Publications

One longstanding explanation for bias and excessive force in policing is selection—the assertion that those who select to work in law enforcement are more likely to hold far-right, intolerant, and anti-egalitarian views than the public. While intuitive and widely believed, the evidence in support of the selection hypothesis is surprisingly thin. We offer a vital contribution to the literature by exploring selection at one of its earliest phases: late-adolescents entering college and the career-formulation stage of life. Utilizing surveys of over 13 million late-adolescents collected across 44 years in the US, we find that those intending a career as a law enforcement officer hold more right-leaning views on race relations, immigration and intercultural relations, women and gender roles, homosexuality and gay rights, drug-use, freedom of speech, and criminal justice, than their peers intending other careers or their modal peer who is undecided with respect to career intentions and serves as a “blank slate” comparison group. Critically, these findings largely hold among Whites and non-Whites but are somewhat attenuated among women. These sources of heterogeneity are noteworthy in light of evidence suggesting that hiring more non-White officers may ameliorate bias and excessive force in policing and accompanying pushes to diversify police forces. Our findings add caution to such pushes by suggesting that the non-Whites who select into law enforcement may hold views that reproduce, versus attenuate, existing police bias. In contrast, our findings direct reform efforts toward expanding the ranks of female officers, bias testing, and training during police recruitment.

It is well established that Donald Trump’s rhetoric and actions during his candidacy and presidency endorsed existing group-based social hierarchies, helping to boost his support among white Americans, especially men and those without a college degree. But how did these endorsements shape support for Trump among non-white Americans? Extant theories suggest that these actions should have pushed racial and ethnic minority voter support for the GOP candidate to its lowest observed levels in contemporary political history. Yet Trump outperformed these expectations in 2016 and in 2020 among Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. We propose the same embrace of social hierarchies that motivated white support for Trump also motivated the political preferences and behaviors of a significant number of non-white Americans. Using several national large-N surveys conducted between 2011 and 2021 with large samples of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans, we explore how support for existing status hierarchies—both gender and racial—engendered support for Trump across racial and ethnic groups and discuss implications for the future of electoral politics in a rapidly diversifying United States.

Populist parties have been increasingly successful in European politics over the last decade. Although research suggests that nostalgic deprivation – a perceived loss of economic, political or social status — is linked to support for populist parties, the generalizability of this argument across voters and national contexts remains unclear. In this research note, we leverage original representative surveys across 19 European countries to demonstrate that perceptions of declining status are a consistent predictor of populist support. Decomposing nostalgic deprivation into different dimensions, we find that while social, economic and power deprivation have different antecedents, each predicts populist attitudes and voting behaviour. Moreover, we find that nostalgic deprivation predicts support for populist platforms among both left-wing and right-wing respondents, as well as across Eastern and Western Europe. While the antecedents differ across contexts, these findings confirm that perceptions of downward mobility are associated with the rise of populism in Europe.

The American public is increasingly affectively polarized. A growing body of research has associated this affective polarization with two key phenomena: ideological polarization and social group sorting. Although there is ample evidence that social group sorting, particularly along racial and ethnic lines, is driving Republicans’ affect toward the Democratic Party, it is not clear how it shapes Democrats’, particularly White Democrats’, feelings toward the predominantly White Republican Party. We propose a third model that bridges these two theoretical approaches, a racial ideology model that helps explain Democrats’ feelings toward the Republican Party. Specifically, we argue that Democrats increasingly dislike Republicans because they view them as standing in opposition to racially progressive policies. Using a preregistered conjoint experiment we find that Americans across party lines see Republicans as opposing efforts to reduce racial inequality and that this perception is associated with negative affect toward the Republican Party among both White and non-White Democrats.

