Research
Jump to Articles, Book Chapters, Working Papers and Ongoing Projects
Articles
Conditionally Accepted Validating Whites’ Reactions to the ‘Racial Shift’ Journal of Experimental Political Science
(with Nicole Huffman and Veronica Oelerich) [doi]
Abstract: A prominent paradigm demonstrates many White Americans respond negatively to information on their declining population share. But this paradigm considers this ‘racial shift’ in a single hierarchy-challenging context that produces similar status threat responses across conceptually distinct outcomes, undercutting the ability to both explain the causes of Whites’ social and political responses and advance theorizing about native majorities’ responses to demographic change. We test whether evidence for Whites’ responses to demographic change varies across three distinct hierarchy-challenging contexts: society at large, culture, and politics. We find little evidence any racial shift information instills status threat or otherwise changes attitudes or behavioral intentions, and do not replicate evidence for reactions diverging by left- vs. right-wing political attachments. We conclude with what our well-powered (n=2100) results suggest about a paradigm and intervention used prominently, with results cited frequently, to understand native majorities’ responses to demographic change and potential challenges to multi-racial democracy.
Forthcoming From Protest to Child-Rearing: How Movement Politics Shape Socialization Priorities American Political Science Review
(with Allison P. Anoll and Mackenzie Israel-Trummel) [doi]
Media: [LSE USAPP Blog]
Abstract: Classic political behavior studies assert that childhood socialization can contribute to later political orientations. But, as adults consider how to introduce children to politics, what shapes their decisions? We argue socialization is itself political with adults changing their socialization priorities in response to salient political events including social movements. Using Black Lives Matter protests and race socialization as a case, we show the summer 2020 information environment coupled movement-consistent concepts of race with child-rearing guidance. A survey of White parents after the summer activism suggests that many—but especially Democrats and those near peaceful protest epicenters—prioritized new forms of race socialization. Further, nearly two years after the protests’ height, priming Black Lives Matter changes support for race-related curricular materials among White Americans. Our work casts political socialization in a new light, reviving an old literature, and has implications for when today’s children become tomorrow’s voters.
2023 A Drop in the Ocean: How Priors Anchor Attitudes Toward the American Carceral State British Journal of Political Science 53(4):1150–1169
(with Allison P. Anoll) [doi]
Media: [LSE USAPP Blog]
Abstract: That Black and White Americans disagree about the carceral state is well established; why this is the case is much less clear. Drawing on group hierarchy theory and the state’s role in perpetuating group subordination/domination, we theorize that differences in socialization and contact during emergent adulthood produce divergent priors for racial groups and gender subgroups within race. These different starting points shape how people integrate new information from recent contact into their belief systems. Using a survey of over 11,000 respondents, we find that instead of all groups integrating information the same way, recent direct contact contributes most to negative attitudes among groups whose contact with government agents is least negatively valanced. While interactions with the American carceral state divide opinions considerably among White Americans and women, adulthood contact for Black Americans, especially Black men, appears but “a drop in the ocean” of political life.
2023 Advancing the Measurement of Authoritarianism Political Behavior 45(2):537–560
(with Stanley Feldman and Marc J. Hetherington) [doi]
Abstract: Popular support for ethnocentric, nationalistic politicians, parties, and policies around the world has renewed interest in authoritarianism. Measured by people’s preferences for certain desirable qualities in children, scholars have identified relationships between it and support for right wing populist parties and the ideas they champion. But despite authoritarianism’s unique ability to explain present political dynamics, scholars have devoted too little attention to this operationalization’s measurement properties. We address these and other issues here. We demonstrate that 1) the childrearing measure taps authoritarianism, 2) it is exogenous to a wide range of political attitudes, 3) its temporal stability is consistent with its conceptualization as a personality adaptation and 4) adding new items to the existing set improves our ability to measure authoritarianism. We thus provide scholars with a measure that better explains political opinions, which should allow future work to better identify when, how, and among whom authoritarianism explains political thinking.
2023 Observational Equivalence in Explaining Attitude Change: Have White Racial Attitudes Genuinely Changed? American Journal of Political Science 67(2):411–425
[doi]
Media: [AJPS Blog Summary]
Abstract: Understanding when and why White racial attitudes change is important for understanding their politics. Critically, surveys reveal Whites’ views of Black Americans are changing recently, an important result given conventional wisdom that these are stable orientations. I test four possible explanations for these shifting views: genuine attitude change, social desirability, partisan expressive responding, and changing racial attitude measure performance. Importantly, these explanations produce observationally equivalent survey toplines. To adjudicate between them I use the measurement equivalence framework and examine how Whites answer the racial resentment measure. Evidence from multi-group confirmatory factor analysis models supports genuine attitude change. Substantively, this suggests these changes may have important political implications. Methodologically, it suggests partisan expressive responding may have limits, indicates social desirability pressures have not changed how Whites answer at least one racial attitude measure, and offers additional validity evidence for the racial resentment measure.
