Here we first highlight the central role played by the vote and political participation in the democratic process. We then look at who votes and who participates in politics. The chapter underscores severe racial imbalances across most types of participation—both conventional and less conventional. It then seeks to explain these imbalances through a rigorous examination of factors like socioeconomic status, group identity and consciousness, institutions, and mobilization. We also look at the impact of uneven participation on outcomes in American democracy and introduce potential solutions for existing inequities.

Chapter 6 describes how some local governments have given rights of citizenship, including voting rights, to nonresident landowners; in some cases, municipalities have actually limited the franchise exclusively to landowners. Once again, this is indicative of the distinctive nature of local citizenship. Property ownership ceased being a prerequisite for voting in state and federal elections by the 1850s, as citizenship was coming to be seen primarily in ethno-nationalist terms as a matter of shared identity. Local governments, reflecting their history as commercial entities, have been more open to tying the franchise to landownership, and as a de facto matter, many cities today use zoning regulations to ensure that anyone who cannot afford to purchase a home cannot acquire residence, and therefore the right to vote. This de facto property qualification for local citizenship illustrates that local citizenship is constructed as purely private and liberal, predicated upon consumer choice, mobility, and self-interest rather than identity or civic activity.

This chapter describes and assesses the racial liberalization hypothesis: the notion that World War II had a liberalizing impact on white racial attitudes. Contrary to the Myrdalian account, however, analysis of rarely utilized survey evidence is used to demonstrate that there is much less evidence for the racial liberalization hypothesis than is often assumed, particularly when the focus is on measures of policy rather than prejudice. Although there is some evidence that the war coincided with decreases in anti-black prejudice (e.g., whether black blood is biologically distinctive from white blood),this chapter demonstrates that white attitudes toward civil rights policies—particularly federal intervention in state lynching cases—did not liberalize over the course of the war. If anything, white opposition to anti-lynching legislation actually seems to have increased. While the available evidence is more limited, whites were also largely opposed to wartime civil rights demands like integration of the armed forces.