As public mass shootings continue to plague the United States, a growing scholarly literature seeks to understand the political effect of these tragic events. This literature, however, focuses on public opinion or turnout and vote choice, leaving open to question whether or not public mass shootings affect a range of other important actions citizens may take to engage with gun policy. Leveraging the as-good-as random timing of high-publicity public mass shootings over the past decade and an immense array of publicly available and proprietary data, we demonstrate that these events consistently cause surges in public engagement with gun policy—including internet searches, streaming documentaries, discussion on social media, signing petitions, and donating to PACs. Importantly, we document the behaviors where shootings induce polarizing upswings in engagement and those where upswings skew towards gun control. Finally, we demonstrate that low-publicity shootings largely exert little-to-no effect on our outcomes.

In this article, we develop and test three propositions related to the status of a primary counterpoint of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—”Blue Lives Matter” (BlueLM). Employing correlational and causal analyses on a wide array of data, including public opinion, news and social media, internet searches, and merchandise sales, our findings are threefold: first, we offer evidence that Whiteness is associated with attitudinal and behavioral indicators of support for BlueLM; second, we present evidence that support for BlueLM is systematically linked to White racial prejudice; and third, we demonstrate that BlueLM activity is caused by BLM protest following a high-profile police killing of a Black man, which comports with the conceptualization of BlueLM as engaging in a process of “competitive victimhood” against BLM. Together, these findings suggest that BlueLM is a new incarnation of an ongoing history of White countermobilization against organized Black claims-making activity.

Public opinion towards human-induced climate change is polarized along partisan lines. Indeed, the preponderance of scholarly work suggests that not even direct experiences with the consequences of climate change result in durable effects on opinions or behaviors. Our analysis of over 519,000 survey respondents and nearly 30,000 precinct-level voting returns challenges this emerging consensus for one kind of climate change event: rising sea levels. We find that persistent vulnerability to rising sea levels is associated with opinions and behaviors about global warming. Coastal residents affected by sea-level rise are more likely to support climate mitigation policy. This association is strongest among those firmly attached to their communities, as opposed to those with the most to lose financially. We speculate that sea-level rise is exceptionally salient in the minds of those affected as an ever-present reminder of the inevitable toll of climate change.

As the political salience of immigrant-origin minorities continues to increase in the United States and Europe, researchers are increasingly focused on understanding what interventions reduce exclusionary attitudes. While several recent studies have examined the effect of different narrative and interpersonal communication techniques, few have focused on the role of the “messenger” that delivers these techniques. Drawing from psychological research on persuasion, we hypothesize that anti-exclusionary messages are more persuasive when delivered by elite messengers who reinforce shared identities. To test this, we conduct a large, pre-registered survey experiment exposing a sample of American adults to audio messages on immigration from persuasive elites performed by professional voice actors. We find that a persuasive message only shifts attitudes about immigration when elites include co-identity reinforcement primes. These findings offer additional nuance to the literature on immigration attitudes, persuasion, and elite-led public opinion, and have important implications for immigration advocacy work.

A corpus of research on the effect of exposure to income inequality on citizens’ economic policy preferences renders inconclusive results. At the same time, a distinct body of work demonstrates that ethnic fragmentation within a polity reduces government spending, presumably due to opposition among the public to spending believed to benefit stigmatized ethnic minorities. Focusing on the American context, this short article ties these two bodies of work together by arguing that the effect of routine exposure to income inequality should depend on the racial composition of the “have-nots,” with citizens being most likely to support liberal economic policies in the face of pronounced inequality only when potential beneficiaries are not a highly stigmatized minority group, such as Black Americans. Using geocoded survey data, we find that exposure to local economic inequality is only systematically associated with increased support for liberal economic policies when the respective “have-nots” are not Black.

Does social protest following the police killing of unarmed Black civilians have a widespread “opinion mobilizing” effect against the police? Or, does the racialized nature of these events polarize mass opinion based on standing racial and political orientations? To answer these questions, we utilize a large dataset comprised of weekly cross-sections of the American public and employ a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) approach leveraging the random timing of the police killing of George Floyd and ensuing nationwide protests. We find that the Floyd protests swiftly decreased favorability toward the police and increased perceived anti-Black discrimination among low-prejudice and politically liberal Americans. However, attitudes among high-prejudice and politically conservative Americans either remained unchanged or evinced only small and ephemeral shifts. Our evidence suggests that the Floyd protests served to further racialize and politicize attitudes within the domain of race and law enforcement in the U.S.

