Racial Residential Segregation and Social Control: A Panel Study of the Variation in Police Strength Across U.S Cities, 1980–2010

Despite a great deal of theoretical and empirical attention given to racial residential segregation and its influence on a number of social problems in the United States, few scholars have examined the role that this persistent form of racial inequality plays in shaping the magnitude of formal social control efforts. Our study examines this relationship by assessing the potential influence that the isolation of minorities may have on efforts to control crime in urban centers across the United States. Using a pooled time-series regression technique well suited for the analysis of aggregate, longitudinal data, we assess the potential influence of racial segregation on the size of municipal police departments in 170 U.S. cities between 1980 and 2010. After accounting for minority group size, economic threat, crime, and disorganization, we find that racial residential segregation has a significant non-linear effect on police force size. Cities with the most racially integrated populations have the smallest police presence but at very high levels of segregation, police strength levels off. This finding is consistent with expectations derived from the contact hypothesis. Under such conditions, majority group members appear to be less inclined to demand greater crime control measures such as increased police protection. Period interactions with residential segregation also suggest that this relationship has grown stronger in each decade since 1980. Overall, our study provides strong support for threat theories and the contact hypothesis but offers necessary refinements.     

Local economies and national economic evaluations

Underlying the phenomena of economic voting are voters’ perceptions of economic conditions. But from where do these evaluations originate? This work examines the effects of three types of factors influential to the formation of national economic evaluations: predispositions (such as age, gender, income, partisanship), information and attentiveness, and objective local economic conditions (local unemployment rates). Our findings fit with earlier work, broadly confirming the influential role each set of factors plays in shaping national economic perceptions. We then extend the literature - demonstrating that the impact of the local economic environment is conditional on attention to media, political information and education. Using a combined dataset of the 2006 Canadian Election Studies with neighbourhood level economic indicators drawn from Canadian Census data (2006), our findings show that, in developing perceptions of the national economy, more attentive, more informed and more educated individuals are less influenced by local economic conditions than their less attentive, less informed and less educated counterparts. These findings contribute to our understanding of how local economic conditions influence the formation of national economic evaluations.     

How Trust Matters: The Changing Political Relevance of Political Trust

Americans most often think about government in terms of its ability to grapple with issues of redistribution and race. However, the September 11 terrorist attacks led to a massive increase in media attention to foreign affairs, which caused people to think about the government in terms of defense and foreign policy. We demonstrate that such changes in issue salience alter the policy preferences that political trust shapes. Specifically, we show that trust did not affect attitudes about the race‐targeted programs in 2004 as it usually does, but instead affected a range of foreign policy and national defense preferences. By merging survey data gathered from 1980 through 2004 with data from media content analyses, we show that, more generally, trust's effects on defense and racial policy preferences, respectively, increase as the media focus more attention in these areas and decrease when that attention ebbs.     

Negative Advertising and the Dynamics of Candidate Support

Scholars have spent a great deal of effort examining the effects of negative advertising on citizens’ perceptions of candidates. Much of this work has used experimental designs and has produced mixed findings supporting one of two competing theories. First, negative ads may harm candidates who sponsor them because citizens tend to dislike negativity. Second, negativity may drive down citizens’ support for the targeted candidate because the attacks give people reasons to reject the target. We argue that the mixed findings produced by prior research may be driven by a disregard for campaign dynamics. We present a critical test of these two theories using data drawn from 80 statewide elections—37 gubernatorial and 43 U.S. Senate contests—from three election years and public opinion polling collected during the last 12 weeks of each campaign. We find that a candidate’s support declines as her advertising strategy includes a higher proportion of negative ads relative to her opponent and that this process unfolds slowly over the course of the campaign.