A large literature considers the mid-century a key turning point in punitive public opinion in the United States. This article examines racial and geographic heterogeneity in changing public opinion during the mid-century using data on death penalty support from as early as 1953. I find that the punitive turn is characterized by divergence in death penalty support between Black and White people, and that White Southerners grew more supportive than Whites in the non-South from before to after the turn. Additional tests identify that this regional divergence is unlikely to have arisen by chance. Heterogeneity in partisanship and responsiveness to regional violent crime support is consistent with the idea that crime rates themselves were meaningful in punitive attitude formation only insofar as they were mediated by additional socio-political forces.

The US has experienced runaway economic inequality since the 1970s, yet there is no strong public support for government efforts that serve to narrow the growing disparities between citizens. Why? I point to the role of rising racial diversity. I argue Americans believe in conditional equality, where they support equalizing policies as long as they perceive the beneficiaries as people like themselves. However, as the country grows more diverse, citizens are less likely to perceive those around them as people like themselves. Using time-series cross-sectional data of the American states, I demonstrate that as racial diversity increases, the likelihood the public will respond to increasing inequality by supporting bigger government declines. This study provides evidence for the mechanism usually implied but rarely tested by studies of diversity and policy: mass preferences.

In 2016, British investigative journalist Simon Rogers created a map/timeline of Twitter hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter. The map (which no longer exists) indirectly shows both the intensity of Black Lives Matter protests and their geographic scope. Within the United States, we see not only protest activity in metropolitan areas with large black population percentages, but also protest activity in metropolitan areas with few (if any) African Americans. Further, we see protests not just in the United States but throughout the world. The 2020 George Floyd murder arguably spurred more protests against police violence within the United States and around the world than any other moment. We understand these protests as part of a broader decolonial project that seeks to eradicate racialised violence. How does this project develop? In examining Black Lives Matter as a movement, most have either focused on domestic activity within the United States or on instances of international activity, but few have attempted to theorise its spread. I suggest that any approach that focuses solely or primarily on technological advances or on the work of activists misses an essential and under-examined element – US Black popular culture.

U.S. national policies toward Native Americans followed a zig-zag path of change from 1889 to 1970. How do we explain policymakers’ unsteady attraction to the rights of Native Nations? I argue that in precarious circumstances, Native Americans forged interest-based political coalitions with non-Native American western rural interests. At times, this cross-racial, interest-based coalition successfully challenged the power of non-Native American eastern ideologues. These findings advance our understanding of the interplay of race and federalism. Also, these findings illustrate the unique importance of Native Nations for American political development. This article presents quantitative and qualitative analyses of a new dataset on federal Indian policy. It also reviews existing historical scholarship.

During the most recent round of redistricting, many states have enacted a number of reforms to their mapmaking practices. One reform that has received increased attention in recent years is a ban on prison gerrymandering—the practice of counting incarcerated individuals in prisons instead of their home addresses. Eleven states drew districts while counting incarcerated persons in their homes after the 2020 Census. Though substantial research has investigated redistricting practices, far less attention has been paid to empirically examining the effect of prison gerrymandering on elections. We seek to fill this void by evaluating the effect of New York’s ban on prison gerrymandering on state legislative elections between 2002 and 2020. We find that altering how the prison population is counted, indeed, altered the electoral dynamics across the state.

This article introduces White identity as an understudied concept in Canadian politics and compares how White settlers’ ingroup attachments and their outgroup attitudes—specifically, White settlers’ anti-Indigenous attitudes—shape Canadian politics. We find that White identity is associated with greater support for government spending on policies that disproportionately benefit White Canadians, such as pensions, whereas Indigenous resentment is associated with greater opposition toward government spending on policies that are often perceived as disproportionately benefiting Indigenous peoples, such as welfare. In Canada outside Quebec, both White identity and anti-Indigenous attitudes are associated with voting Conservative. In Quebec, White identity mobilizes support for the Bloc Québécois, while White settlers’ negative attitudes toward Indigenous peoples are not associated with vote choice.

This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.

This essay posits that justice is the core value epitomizing our moment. Justice is violated when positive outcomes are undeserved, and the felt sense of injustice motivates a need for retribution. Because politics involves allocation (distribution and redistribution), deservingness is a core appraisal of “who gets what” and therefore justice is fundamental for politics. This is especially germane to race, ethnicity, and politics scholars. I present a few core tenets of justice theory, and argue that political science can take advantage of the moment to engage the concept of justice; especially as it relates to the study of racial attitudes and the identification of racial enablers—those ostensible non-racists who facilitate the status quo. Summarily, I propose that justice can unify debates over prejudice and politics, and advance our scholarly understanding of how well-intentioned people—regardless of their identities, or ideological or partisan labels—can facilitate racism, racial inequality, and injustice.