This letter explores language politics as it concerns gender, and investigates the adoption of amendments which introduce gender-neutral language to subnational constitutions via popular initiative. Embracing theories of female empowerment based on resource acquisition and shrinking gender differentials in economic resources, we argue that popular support for these initiatives will be higher in contexts where female and male incomes are closer to parity. We test this expectation using city-level historical administrative data in California on Proposition 11 in 1974—the first American state to hold a popular vote on amending its constitution to include only gender-neutral language. We find that greater parity in income between women and men is associated with greater voter support for the initiative. This result holds after controlling for conceivable confounders, fails to emerge when analyzing gender-irrelevant ballot measures, and replicates when analyzing similar measures held in three additional jurisdictions.

As the number of COVID-19 cases rose in the U.S. and around the world in early 2020, conservative elites in the United States racialized the pandemic, referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese flu” or the “Wuhan virus.” Existing research suggests that this linking of the viral pandemic to a social group will “activate” anti-Asian attitudes in the mass public, helping bring those attitudes to bear on behaviors and attitudes related to COVID-19. Despite anecdotal evidence of a spike in discriminatory behavior targeted at Asians across western countries, little empirical evidence for this “othering” hypothesis exists. Using a large survey (n=4,311) benchmarked to national demographics, we analyze the relationship between attitudes toward Asian Americans, xenophobia, concern about contracting the coronavirus, and a variety of behavioral outcomes and policy attitudes. We find evidence that anti-Asian attitudes are associated with concern about the virus but also with xenophobic behaviors and policy preferences. These relationships are unique to Asian American attitudes, are not related to attitudes toward other outgroups, and do not hold for a variety of placebo outcomes. Together our findings suggest that anti-Asian attitudes were activated and were associated with a variety of COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors in the early stages of the pandemic.

During the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2019-2020 early data suggested that men were slightly more likely to contract COVID-19 than women, less likely to seek medical attention for the disease, and far more likely to die as a result of COVID-19. While several studies have explored this gender gap, none have attempted to isolate the psychological processes underpinning this phenomenon. In this research note, I suggest that belief in masculine norms partly explains these differences. Using data from a large (n=100,689) survey of American adults conducted between March and June by the Democracy Fund + UCLA (Nationscape), I find that sexist beliefs, a component of masculine norms, are consistently the strongest predictor of coronavirus-related emotions, behaviors, policy attitudes, and ultimately contracting COVID-19. This study highlights how gender ideology can impact health and impede government public health efforts.

Social scientists have long shown that self-interest rarely has a large effect on citizens’ sociopolitical attitudes. Instead, Americans’ opinions about public policy are driven more by symbolic predispositions. Yet those opinions about policy may just be cheap talk. When Americans are faced with costly behaviors that pit their interests against their values, perhaps self-interest will play a larger role. Post-Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance coverage provides an important test for self-interest and symbolic politics. Faced with costly decisions to pay fines or purchase insurance, did Americans put symbolic politics over material self-interests? Using a monthly tracking poll, we first show that symbolic attitudes overwhelm self-interest in shaping public opinion about health policy. Marshaling data from over one million respondents from Gallup’s Tracking Poll, however, we show that both self-interest and symbolic predispositions are associated with decisions to purchase health insurance under the ACA.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral college victory, journalists focused heavily on the white working class (WWC) and the relationship between economic anxiety, racial attitudes, and immigration attitudes and support for Trump. One hypothesized but untested proposition for Donald Trump’s success is that his unorthodox candidacy, particularly his rhetoric surrounding economic marginalization and immigration, shifted WWC voters who did not vote Republican in 2012 into his coalition. Using a large nationally representative survey we examine 1) whether racial and immigration attitudes or economic dislocation and marginality were the main catalysts for vote switching, and; 2) whether this phenomena was isolated among the white working class. We find a non-trivial number of white voters switched their votes in the 2016 election to Trump or Clinton, that this vote switching was associated much more strongly with racial and immigration attitudes than economic factors, and that the phenomena occurred among both working class and non-working class whites, though many more working class whites switched than non-working class whites. Our findings suggest that racial and immigration attitudes may be continuing to sort white voters into new partisan camps and further polarize the parties along racial lines.

