We examine factors that explain differences in opinions among Asian Americans and Latinos regarding the government’s responsibility in addressing economic inequality. We utilize a subjective social position framework to better understand variations in attitudes about the role the government should play in addressing the differences in income between people with high and low incomes. We use ordered logit models to assess 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey data. Respondent’s age, feelings of marginalization, perceptions of local context, and use of alternative financial services are more important for predicting support or opposition to the government addressing income inequality. Taken together, the subjective social position of individuals goes a long way in explaining individuals’ attitudes regarding this matter.

The relative education model holds that educational attainment reflects existing socioeconomic advantages that are associated with participation rather than spurring political participation on its own. Yet, emerging research on compensation effects suggests that greater educational attainment leads to increased political engagement among more marginal populations in which political socialization is less likely to occur outside of schools. We argue that the relative education model will better describe the relationship between education and voting patterns among more advantaged groups. We test our expectations by estimating the relative education model within racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. using data from the Current Population Survey’s (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement from 1978 to 2020. We find that for relatively highly educated White and Asian American voters, each additional year of education yields diminishing returns to turnout. For Black and Latino voters, additional years of education are positively associated with turnout regardless of relative education. The results suggest that opportunities remain to reduce racial turnout gaps and boost political participation by addressing racial gaps in educational attainment.

The American public is increasingly affectively polarized. A growing body of research has associated 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 Republicans are seen 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.

Existing research on public opinion towards Indigenous peoples tends to focus on the extent to which citizens hold racist and anti-Indigenous attitudes. In contrast, few empirical studies have examined the extent to which citizens support reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Drawing on data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study (CES), we construct a novel Indigenous reconciliation scale to measure non-Indigenous support for policies that seek to address the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools. We then compare this scale to existing measures of Indigenous resentment before investigating the effects of several individual-level determinants related to attitudes, elite cues, and policy preferences on support for Indigenous reconciliation policies. Our findings shed light on the ongoing efforts in settler countries in North and South America and Australasia to decolonize their settler institutions and to create new and renewed relationships with Indigenous communities in those countries.

Why is solidarity between people of color (PoC) so difficult to achieve? New evidence suggests solidarity can be activated through a sense of shared discrimination between PoC. Yet other research highlights many real-world obstacles to this solidarity, including recurring inter-minority conflicts. We consider system justification as one possible mechanism that undercuts PoC solidarity. System justification is a human motive to bolster the status quo. System justifiers who are PoC condone racial inequalities as stable, predictable, and just—which alleviates mental stressors associated with their own racially stigmatized status. We investigate system justification’s impacts on Asian Americans: a key party to many coalitions and conflicts with Black and Latino people. Using national survey data, we find that system justification is significantly associated with Asian opposition to solidarity with Black Lives Matter, net of racial resentment, and other key covariates. We then refine this result experimentally by exposing Asian adults to the model minority myth—a system-legitimizing ideology. Exposure to this myth triggers system justification, which then increases Asian opposition to pro-Black and pro-Latino policies, among other solidarity-based outcomes. Both results are primarily driven by conservative Asian Americans, highlighting a need to better appreciate Asian Americans’ ideological diversity in U.S. racial politics.

This article investigates how Black voters choose candidates in majority-Black congressional districts. Partisanship often drives Black vote choice, but the lack of competition in general elections reduces its relevance and highlights the importance of primary elections. Racial cues are also referenced in literature, but the electoral setting reduces the relevance of race. Majority-Black congressional districts are racially homogeneous, and all emerging candidates are Black. Race cannot be used to distinguish between candidates. Congressional primary elections are also considered low-information environments, and voters have limited knowledge about the emerging candidates. In these settings, Black voters turn to cues to choose candidates. Since partisan and racial cues are not viable options, I argue that Black voters seek cues that signal group consensus. I highlight the role of endorsements and public opinion data. I utilize a mixed methodological approach incorporating a randomized survey experiment and focus group discussions with Black primary voters. Results from both methods suggest consensus cues are essential. Experimental results found no significant difference between racial and partisan endorsements, but they found a positive and significant effect for high polling. Focus group respondents had sincere preferences but were willing to abandon them if they differed from the group consensus. They also pointed to the importance of the media. I conducted an exploratory analysis of my experimental results, and I found that those with higher levels of media attention are more likely to rely on consensus cues. These results provide important insight into Black vote choice in majority-Black congressional districts.

In this paper, we demonstrate that the federal enforcement of the 15th Amendment is necessary for Black representation in the U.S. South. Using novel data on Black officeholders in the South from 1866 to 1912 and from 1969 to 1993, we examine Black representation during Reconstruction and after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In both political periods, we find that policies aimed to enforce the 15th Amendment and active Black political participation are necessary preconditions for Black officeholding. This paper helps contextualize scholarship on descriptive representation by identifying this critical link between democracy and representation in the American South. By analyzing broad periods of history, we demonstrate the enduring necessity of active policymaking to ensure fair elections as a precondition of democracy in the American South. Our findings carry significant consequences for understanding the health of American democracy in the twenty-first century.

