Works in progress

Getting to the Heart of White Democrats' Racial Liberalism: Collective emotions and political engagement

What We Talk About when We Talk About Race: Unpacking the contents of racial identity by race and partisanship

Other working papers

Why Do White Democrats No Longer Prize Descriptively Representative Members of Congress?  with Anna Weissman

Under review

Recent research shows that white Democratic voters have become more approving of politicians of color compared to white politicians in the last ten years. This is surprising, since past research indicates that voters generally prefer representatives who share their own racial background. The mechanisms underpinning this shift are key to understanding its likely durability and its broader implications for racial politics. We evaluate three potential explanations: changing racial attitudes, partisan identity, and that race serves as a cue for politicians’ ideologies. Our evidence suggests changing racial attitudes among white Democrats as the likely mechanism: racial attitudes are strongly associated with these voters’ greater approval of representatives of color both at the individual level and over time, while there is little evidence that partisan identity or perceptions of politicians’ ideologies are responsible. These results provide evidence that white Democrats put their racially liberal attitudes into action through support for representatives of color.

Migration and the Persistence of Violent Victimization with Martin Vinæs Larsen and Gabriel S. Lenz

Researchers have long known that regional differences in interpersonal violence rates tend to persist, but they haven’t known why. In this paper, we use migration as a laboratory to help understand this persistence. Using administrative data, we find that interpersonal violence rates are also highly persistent for migrants after they leave their place of origin. We find this persistence for internal white US migrants and for international migrants in Denmark. We discuss mechanisms behind this persistence, including institutional, economic, and cultural ones.

A Century of Struggle and Change: Mass Mobilization and Reform in North Africa and the Middle East, 1800-2013 with Stephen Kosack, Ashley Fabrizio, Alicia Erickson, Sam Selsky, Evann Smith, Raafi Alidina, Atul Bhattarai, Cathleen R. Buzan, Alex Farley, Perin Gokce, Amy Beck Harris, Dan Hemenway, Kevin Huang, Anja Nilsson, Shalini Rao, Paul Schied, Eric Seely, Ka Stern, Lindsey Trimmer, Erika VanHourne, and Shatha Yasin

How influential are mass movements expressing common political concerns on governance in closed political systems? Closed, autocratic political systems are generally thought to inhibit and be unresponsive to collective mobilization. Yet in the most comprehensive historical survey to date of mass political mobilization in the Middle East and North Africa, a region where governance has generally been autocratic, we find the opposite. We systematically survey more than 5,000 works of scholarship and historical texts about all mass movements in the region involving at least one thousand people mobilizing for at least a month around shared political or policy concerns, how governments responded, and whether movements achieved substantial reforms or inclusion in state decision-making, from 1800 to 2013. We find clear historical evidence of steadily increasing mobilization since the early 1900s, in hundreds of enduring mass political movements around wide-ranging concerns. Most of the time (83%), governments responded to movements with silence or repression. Yet even movements facing violent repression almost always continued to mobilize the following year (81%). And despite the costs and risks, almost half (48%) of movements eventually achieved substantial reforms of institutional inclusion in state decision-making. These patterns suggest a broad and steadily increasing range of political and policy concerns in the region that have become sufficiently widely and deeply felt that, despite the region’s frequently autocratic politics, large groups have been increasingly willing over the past century to struggle collectively for redress, and as often as not have been able to substantially influence their governance.

Culture, Diversity, and Intergroup Relations Lab papers

Covid-19 Responsibility and Blame: How group identity and political ideology inform perceptions of responsibility, blame, and racial disparities with Lyndsey Wallace, Celina Romano, Kyneshawau Hurd, Rubi Gonzalez, and Victoria Plaut
Forthcoming at Social and Personality Psychology Compass

This study explored how group identity and political ideology inform perceptions of responsibility, blame, and racial disparities. Researchers focused on the influence of identity an political ideology. The findings revealed that highly identified White participants were more likely to blame individuals for their own infection, whereas minority group members attributed disparities to structural inequalities. Conservative ideology was linked to individual blame and responsibility and to rejecting explanations based on structural inequalities. The study highlights the importance of understanding the role of identity and political ideology in shaping perceptions of blame and responsibility for COVID-19, and how these perceptions may influence political discourse and health inequities.

Perceptions of Privilege and Risk during the COVID-19 Pandemic with Lyndsey Wallace, Celina Romano, Kyneshawau Hurd, Rubi Gonzalez, and Victoria Plaut

This study investigates group-based differences in perceptions of COVID-19 related risk of infection and death, as well as perceptions of group-based differences in access to resources and in the ability to self-isolate and work from home. The possible contributions of racial identity centrality; symbolic, prototypicality, and realistic threat; and political factors including partisanship, ideology, and residing in a majority-Republican or majority-Democratic state are also explored. The findings suggest that group identity plays a crucial role in shaping perceptions of COVID-19 risk and access to resources. Overall, participants were more protective of their in-group, recognizing higher risk to their own group and greater limitations in access to resources relative to other groups. Participants from non-dominant groups acknowledged higher levels of risk for their own group as well as for other non-dominant groups and recognized disparities in access to resources across different non-dominant groups. However, dominant group members tended to estimate higher risk to Whites and lower risks to non-dominant groups while denying privilege in access to resources. Furthermore, Republicans and conservatives consistently estimated lower risk to all group members, provided lower estimates of group-based disparities, and denied privilege in access to resources when compared to Democrats and liberals. These findings have important implications for policymakers, highlighting the need to address and eliminate disparities in access to resources and COVID-19 risk management for marginalized communities.