Throughout the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the first two years of his presidency, Donald Trump has repeatedly dehumanized immigrants in pursuit of more restrictive immigration policies. Despite the common perception that this threat should increase the political mobilization of Latino voters, existing research has yielded mixed findings. In this article, we argue that attention has to be paid to both threatening climate and mobilization. We examine Latino voting in the 2018 midterm election using both aggregate election data from 2014 and 2018 as well as a large 10-week tracking poll (n=2,767) of Latinos during the last two months of the 2018 election. We show that, compared to 2014, the number of ballots cast by Latinos increased substantially. Using the tracking poll, however, we show that threat alone did not appear to be sufficient to mobilize Latino voters in the 2018 election. It is threat combined with mobilization, rather, that increased Latino voting. We discuss implications for future Latino political participation in the United States.

Despite a sizable literature on racial priming, scholars have failed to account for the shifting nature of racial appeals. First, theories of racial priming have not yet been widely applied to increasingly common anti-immigrant and anti-Latino political appeals. Second, theories of racial priming have not adequately accounted for both an increasingly racialized political climate and increased tolerance for explicit anti-minority appeals. In two survey experiments fielded both before Trump’s rise and after his presidential victory, we find the Implicit-Explicit (IE) model always fails for anti-Black appeals, sometimes fails for anti-immigrant appeals, but consistently holds for anti-Latino appeals. While we find the null effects of implicit versus explicit anti-Black and anti-immigrant appeals are partly driven by tolerance for the explicit appeals, we also find evidence that white Americans are adept at recognizing the racial content of appeals featuring widely used issue-group congruent pairs. Our findings shed light on conditions under which the IE model does and does not hold in the current political era.

Record numbers of first- and second-generation immigrants have won elected office over the last few electoral cycles, yet we find immigrants are still underrepresented at all levels of government. What are the perceived barriers to entry into political life among these New Americans? Using a unique survey dataset that includes an oversample of first- and second-generation immigrants who have enrolled in civic leadership trainings, we examine the similarities and differences between immigrant and non-immigrant leaders. We find that immigrants are in many ways similar to their non-immigrant counterparts in that access to structural resources help shape their political ambition. Yet immigrants, unlike their non-immigrant counterparts, often have less of these resources and perceive their ability to capitalize on these resources as less feasible. We find that the traditional barriers to office—lack of professional and political experiences, finances, and monied networks—all contribute to lower self-perceived qualifications for office among both immigrants and non-immigrants. Yet the New American leaders who are highly politically involved, deeply rooted in their communities, and well-positioned to run for office, face the additional psychological barriers posed by their race and ethnicity, immigrant identity, citizenship status, language ability, and acculturation, barriers that are often offered in open-ended essays as self-evident and crippling. Leadership training programs play a crucial role in providing training and instilling confidence in would-be immigrant candidates.

Taking advantage of a unique event in American history, the Second Great Migration, we explore whether the rapid entry of blacks into nearly exclusively white contexts triggered “racial threat” in white voting behavior in the state of California. Utilizing historical administrative data, we find that increasing proximity to previously white areas experiencing drastic black population growth between 1940 to 1960 is associated with significant increases in aggregate white voter support for a highly racially-charged ballot measure, Proposition 14, which legally protected racial discrimination in housing. Importantly, we find that this result holds when restricting the analysis to all-white areas with high rates of residential tenure and low rates of white population growth. These latter findings indicate that this relationship materializes in contexts where a larger share of white voters (a) were present during the treatment and (b) exercised residential-choice before the treatment commenced, which is suggestive of a causal effect.

