using voting eligibility discontinuities to identify the effect of voting in 2008 on future voting for Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites. Voting in 2008 caused a greater increase in the likelihood of voting in 2010 for Blacks than for other new voters, but there is no evidence of a sustained mobilizing advantage in subsequent elections. Furthermore, 2008 was not a unique formative voting experience for new Black voters, but rather produced similar effects on future voting as other presidential elections. These results signal that group political empowerment does not drive habitual voting.

Does exposure to a mass migration event cause citizens to vote against incumbents? I offer an answer to this question by studying one of the largest acute periods of migration in the US, the case of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift during which roughly 125,000 Cubans fled to South Florida. I estimate the change in support for Republican presidential candidates in Miami using the synthetic control method and fixed effects regressions with a panel of county-level and archival precinct-level election results. I find that, while Miami voters dramatically increased their support of the Republican candidate in 1980, this shift was not a local consequence of the Boatlift. Instead, the evidence suggests that Cuban support for Reagan was not a local Miami response to the Boatlift—it happened in Cuban communities throughout the US—but it was most noticeable in Miami because Miami had the largest Cuban population in the US even before the Boatlift. I also present evidence that this change in Cuban voting may have been specific to Reagan and not a broader shift against incumbents or toward Republicans. These findings suggest that, in this case, direct exposure to migration did not lead citizens to dramatically change their voting behavior.

How well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behavior of specific individuals. We report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles of respondents to the 2017 British Election Study (BES) and then asked to assess either (1) which party that individual was likely to have voted for in the 2017 UK election or (2) whether that individual was likely to have voted Leave or Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership. We find that, despite substantial overconfidence in individual responses, on average citizens’ guesses broadly reflect the actual distribution of groups supporting the parties and referendum positions.

When the United States intervenes in foreign countries, the lives of both foreign combatants and foreign civilians are put at risk. I examine two rhetorical strategies, the use of sanitized and dehumanizing language that can influence the public's support of foreign intervention. In the context of foreign policy, sanitized language operates by obscuring casualties of war, while dehumanizing language operates by devaluing the lives of groups of individuals. Drawing on data from two experiments, I find that sanitized language operates through creating less of an emotional reaction toward casualties of war, which causes individuals to adopt more hawkish foreign policy attitudes. I find that dehumanizing language also leads to more hawkish foreign policy attitudes, but, contrary to expectations, does not lead to increased disgust or anger toward dehumanized groups.

Despite widespread belief in the efficacy of statutes prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, including protections for the use of privately provided yet publicly available services such as transportation, hotels, and restaurants, we lack causal estimates of the impacts of these statutes on the well-being of those they are designed to protect. We leverage the US Supreme Court's 1883 strike of the public accommodations provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, along with variation in state-level statutes, to identify the impact of the Act's public accommodations provisions. Using a panel of repeated geo-located medical exams of US Colored Troops (USCT) and white Union Army veterans, and a series of difference-in-differences, geographic regression discontinuity, and placebo designs, estimates consistently suggest that the Court's ruling led to meaningful weight losses for USCT veterans in states without state-level public accommodations statutes. These findings suggest that statutes prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations can have significant positive impacts on the well-being of those they are designed to protect.

Though the demographic characteristics of judicial nominees in the United States have gained increased political attention in recent years, relatively little is known about how they affect public opinion toward judicial nominees and courts. We evaluate these relationships in the context of race and gender using a conjoint experiment conducted during a recent vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. We find consistent evidence that Americans are more supportive of coracial nominees, particularly among white Republicans and Black Democrats, but no evidence of a similar effect on the basis of gender. Our results have important implications for theories of descriptive representation and suggest limits to its use as a means for generating political support for judicial nominees.