2022 Black Lives, White Kids: White Parenting Practices Following Black-Led Protests Perspectives on Politics 20(4):1328-1345
(with Allison P. Anoll and Mackenzie Israel-Trummel) [doi]
Abstract: Summer 2020 saw widespread protests under the banner, Black Lives Matter. Coupled with the global pandemic that kept America’s children in the predominant care of their parents, we argue the latter half of 2020 offers a unique moment to consider Whites’ race-focused parenting practices. We use Google Trends data and posts on public parenting Facebook pages to show that the remarkable levels of protest activity in summer 2020 served as a focusing event that not only directed Americans’ attention to racial concepts, but connected those concepts to parenting. Using a national survey of non-Hispanic White parents with White school-age children, we show that most White parents spoke with their children about race during this period and nearly three-quarters took actions to increase racial diversity in their children’s environment or introduce them to racial politics. But, the data also show parenting practices rife with uncertainty and deep partisan, gender, and socioeconomic divisions. Drawing upon our findings, we call for a renewed focus on political socialization that considers how parenting choices are shaped by political events—including Black Lives Matter— and the possible long-term consequences of racial parenting practices on politics.
2021 Generational Persistence in the Nature of White Racial Attitudes Public Opinion Quarterly 85(3): 887-899
[doi]
Abstract: Race and racial attitudes are central to American politics. To understand these relationships, scholars often use measures developed in earlier social and political contexts. A key issue is thus whether such measures consistently capture the same construct across varied contexts. Changes in the social and political context may result in generational differences in how people interpret certain racial attitude items given different socialization experiences. Such differences make generational comparisons on these items invalid because the items capture different considerations. I build on recent work investigating this possibility and test the racial resentment measure’s equivalence between Millennial and older Whites. Despite potential generational differences, I find that the racial resentment measure operates equivalently across generations using two different analytical approaches (retrospective thought-listing and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis). The racial resentment measure offers valid insights into racial attitudes across generational cohorts. I conclude by discussing what this finding implies for emerging work on the manifestations of prejudiced attitudes among Millennial Whites and also suggest potential points of improvement for the measure.
2021 The Content of their Coverage: Contrasting Racially Conservative and Liberal Elite Rhetoric Politics, Groups, and Identities 9(5): 935-954
[doi]
Abstract: Theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that how elites talk about race may shape mass racial attitudes. But current work limits understanding this possibility by not systematically characterizing elite rhetoric on race. To shed light on the nature of racially liberal and conservative elite rhetoric, and therefore the potential for elites to shape mass racial attitudes, I analyze transcripts from two partisan news shows: The Rachel Maddow Show and The O’Reilly Factor. Pairing a case study with text-as-data methods, I provide insight into themes constituting racially liberal and conservative elite discourse. Racial liberals like Maddow emphasize that race matters–racial bias and discrimination still shape nonwhites’ life chances. In contrast, racial conservatives like O’Reilly contend that race does not shape life chances and serves only as an attention-seeking device. Identifying these divides helps shed light on the origins and dynamics of mass racial attitudes.
2021 Racial Attitudes through a Partisan Lens British Journal of Political Science 51(3): 1062-1079
[doi]
Media: [NPR][NPR][Sinclair][The New York Times][The New York Times][FiveThirtyEight][Science of Politics Podcast]
Abstract: The conventional wisdom is that racial attitudes, by forming through early socialization processes, are causally prior to most things political, including whites’ party identifications. Yet, a broad literature demonstrates that partisanship can shape mass attitudes. I argue that this influence extends even to presumptively fundamental predispositions like racial attitudes. Applying cross-lagged models to panel data from the 1990s and 2000s, I demonstrate that whites align their racial attitudes with their party loyalties. Partisanship’s influence is more pronounced in the latter time period, results consistent with a view that changes in the political context can make partisanship a more likely causal force on other attitudes. Racial concerns not only provide a foundation for political conflict, but my results reveal that political processes can actually increase or decrease racial animus.