Award: Charles Redd Award for Best Paper on Politics of the American West (WPSA 2018)

In this article we use precinct level election and demographic data to estimate Latino 2016 presidential general election votes in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. We find that Trump won an estimated 16% of the Latino vote, a historic low and well below Exit Poll estimates.

In this article, we briefly summarize the academic literature on Latino political behavior, explain why understanding the attitudes of subgroups requires pollsters sensitive to the populations they study, and present a novel analysis of real vote data that suggests that Clinton did, as expected, surpass Obama’s margin of victory among Latino voters. Analyzing 29,045,522 votes from 39,118 electoral precincts across 10 states, we show that Latino Decisions polling was far closer to the actual vote returns than the Edison Exit Poll. We conclude by looking to the future of the Latino electorate and polling in U.S. elections.

Demographic changes from decades of mass immigration and shifts in internal migration patterns are upending the traditional racial composition of many states throughout the United States, transforming the American electorate, and increasing both the political salience of immigration and the racial salience of Latinos. Politicizing these visible demographic shifts has become an increasingly common strategy by both Democrats and Republicans with potentially significant electoral effects. While many have examined the impact of these demographic changes on dominant receiving populations’ attitudes, few have examined how changing demographics are shaping immigration politics in electoral campaigns. Specifically, under what conditions do political candidates politicize demographic change? I hypothesize that both political and demographic considerations drive variation in immigration appeals. I test my hypotheses using candidate campaign websites from 2010, 2012, and 2014 U.S. Senate primary and general elections. I argue that racial party cleavages increase the electoral temptation of immigration appeals but it is the interaction between Latino population growth, electoral competition, and Latino voters that determines campaign strategy more broadly and moderates the use of pro- and anti-immigrant appeals.

Following trends in Europe over the past decade, support for the Radical Right has recently grown more significant in the United States and the United Kingdom. While the United Kingdom has witnessed the rise of Radical Right fringe groups, the United States’s political spectrum has been altered by the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump. This paper asks what predicts white individuals’ support for such groups. In original, representative surveys of white individuals in Britain and the United States, we use an innovative technique to measure subjective social, political, and economic status that captures individuals’ perceptions of increasing or decreasing deprivation over time. We then analyze the impact of these deprivation measures on support for the Radical Right among Republicans (Conservatives), Democrats (Labourites), and Independents. We show that nostalgic deprivation among white respondents drives support for the Radical Right in the United Kingdom and the United States.

A large body of research shows exposure to racialized media and racist campaign communication can increase the likelihood that racial attitudes influence Americans’ subsequent political evaluations. Recent political trends, however, suggest existing models may no longer adequately explain the effects of racial and racist messages among whites and non-whites alike. Of particular importance for this question is whether implicitly racial messages still prime white Americans’ racial attitudes. Additional questions considered in this chapter include the following. Do classic theories of racial priming apply to political messages about other racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups? Who is most susceptible to racial priming? When should researchers measure racial attitudes in survey experiments? How can we design racial messages that are implicit? And do identity-based appeals and attacks commonly used today still prime ethno-racial identity attachments? We synthesize debates in the extant research on racial priming, explain why experiments are the best approach for measuring racial priming effects, discuss how to overcome several design and methodological challenges facing racial priming scholars, and then propose an agenda for future research to help address a variety of outstanding questions in this increasingly important area of scholarship.

In this chapter, we leverage data from a national survey and an interactive online experiment to answer two key questions. First, which stereotypes about Latinos and immigrants do Americans hold? Second, does exposure to these stereotypes from popular media sources reinforce or attenuate them? We find convincing evidence that non-Latinos attribute both negative and positive stereotypes to Latinos and immigrants, that these stereotypes are not moderated by interpersonal contact with Latinos or immigrants, and that news and entertainment media can shape public opinion about Latinos and immigrants in a variety of ways.