Recent studies confirm that Anglxs’ racial attitudes can shape their opinions about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), particularly when this federal health care policy is linked to Barack Obama. Strong linkages made between Obama and the ACA cue Anglxs to apply their racialized feelings toward Obama to their health policy preferences. This is consistent with a growing body of research demonstrating that “racial priming” can have a powerful impact on Anglxs’ political opinions. Yet few studies have explored racialized policy opinion among minorities, and fewer still have explored racial priming among Latinxs. In this paper, we compare the effect of racial priming on the health policy preferences of Latinxs and Anglxs. Using survey evidence from the 2012 American National Election Study, we find important Anglx–Latinx differences in racialized policy preferences. However, we also find that racial priming has an effect on U.S.-born Latinxs that closely resembles its effect on Anglxs. Results suggest that increasing ethnic diversity in the United States will not necessarily produce increasingly liberal politics as many believe. American politics in the coming decades will depend largely on the ways in which Latinxs’ racial sympathies and resentments are mobilized.

Extant findings show that voter fraud is extremely rare and difficult to prove in the United States. Voter's knowledge about voter fraud allegations likely comes through the media, who tend to sensationalize the issue. In this study, we argue that the more voters are exposed to media coverage of voter fraud allegations, the more likely that they will perceive that voter fraud is a frequent problem. We merge the 2012 Survey of Performance of American Elections with state-level media coverage of voter fraud leading up to the 2012 election. Our results show that media coverage of voter fraud is associated with public beliefs about voter fraud. In states where fraud was more frequently featured in local media outlets, public concerns about voter fraud were heightened. In particular, we find that press attention to voter fraud has a larger influence on Republicans than Democrats and Independents. We further find that media coverage of voter fraud does not further polarize partisan perceptions of voter fraud. Rather, political interest moderates state media coverage on voter fraud beliefs only among Republicans. Last, our results provide no support that demographic changes, approval of election administration, or information concerning actual reported voting irregularities have any discernable effects on partisan perceptions.

This article examines the impact of electoral politics on state welfare policy in the post-civil rights era South. In contrast to an emerging consensus concluding that southern African Americans materially benefited from rejoining the electorate, this study suggests that higher black registration rates actually reduced states' poverty relief efforts. In the years immediately following the Voting Rights Act (VRA), when Democrats controlled state government, the significant negative relationship between the size of the black electorate and state welfare generosity was moderated to some extent by high levels of partisan competition. In such cases, Democrats ostensibly chose a “core” targeting strategy of pursuing lower-income votes and had the institutional wherewithal to purchase these votes with policy concessions. Overall, however, the liberal “Downsian” policy response to African American mobilization was dominated by an antiredistributive response. In the South, welfare policies were relatively conservative vis-à-vis the other states during Jim Crow and became more so in response to black voting.

Prior research has found that descriptive representation by race, ethnicity, or gender increases political action, but it has paid less attention to how the intersection of these identities influences participation. We extend this literature by assessing the effects on voter turnout of collective descriptive representation in U.S. state legislatures on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and their intersections. We argue that members of historically excluded groups respond to the overall composition of their state's legislature. We test this proposition in seven elections (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012). Our results are consistent with the minority empowerment literature, as overall collective representation does substantially increase turnout among previously excluded groups. However, the impact varies intersectionally. For white women, gender trumps race, as higher collective gender representation, regardless of race or ethnicity, increases voter turnout. For African Americans, race trumps gender, as both black men and women respond most consistently to higher levels of collective racial representation. For Latinos, we find less consistent results, but note a collective ethnic turnout effect for 2002 and 2006. We conclude that collective representation, especially at the intersection of identities, is an important factor influencing levels of turnout among previously excluded groups.

Through a critical engagement with Lawrence Blum’s theory of racism, I defend a “social criticism” model for the philosophical study of racism. This model relies on empirical analyses of social and psychological phenomena but goes beyond this to include the assessment of the warrant of widely held beliefs and the normative evaluation of attitudes, actions, institutions, and social arrangements. I argue that we should give political philosophy theoretical primacy over moral philosophy in normative analyses of racism. I also show how conceptualizing racism as an ideology gives us a unified account of racism and helps us to see what is truly troubling about racism, both in the past and today.