2020 Grand Old (Tailgate) Party? Partisan discrimination in apolitical settings Political Behavior 42(3): 769–789
(with Stephen M. Utych) [doi]
Media: [PsyPost]
Abstract: Recent work in political science demonstrates that the American public is strongly divided on partisan lines. Levels of affective polarization are so great, it seems, that partisanship even shapes behavior in apolitical settings. However, this literature does not account for other salient identity dimensions on which people make decisions in apolitical settings, potentially stacking the deck in favor of partisanship. We address this limitation with a pair of experiments studying price discrimination among college football fans. We find that partisan discrimination exists, even when the decision context explicitly calls attention to another social identity. But, importantly, this appears to function mostly as in-group favoritism rather than out-group hostility.
2019 E Pluribus Unum? How Ethnic and National Identity Motivate Individual Reactions to a Political Ideal The Journal of Politics 81(4): 1420–1433
(with Efrén O. Pérez and Maggie Deichert) [doi]
Media: [The Guardian]
Abstract: Preserving national unity in light of diversity—e pluribus unum—is a challenge in immigrant-receiving nations like the U.S. We claim that endorsement of this view is structured by the varied bond between ethnic and national identity among immigrant minorities and native majorities, a proposition we test across three studies of U.S. Latinos and Whites. Study 1 uses national survey data to show that ethnic and national identity are associated with support for this objective, though in varied ways among these groups. Studies 2 and 3 sharpen these results experimentally by illuminating the role of elite rhetoric in forging these connections. We show that elite remarks about the (in-)compatibility of ethnic and national identity motivate support for e pluribus unum through the specific attachment it influences. That is, elite rhetoric causes shifts in ethnic or national identity, which then asymmetrically shapes support for e pluribus unum among Latinos and Whites.
2019 Trumped by Race: Explanations for Race’s Influence on Whites’ Votes in 2016 Quarterly Journal of Political Science 14(3): 313–328
[doi]
Media: [The New York Times][The Week][Yahoo News]
Abstract: Many analyses of the 2016 presidential election suggest that Whites’ racial attitudes played a central role in explaining vote choice, and to a degree greater than preceding years. Most explanations for this outcome emphasize the role that Donald Trump’s campaign played in activating these attitudes. These stories, however, elide an alternative explanation for these same results: a growing polarization in racial attitudes by party driven by changes among Democrats between 2012 and 2016. This matters because the two possibilities—campaign dynamics that increase the relevance of certain attitudes on vote choice or long-term distributional shifts—can produce observationally equivalent regression coefficients. I urge caution against offering singular explanations for why race mattered in 2016 because while it surely did, it is less clear how and, especially, for whom.
2019 Knock out Blows or the Status Quo?: Capturing Momentum in the 2016 Primaries The Journal of Politics 81(3): 997–1013
(with Joshua D. Clinton and Marc Trussler) [doi]
Media: [The Atlantic][The National Review]
Abstract: Notions of momentum loom large in accounts of presidential primaries despite im- precision about its meaning and measurement. Defining momentum as the impact election outcomes have on candidate support above and beyond existing trends and leveraging a rolling cross-section of more than 325,000 interviews to examine daily changes in candidate support in the 2016 nomination contests reveals scant evidence that primary election outcomes uniquely affect respondents’ preferences over the competing candidates. Preferences sometimes respond to election outcomes, but the estimated effects are indistinguishable from effects occurring on non-election days. There is also no evidence that those who should be most receptive to new information are more affected by election outcomes. As a result, our investigation strongly suggests that election outcomes are not uniquely important for affecting opinions and shaping the outcome of nomination contests.
Book Chapters
Forthcoming Worldview and Partisanship. Reconsidering Parties and Partisanship Karpowitz, C. F. and Pope, J. C. Eds. (with Marc Hetherington and Pamela Conover)
2025 The Mass Public’s View of Implicit Bias, with Implications for Scientific Communication in a Polarized Age. The Cambridge Handbook of Implicit Bias and Racism Krosnick, J. A., Stark, T. H. & Scott, A. L. Eds. (with Cindy D. Kam)
Working Papers and Ongoing Projects
A Racial Reckoning? Racial Attitudes in the Wake of the Murder of George Floyd (with Cindy D. Kam)
More than a Partisan Pandemic: Worldviews and COVID-19 Response in the United States (with Marc J. Hetherington and Isaac D. Mehlhaff)
Testing the Stability and Causal Order of Identity and Solidarity between PoC: Evidence from a New Panel of Asian, Black, Latino, and Multiracial Adults (with Efrén O. Pérez, Seth Goldman, Yuen Huo, Tatishe Nteta, and Linda R. Tropp)
Raising the Future: Race and the Politics of Child-Rearing (in progress book manuscript with Allison Anoll and Mackenzie Israel-Trummel)
What is Conservative? (in progress book manuscript with Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler)