Elements in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics – serie

From the toils of Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan emerges a twenty-first-century leader, Stacey Abrams. This Element explores the strategic organizing acumen of Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi and across the South, and the rise of Barbara Jordan, the second Black woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first Black woman from the US South to head to Congress. The leadership skills and collective political efforts of these two women paved the way for the emergence of Stacey Abrams, candidate for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022, and organizer of an electoral movement that helped deliver the 2020 presidential victory and US Senate majority to the Democratic Party. This Element adds to the existing literature by framing Black women as integral to the expansion of new voters into the Democratic Party, American democracy, and to the political development of Black people in the US South.

Women Voters documents and explains three important phenomena implicating gender, race, and immigration. The Element contributes to a better understanding of partisan candidate choice in US presidential elections. First, women are diverse and politically heterogenous, where white women are more likely to vote Republican and women of color are majority Democratic voters. Second, due to the unequal privileges and constraints associated with race, white women have greater agency to sort by partisan preference, whereas women of color have more limited choice in their partisan support. Finally, the authors emphasize compositional change in the electorate as an important explanation of electoral outcomes.

This Element explores the factors that lead the public to pay attention to and mobilize in support of victims of officer-involved killings. The author argues that race is the most important factor shaping both attention and mobilization. Black victims are statistically significantly more likely to trend on Google and get protested than victims of other races. Deaths of low threat Black victims are more likely to affect political interest, voter turnout, and protest rates, and only among young Black observers. This Element attributes this pattern to the fact that mobilization around officer-involved killings is responding to anti-Black discrimination, rather than general sentiments about police violence. It also finds that the local density of social justice organizations increases political mobilization.

Women Voters documents and explains three important phenomena implicating gender, race, and immigration. The Element contributes to a better understanding of partisan candidate choice in US presidential elections. First, women are diverse and politically heterogenous, where white women are more likely to vote Republican and women of color are majority Democratic voters. Second, due to the unequal privileges and constraints associated with race, white women have greater agency to sort by partisan preference, whereas women of color have more limited choice in their partisan support. Finally, the authors emphasize compositional change in the electorate as an important explanation of electoral outcomes.

From the toils of Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan emerges a twenty-first-century leader, Stacey Abrams. This Element explores the strategic organizing acumen of Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi and across the South, and the rise of Barbara Jordan, the second Black woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first Black woman from the US South to head to Congress. The leadership skills and collective political efforts of these two women paved the way for the emergence of Stacey Abrams, candidate for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022, and organizer of an electoral movement that helped deliver the 2020 presidential victory and US Senate majority to the Democratic Party. This Element adds to the existing literature by framing Black women as integral to the expansion of new voters into the Democratic Party, American democracy, and to the political development of Black people in the US South.

This Element examines just how much the public knows about some of America's most stigmatized social groups, who comprise 40.3% of the population, and evaluates whether misinformation matters for shaping policy attitudes and candidate support. The authors design and field an original survey containing large national samples of Black, Latino, Asian, Muslim, and White Americans, and include measures of misinformation designed to assess the amount of factual information that individuals possess about these groups. They find that Republicans, Whites, the most racially resentful, and consumers of conservative news outlets are the most likely to be misinformed about socially marginalized groups. Their analysis also indicates that misinformation predicts hostile policy support on racialized issues; it is also positively correlated with support for Trump. They then conducted three studies aimed at correcting misinformation. Their research speaks to the prospects of a well-functioning democracy, and its ramifications on the most marginalized.

US immigration policy has deeply racist roots. From his rhetoric to his policies, President Donald Trump has continued this tradition, most notoriously through his border wall, migrant family separation, and child detention measures. But who exactly supports these practices and what factors drive their opinions? Our research reveals that racial attitudes are fundamental to understanding who backs the president's most punitive immigration policies. We find that whites who feel culturally threatened by Latinos, who harbor racially resentful sentiments, and who fear a future in which the United States will be a majority-minority country, are among the most likely to support Trump's actions on immigration. We argue that while the President's policies are unpopular with the majority of Americans, Trump has grounded his political agenda and 2020 reelection bid on his ability to politically mobilize the most racially conservative segment of whites who back his draconian immigration enforcement measures.

America's racial sands are quickly shifting, with parallel growth in theories to explain how varied groups respond, politically, to demographic changes. This Element develops a unified framework to predict when, why, and how racial groups react defensively toward others. America's racial groups can be arrayed along two dimensions: how American and how superior are they considered? This Element claims that location along these axes motivates political reactions to outgroups. Using original survey data and experiments, this Element reveals the acute sensitivity that people of color have to their social station and how it animates political responses to racial diversity.