Racial proximity and campaign contributing

A distinguished tradition of social science research has shown higher levels of U.S. Southern political participation in areas of black-white residential proximity, attributing this activism to the political threat perceived by white voters from having African Americans concentrated close-by. Here we examine whether elevated participation in the form of campaign contributions is also visible in areas of mixed settlement, and which party, if any, this activism has come to favor. The findings from contribution data show that the South remains a distinctive political region. Southern locations of joint black-white settlement are productive of intensified donor mobilization favoring Republican candidates. Republicans not only raise more money in these places, but also receive numerically more contributions than they do in Non-Southern locations that are otherwise similar. These differences remain even after introducing statistical controls for affluence, the aged population, the number of potential contributors, and the competitiveness of local campaigns.     

Earthquakes and Aftershocks: Race, Direct Democracy, and Partisan Change

Although dramatic partisan change among the electorate is infrequent, the issue agendas of parties may produce large shifts. A major cause of such change is the politics of race. In a political environment charged with racially oriented issues, racial groups often align themselves with different parties (as witnessed most recently in the American South). Yet, if racial appeals violate norms of equality, these appeals may rebound on the party using them. Consequently, members of the (white) racial majority and racially targeted minority may both move away from the offending party. Using data from the California Field Poll, we find that racially charged ballot propositions sponsored by the Republican party during the 1990s in California reversed the trend among Latinos and Anglos toward identifying as Republican, ceteris paribus, by shifting party attachments toward the Democratic party. Our results raise serious questions about the long-term efficacy of racially divisive strategies for electoral gain.     

The distorting effects of racial animus on proximity voting in the 2016 elections

While the use of racial appeals by the 2016 Trump campaign is indisputable, researchers are actively debating their precise role in influencing voter behavior in the election. We seek to expand upon existing research which finds that racial animus electorally benefited the Trump campaign. We examine to what extent those benefits also materialized for GOP candidates down-ballot and whether racial animus distorted ideological proximity voting in the 2016 election. We find that racial animus among voters helped Republicans at multiple ballot levels and that higher levels of racial animus distorted spatial voting among voters ideologically closest to the Democratic candidate.     

Promoting ethnic equality in campaign messages: Survey experimental evidence from Nairobi,Kenya

In urban sub-Saharan Africa, leaders should appeal to voters of diverse ethnic backgrounds for electoral success. Yet, the political salience of ethnic inequality demands their attention to ethnicity issues in campaign messaging. This study examines the impacts on voter preference of appeals to ethnic equality by using a conjoint experiment conducted in Nairobi, Kenya. Appeals to ethnic equality were varied randomly as follows: (1) no appeal to ethnic equality, (2) appeals to equal opportunities for all ethnic groups (pan-ethnic appeal), and (3) appeals to opportunities for ethnic minorities (pro-minority appeal). The study found a substantial increase in support for politicians making appeals to ethnic equality, while pan-ethnic appeals increased voter support for candidates more than pro-minority appeals. Pan-ethnic appeals were more effective than pro-minority appeals because they bolster support from co-ethnic voters who are also from the candidate's party, while not alienating non-co-ethnic voters or voters affiliated with other parties.     

Democratic Values? A Racial Group-Based Analysis of Core Political Values,Partisanship, and Ideology

Research on American core political values, partisanship, and ideology often concludes that liberals and Democrats believe equality to be one of the most important values while conservatives and Republicans place greater emphasis on social order and moral traditionalism. Though these findings are valuable, it is assumed that they generalize across various groups (e.g. socioeconomic classes, religious groups, racial groups, etc.) in society. Focusing on racial groups in contemporary American politics, I challenge this assumption. More specifically, I argue that if individuals’ value preferences are formed during their pre-adult socialization years, and if the socialization process is different across racial groups, then it may be the case that members of different racial groups connect their value preferences to important political behaviors, including partisanship and ideology, in different ways as well. In the first part of this study, I fit a geometric model of value preferences to two different data sets—the first from 2010 and the second from 2002—and I show that although there is substantial value disagreement between white Democrats/liberals and Republicans/conservatives, that disagreement is smaller in Latinos and almost completely absent in African Americans. In the second part of this study, I demonstrate the political implications of these findings by estimating the effects of values on party and ideology, conditional on race. Results show that where whites’ value preferences affect their partisan and ideological group ties, the effects are smaller in Latinos and indistinguishable from zero in African Americans. I close by suggesting that scholars of values and political behavior ought to think in a more nuanced manner about how fundamental political cognitions relate to various attitudes and behaviors across different groups in society.     

Get Out on Behalf of Your Group: Electoral Participation of Latinos and Asian Americans

With the continuous inflow of new immigrants, political participation of Latinos and Asian Americans has become increasingly important for understanding the American electoral politics. A few previous studies examining how political participation of Latinos and Asian Americans is contextually determined reported mixed empirical findings, and this paper re-examines the issue by considering how different features of racial contexts interact to influence the voting turnout of individual Latinos and Asian Americans. Theoretically, we present a model of turnout where a rational individual is motivated to participate, not only by individualistic benefits accrued to him- or herself, but also by perceptions of group-level benefits—concerns regarding the welfare of other members of the racial group. We argue that racial contexts provide distinctive (dis-)incentives to participate, by influencing their perception of participatory benefits at the group level. Empirically, we find that the size of the group exerts a significant effect on turnout decisions of Latino and Asian American individuals, and, particularly for Latinos, its effect interacts with the economic status of the group and the overall racial heterogeneity in the county of residence.     

Patriotism,black politics and racial justice in America

Recent decades have seen an upsurge in interest in patriotism among progressive intellectuals and within progressive politics, while recent manifestations of black politics in the era of President Barack Obama have utilized patriotic narratives. We question this turn to patriotism on the grounds that it is a questionable manner in which to pursue racial justice in our post-Civil Rights political landscape. Patriotic appeals to civic virtue always invoke or imply the anti-patriot who lacks that virtue and is therefore less capable of exercising exemplary citizenship. This idea of the anti-patriot, however, easily coalesces with and buttresses the language of cultural pathology used historically to argue that African-Americans are deficient in civic virtue and key for reproducing racial inequality. The idea of the anti-patriot could thus provide another vocabulary for displacing responsibility for addressing racial inequality away from white Americans and onto black Americans. After illuminating this dynamic at work in some of the most successful African-American patriotic thinkers—Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama—we conclude by arguing that those concerned with racial justice should reject patriotism in favor of three alternative traditions in African-American political thought: self-examination, prophecy, and rage.     

Creating Constituencies: Presidential Campaigns, the Scope of Conflict, and Selective Mobilization

We investigate how material and symbolic campaign appeals may motivate segments of the electorate to be more engaged with the unfolding presidential campaign; this engagement is a first step toward bringing these populations into an electoral coalition. We pair two massive new data collections—the National Annenberg Election Study capturing public opinion across an entire campaign and The Wisconsin Advertising Project recording and cataloging the political commercials aired by campaigns—to examine how the candidates’ choice of issues affects who gets into the game. We find evidence that appeals to symbolic interests are more likely than appeals to material interest to selectively engage targeted groups.     

Shades of Faith: Religious Foundations of Political Attitudes among African Americans,Latinos, and Whites

Although there is considerable evidence that religion influences political opinions, it is unclear how this story plays out across different segments of the U.S. population. Utilizing the 2000 Religion and Politics Survey, we examine the effects of religious beliefs, behaviors, and affiliations on citizens’ attitudes relating to issues of egalitarianism. Our study is one of the few to comparatively analyze the link between religious measures and political outlooks for the nation's three largest ethno‐racial groups. The findings show that conservative Christianity is consistently associated with less tolerant and less egalitarian views among whites. Religious African Americans and Latinos, however, hold more equitable opinions about disadvantaged individuals. To further strengthen our arguments, we also replicate these results using the 2008 American National Election Study. Overall, we demonstrate that a single perspective on religion and public opinion does not apply to all groups.     

Immigration,Latinos, and White Partisan Politics: The New Democratic Defection

Immigration is profoundly changing the racial demographics of America. In this article, we seek to understand if and how immigration and increasing racial diversity are shaping the partisan politics of individual white Americans. We show that whites’ views on immigration and Latinos are strongly related to their core political identities and vote choices. Using a range of different surveys, we find that, all else equal, whites with more anti‐immigrant views or more negative views of Latinos are less apt to identify as Democrats and less likely to favor Democratic candidates. This rightward shift harkens back to an earlier period of white defection from the Democratic Party and highlights the enduring but shifting impact of race on American politics.     

Political participation,personality, and the conditional effect of campaign mobilization

Why are some people more responsive to campaign mobilization than others? I argue that the composition of a person's core personality makes some people more responsive to mobilization cues than others. However, the degree to which personality alters the effectiveness of mobilization also depends on the type of political participation for which people are being mobilized. I explore the determinants of political participation by looking at the interaction between the Big-5 traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability and the intensity of campaign environments. This paper demonstrates that despite the possible ameliorative effect mobilization has on unequal patterns of political participation, an enduring source of participatory inequality may very well be rooted in a person's core psychological structure.     

What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior

How does the context in which a person lives affect his or her political behavior? I exploit an event in which demographic context was exogenously changed, leading to a significant change in voters' behavior and demonstrating that voters react strongly to changes in an outgroup population. Between 2000 and 2004, the reconstruction of public housing in Chicago caused the displacement of over 25,000 African Americans, many of whom had previously lived in close proximity to white voters. After the removal of their African American neighbors, the white voters' turnout dropped by over 10 percentage points. Consistent with psychological theories of racial threat, their change in behavior was a function of the size and proximity of the outgroup population. Proximity was also related to increased voting for conservative candidates. These findings strongly suggest that racial threat occurs because of attitude change rather than selection.     

President Obama on the ballot: Referendum voting and racial spillover in the 2014 midterm elections

The 2014 elections were widely viewed as a referendum on the presidency of Barack Obama. Republicans ran against the incumbent president, and many view the Republican Party's victories in 2014 as a mass rejection of President Obama's policies. We argue that this account of the 2014 elections is incomplete. We advance the theory of racial spillover—that associating an attitude object with President Obama causes public opinion to polarize on the basis of racial attitudes—to explain both vote choice and referendum voting in the 2014 elections. In an analysis of the CCES and an original survey, we show that congressional vote choice was strongly racialized in 2014. We go on to show that perceptions of the election as a referendum on President Obama were also racialized, and that these perceptions mediated the link between racial animus and 2014 congressional vote choice. This represents the first study to show that racialized congressional evaluations continued into 2014 and we provide direct evidence that attitudes about President Obama mediated the effect of racial animus on congressional vote choice. We conclude by discussing the implications for referendum voting, racial spillover, and the 2014 midterm elections.     

Public opinion during a presidential campaign: Distinguishing the effects of environmental evolution and attitude change

This paper develops a spatial model which distinguishes between different sources of temporal variability in public opinion over the course of an election campaign. Candidates and citizens are shown as points within a space. The candidate points are fixed, but their relative positions can change as a result of change over time in the dimension weights. If this occurs, it represents environmental evolution. The individual citizens' points also can move within the space, independently of the external environment. To the extent this occurs, it represents attitude change. The model is tested with data from the CPS 1980 National Election Study. The empirical results show that much of the variability in public evaluations of the candidates is due to evolutionary changes in the electoral environment, rather than individual-level attitude changes. Furthermore, that attitudinal change which does occur is strongly delimited by factors like partisan strength, interest in the campaign, and political participation.     

Labor Unions and White Racial Politics

Scholars and political observers point to declining labor unions, on the one hand, and rising white identity politics, on the other, as profound changes in American politics. However, there has been little attention given to the potential feedback between these forces. In this article, we investigate the role of union membership in shaping white racial attitudes. We draw upon research in history and American political development to generate a theory of interracial labor politics, in which union membership reduces racial resentment. Cross‐sectional analyses consistently show that white union members have lower racial resentment and greater support for policies that benefit African Americans. More importantly, our panel analysis suggests that gaining union membership between 2010 and 2016 reduced racial resentment among white workers. The findings highlight the important role of labor unions in mass politics and, more broadly, the importance of organizational membership for political attitudes and behavior.     

Empowering the Party-Crasher: Donald J. Trump,the First 2016 GOP Presidential Debate,and the Twitter Marketplace for Political Campaigns

This article argues that an important political marketplace of keywords expands in social media around campaign events such as a debate; that rhetorical efforts to define the situation in which a campaign event occurs are met in this marketplace by user responses that more or less echo the keywords, thereby enhancing or diminishing the political power of their “caller” or speaker; and that social media monitoring platforms can enhance our understanding of public opinion influence competitions among candidates through the careful selection, tabulation, and inspection of words and phrases being voiced. In the case at hand, an analysis of Twitter volume data and a reading of a sample of 1200 tweets between July 30 and August 15, 2015, a period enveloping the first 2016 Republican presidential candidate debate on August 6, 2015, helps us understand how Donald J. Trump escaped political punishment from party and media elites for subverting Republican and U.S. norms of candidate behavior. Elite voices greatly disapproved of Trump’s debate performance and conduct, a traditional augury of declining public support. But the presence of social media voices enhanced Trump’s capacity to succeed with an insurgent marketing strategy, one he would continue into his election as president fifteen months later. Specifically, comparatively high user volume on a debate-oriented section of Twitter (i.e., posts with the hashtag #GOPDebate) for Trump’s name, slogan, and Twitter address, and for such advantageous keywords as “political correctness,” “Megyn Kelly,” and “illegal immigration” relative to terms and phrases favoring other candidates and Republicans as a whole indicates the presence of heavy and active popular support for Trump. The contents of the corresponding tweet sample exhibit Twitter-savvy techniques and populist stances by which the Trump campaign solicited that support: celebrity feuding, callouts to legacy media allies, featured fan comments, a blunt vernacular, and confrontational branding. The contents also illustrate ways in which users manifested their support: from the aforementioned high keyword volume to imitative behavior and the supplying of evidence to verify Trump’s contested claims during the debate.     

The electoral consequences of racial fluidity

Brazilian politicians have seemingly adopted new racial identities en masse in recent years. What are the electoral consequences of asserting membership in a new racial group? In the Brazilian case, politicians who change how they racially identify themselves and secure greater access to campaign resources may become more electorally competitive. If voters learn a politician has changed their self-declared race, however, the politician’s reputation is likely to be tarnished and their chances of victory are likely to decline. Building on evidence that voters acquire greater information about election front-runners in high-profile contests than other types of politicians, I expect incumbents running for executive offices who change how they publicly identify themselves to suffer an electoral penalty. Drawing on data from local elections in Brazil, I find limited evidence that voters penalize city council candidates who adopt new racial identities. I show that incumbent mayors seeking reelection, however, receive significantly fewer votes after they assert membership in new racial groups.     

Racial Solidarity and Political Participation

Studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s generally confirmed that racial group solidarity boosted rates of participation among African Americans. But since the 1980s, research has tended to conclude that the effect of solidarity on voter turnout among blacks and other minorities has moderated if not faded entirely. We hypothesize that part of this observed decline is explained by a dilution of measures of group solidarity in recent studies. We argue that a fair test of racial solidarity requires using a comprehensive measure that incorporates both psychological “identification” and the ideological beliefs that comprise “consciousness.” Moreover, we hypothesize that the effects of solidarity, will vary across forms of participation and be greatest on political activities that require group coordination. Our re-analysis of the 1984 NBES using separate measures of identification and consciousness indicates that the more narrowly circumscribed measures of these concepts used in recent studies are likely to have underestimated its influence on political participation. We show that racial identification and consciousness had a modest effect on voting turnout in 1984, but a significant influence on participation in several traditional campaign activities, petitioning government officials, and especially participation in protests and boycotts.     

The Role of Party Activists in the Evolution of the Abortion Issue

This article examines the role of party activists in the partisan evolution of the abortion issue. Previous research indicates that party elites—specifically members of Congress—and partisans in the mass public have become more differentiated in their abortion attitudes during the last several decades with Democrats becoming more pro-choice and Republicans becoming increasingly pro-life. The missing piece of the picture is the behavior of party activists. Accordingly, this research examines the changes in the abortion attitudes of two groups of party activists during the last three decades: campaign activists and national convention delegates. From 1972 to 1980 there were no significant differences in the abortion attitudes of Republican and Democratic campaign activists, and the mean positions of the two parties' national convention delegates did not differ greatly. However, since 1984 there has been a growing differentiation in the abortion positions of both groups of party activists. Now Democratic activists are consistently pro-choice while Republican activists are equally pro-life. This evidence indicates that the differentiation on the abortion issue that has only recently emerged among partisans in the mass public was predated by an earlier and much more dramatic polarization that had already developed among party activists and elites, thus supporting a model of issue evolution introduced by Carmines and Stimson in their study of racial issues. We also find that citizens' abortion attitudes have become increasingly correlated with party voting not just in presidential elections but also in House, Senate, and gubernatorial contests during this period as well as being more closely related to political ideology. All of this evidence points to the growing extent to which abortion has become a partisan issue in American politics and the key role that party activists have played in this process.     

Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes toward Latinos

Rapid growth in the size of the Latino population has increased the ethnic diversity of urban neighborhoods, transforming the residential experiences of many black Americans. The competition for scarce resources is considered a central force in black-Latino relations and a source of anti-Latino sentiment among blacks. This article examines how the level and the distribution of economic resources within diverse areas affect black attitudes toward Latinos. Drawing on a multilevel dataset of individual racial attitudes and neighborhood characteristics, the analysis reveals that the relative economic status of racial groups is an important influence on black attitudes. In environments where Latinos are economically advantaged relative to their black neighbors, blacks are more likely to harbor negative stereotypes about Latinos, to be reluctant to extend to Latinos the same policy benefits they themselves enjoy, and to view black and Latino economic and political interests as incompatible. While the results suggest that diversity without conflict is possible, they make clear that the prospects for intergroup comity depend on some resolution of blacks' economic insecurities.