Narratives and studies of Latino partisanship often emphasize Democratic identification, but some have recently suggested a shift towards Republicans. We address these by examining Latino party identification over a 34-year period, leveraging 35 national surveys with a total of over 103,000 Latino respondents along with Census data to create post-stratified survey weights to correct for biases. We emphasize changing partisanship over time by nativity, birth cohorts, and by national origin. From 2000 to 2012, we observed a slight overall increase in Democratic identification and a decrease in Republican identification, but this was driven by foreign-born Latinos. After 2012, we see declining Democratic identification overall, greater Republican identification among foreign-born and older native-born Latinos, and accelerating Independent identification among native-born Millennial and Gen Z Latinos. These results show that generational turnover and differences by nativity challenge extant theories of Latino partisan change over time.

The U.S. Supreme Court is often regarded as an impartial arbiter of justice, yet various prejudices may influence its decisions. This article examines Supreme Court justices’ biases, focusing on how they invoke racialized stereotypes of criminality. We argue that justices are more likely to vote in favor of white, nonviolent litigants, reinforcing stereotypes that depict nonwhite defendants as inherently more criminal and violent. Drawing on the U.S. Supreme Court Database’s criminal procedure cases from 2005–2017, combined with an original dataset of litigants’ racial identities, we estimate a series of multilevel logistic regressions. Our findings show that litigant race, crime type, and justice ideology jointly shape judicial votes. We further investigate how bias appears in justices’ written opinions, revealing language that perpetuates racialized conceptions of criminality. Overall, our results underscore the Court’s role in constructing what it means to be both “criminal” and “nonwhite,” suggesting that the Court is not a neutral interpreter of law, but an institution shaped by broader social and political biases.

Contemporary research on far-right politics has relied predominantly on the use of binaries between the ‘far/extreme/(populist) radical right’ and the so-called ‘mainstream’, and a ‘waves’ metaphor to historicise different eras of the post-World War Two far-right. In this article, we probe these categories and binaries, problematising hegemonic depictions, the consequent assumptions underpinning them, and what this means for resistance to reactionary politics. By reflecting on the current state of the field, summarising dominant approaches and their potential limitations, we arrive at our key contribution: a revised definition of the term ‘far right’ which shifts the focus away from categorisation towards an understanding of far-right politics as a political position. In turn, our approach also presents both a challenge to and evolution of the ‘waves’ metaphor which accounts for processes of mainstreaming and rests on a critical account of the mainstream itself. Our conceptualisation problematises traditional binaries while pointing to a ‘fifth wave’ of far-right politics in which the identities of the mainstream and far right are mutually constitutive. To illustrate our conceptual contribution, we conclude our article with a case study on the interaction between the far right and mainstream in UK politics.

In the United States, the public does not view all refugee groups with equal favorability. Why do individuals express more support for some refugee groups compared to others? We argue that some Americans are more supportive of certain refugee groups when they share a racial identity because it is easier for them to empathize with them. While recent research points to empathy as a useful tool for cultivating supportive attitudes toward refugees and immigrants, the political science literature lacks a nuanced understanding of the conditions under which empathy drives pro-social attitudes toward refugees, specifically with regard to racial dynamics. Does empathy allow people to overcome their racial ingroup preferences, or does it magnify them? With an original web experiment administered to a 50/50 Black and white sample of Americans, we prime half of the sample to associate refugees with their racial ingroup and prime the other half with their racial outgroup. We find that refugee race only affects support for refugees among white individuals with low group empathy. For high-empathy whites and Blacks of all levels of empathy, the race linked to refugees does not condition their support for refugees. Rather, group empathy is a strong, independent explanation for variation in attitudes toward refugees. We also find modest evidence that the positive association between empathy for refugees and support for this group is driven by partisanship, particularly for whites. The direct effect of partisanship on support for refugees is much stronger. This study contributes to research on the dynamics of race, empathy, and attitudes toward refugees.

While prior studies have consistently linked immigration attitudes with public support for the welfare state, it is not yet clear how individuals process immigrant-related information in their home contexts and combine that with their existing immigration attitudes to update their attitudes toward the welfare state. In this paper, we consider how context (i.e., immigrant welfare participation rates in individuals’ home states) works in tandem with immigration attitudes to shape Americans’ support for the welfare state. We merge state contextual data on the welfare consumption rates of immigrants with micro-level public opinion data from the Cumulative American National Election Survey (CANES) for the years from 2004 to 2016. Our results suggest that individuals’ immigration attitudes and the degree of immigrant welfare participation in their home contexts combine to influence Americans’ welfare spending attitudes. More specifically, among individuals with unfavorable immigration attitudes, higher levels of immigrant welfare participation in their state contexts lead to significantly lower levels of welfare support. Likewise, in states with high-immigrant welfare participation rates, negative immigration attitudes have a stronger negative effect on welfare support. These findings suggest that Americans’ support for the welfare state is not only determined by their existing immigration attitudes but also the reality of immigrant welfare usage in their home contexts.

As global migration continues to intensify, legislatures in liberal democracies increasingly feature policymakers with direct experiences with immigration. Concurrently, scholars often argue that electoral accountability creates incentives to appeal to public opinion, which in the context of immigration policymaking favors restrictions over admission. In this paper, we study these competing dynamics among these immigrant legislators. We theorize that political institutions—particularly political parties—impede the sincere expression of legislative preferences among legislators that come from immigrant backgrounds. To begin, we present stylized facts about legislative behavior drawing on roll-call votes from the Canadian, British, and American legislatures. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with representatives, we find strong evidence that the threat of political party sanction and individual concerns about legislators’ own parties affects legislative decision-making. These findings contribute to our understanding of legislative accountability and highlight how the trend of increasing immigration to democratic polities does not directly translate to political representation.