Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, popular perceptions in the United States, especially among political elites, continue to believe that religious Muslims oppose American democratic traditions and values. While many studies find positive relationships between mosque attendance and civic participation among U.S. Muslims, an empirical and theoretical puzzle continues to exist. What is missing is research that examines the relationships between the multi-dimensional concept of religiosity and how this is associated with public opinion and attitudes towards the American political system among Muslim Americans. Using a unique national survey of Muslim Americans, we find a positive relationship between religious beliefs, behavior, and belonging and perceptions of compatibility with American democratic traditions. Quite simply, the most religious are the most likely to believe in political integration in the United States.

The question of how partisanship is influenced by exogenous factors has been vigorously debated, yet this debate is less frequently noted in the literature on Latino partisanship. This study analyzes the 2006 Latino National Survey with geographic identifiers to explore how the political context of a county influences Latino partisan self-identification. There are a variety of reasons why the political environment might influence Latinos’ partisan choice. First, a substantial proportion of the adult Latino population in the United States is foreign-born, potentially lessening the influence of parental partisan socialization. Second, increased migration to areas outside the Southwest has exposed Latinos to new and different social, political, and economic environments. Using subgroup analysis, interactive logit models, and regression discontinuity, we find that the local political context influences the party attachment of Latino immigrants in predictable ways. However, for Latinos born in the United States, our analysis does not provide evidence of a causal connection between partisan environment and an individual's partisan identification.

The public opinion literature stresses the importance of source cues in determining which types of messages affect attitudes and which types do not. Building upon such research, we seek to determine if messenger ethnicity influences how individuals evaluate candidates speaking on immigration in the context of a campaign. Do Americans (and Anglo Americans in particular) view Latino candidates as more experienced, stronger leaders, more trustworthy, and more qualified on immigration than Anglo candidates? Moreover, do such relationships hold regardless of the valence of the message itself? Through an original survey experiment presenting subjects with immigration talk on the campaign trail, we find Latino candidates are reviewed more positively than Anglo candidates when it comes to the immigration messages they speak (especially when it comes to pro-immigration messages). Such findings give us insight into whether or not Latino candidates have the potential to “own” the issue of immigration, as well as offering another path by which Latino candidates can gain a strong foothold with the public in the context of a campaign.

The American public's beliefs about the causes of social inequality vary greatly, with debates over the causes of racial inequality tending to be the most salient and divisive. Among whites in particular, liberals tend to see inequality as rooted in society's ills, whereas conservatives tend to see inequality as rooted in individuals’ shortcomings. Given this, many infer that white conservatives are more likely than white liberals to adopt the controversial view that racial inequality is “natural,” i.e., due to genetically inherited characteristics. We argue that genetic explanations for racial inequality, in and of themselves, offer little appeal to white conservatives. However, when white citizens are exposed to media messages that emphasize the egalitarian implications of genetic similarity between racial groups, those on the left and right engage in biased assimilation, resulting in a “nature” (conservative) versus “nurture” (liberal) divide. Data from two studies of white Americans—one representative survey and one experiment—support this theoretical framework.

While the concept and measurement of race has been a longstanding focus of social science research, capturing its significance requires a broader notion than utilizing only racial group categories. More recently, race has been treated as both a “characteristic” and a set of experiences that affect a multitude of life conditions and outcomes. This discussion and analysis moves away from treating race as only a categorical and static characteristic to a multi-dimensional concept that is dynamic, relational, and represents the intersection of individual, ecological, and structural components. By exploring the data collection of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and studies that include race as a variable, we were able to trace how race has been used by social scientists over the past 60 years. Using an extensive coding protocol, we have attained key characteristics of the principal investigator(s) (PI), funders, scope of the overall study, and the use of different measures of race. As a result, this “meta-analysis” of social science surveys enabled this researcher to examine how these studies use a wide scope of racial “variables,” and the way in which PI characteristics affected the inclusion of race-related items. In addition, bivariate analysis is presented to examine social scientists’ tendencies in investigating race and inclusion of qualitative examples of item wordings and response categories. This overview of social science studies is placed in the context of conceptual and measurement issues surrounding the use and meaning of race. Hopefully this can serve to advance the discussion and strategic approaches in doing research about race and what should be incorporated in studying race as a lived experience.

Our understanding of the politics of race, indigeneity, and ethnicity is informed not only by the work of scholars, but also by the work of leaders and practitioners, many of whom are pioneers in their respective fields. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (JREP) is proud to continue our Q&A series with Steve Phillips, founder of Democracy in Color, an organization focused on race and politics, and author of the New York Times and Washington Post bestselling book, Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. Our hope is that forums like these will help advance our collective scholarship by better informing our research agendas, validating some of our claims, and building more bridges between the worlds of research, politics, and policy.