White Voters, A Key Piece of the Puzzle: Education, Race, and Electoral Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (03) ◽  
pp. 517-522
Author(s):  
DeeAnn Grove

ABSTRACTIn 2004, Jennifer L. Hochschild challenged political scientists to give greater attention to education policy and politics. Although it challenges Hochschild’s interpretation of the politics of school vouchers, this article demonstrates her central assertion that the era of school desegregation continues to impact American politics. Internal campaign strategy documents from presidential election campaigns reveal how the two parties have arrived at different school voucher positions because of the different challenges each party faced as a result of the battle over school desegregation. Republican strategists were concerned that white voters believed their candidates did not care about people of color. Supporting vouchers for urban Black children allowed Republicans to reassure white voters of their racial sensitivity. In contrast, Democratic candidates were more concerned that they might alienate white voters by taking another position that seemed to pander to Black voters. Strategists’ perceptions of white voters’ attitudes toward education and race comprise the thread that connects the past to the present.

Author(s):  
LEONARDO BACCINI ◽  
STEPHEN WEYMOUTH

Globalization and automation have contributed to deindustrialization and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, yielding important electoral implications across advanced democracies. Coupling insights from economic voting and social identity theory, we consider how different groups in society may construe manufacturing job losses in contrasting ways. We argue that deindustrialization threatens dominant group status, leading some white voters in affected localities to favor candidates they believe will address economic distress and defend racial hierarchy. Examining three US presidential elections, we find white voters were more likely to vote for Republican challengers where manufacturing layoffs were high, whereas Black voters in hard-hit localities were more likely to vote for Democrats. In survey data, white respondents, in contrast to people of color, associated local manufacturing job losses with obstacles to individual upward mobility and with broader American economic decline. Group-based identities help explain divergent political reactions to common economic shocks.


Author(s):  
Greg Garrett

Hollywood films are perhaps the most powerful storytellers in American history, and their depiction of race and culture has helped to shape the way people around the world respond to race and prejudice. Over the past one hundred years, films have moved from the radically prejudiced views of people of color to the depiction of people of color by writers and filmmakers from within those cultures. In the process, we begin to see how films have depicted negative versions of people outside the white mainstream, and how film might become a vehicle for racial reconciliation. Religious traditions offer powerful correctives to our cultural narratives, and this work incorporates both narrative truth-telling and religious truth-telling as we consider race and film and work toward reconciliation. By exploring the hundred-year period from The Birth of a Nation to Get Out, this work acknowledges the racist history of America and offers the possibility of hope for the future.


Author(s):  
Costas Panagopoulos

Over the past few decades, a fundamental shift in political campaign strategy has been afoot in U.S. elections: Political campaigns have been gradually shifting their attention away from swing voters toward their respective, partisan bases. Independents and weak partisans have been targeted with less frequency, and the emphasis in contemporary elections has been on strong partisans. This book documents this shift—away from persuasion toward base mobilization—in the context of U.S. presidential elections and explains that this phenomenon is likely linked to several developments, including advances in campaign technology and voter-targeting capabilities as well as insights from behavioral social science focusing on voter mobilization. The analyses show the 2000 presidential election represents a watershed cycle that punctuated this shift. The book also explores the implications of the shift toward base mobilization and links these developments to growing turnout rates for strong partisans and attenuating participation among independents or swing voters over time. The book concludes these patterns have contributed to heightened partisan polarization in the United States.


Author(s):  
Camille Walsh

Chapter Two examines a handful of pivotal Supreme Court cases brought against school desegregation at the turn of the century and the first few decades of the 20th century. The Cumming v. Georgia case in 1899 indicated a demand for equality on the basis of taxpayer status that was understood by the plaintiffs to be intertwined with race, a demand that was interpreted by the Supreme Court only in the language of taxation and federalism. This chapter also highlights regional variations and a number of cases brought at the height of Jim Crow segregation by people of color who fell outside the black-white paradigm, even if courts then imposed it on them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (01) ◽  
pp. 1950003
Author(s):  
EUNJUNG CHOI ◽  
JONGSEOK WOO

In the past few decades, post-democratization politics in South Korea have witnessed an upsurge in authoritarian nostalgia, called the “Park Jung-hee syndrome.” This paper examines the origins of public nostalgia for the authoritarian dictator by putting two theoretical arguments, i.e., the socialization thesis and the system output thesis, to an empirical test. This paper utilizes the 2010 Korea Democracy Barometer from the Korea Barometer and the 2010 and the 2015 Korean National Identity Survey from the East Asia Institute. The empirical analysis of the South Korean case strongly supports the political socialization argument, suggesting that citizens’ yearning for Park Jung-hee is not merely an outcome of the negative evaluations of the democratic governments’ performances. Rather, their authoritarian nostalgia is in large part an outcome of their political socialization during the Park dictatorship. The analysis implies that, although a resurgence of the Park Jung-hee syndrome in post-democratization South Korea is not expected to derail the country’s route to democratic deepening, it may continue to be a main source of political division in partisan and electoral politics in the future.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 434-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia C. Phillips

This reaction paper highlights what the author views as remarkable and particularly laudable about this major contribution on lesbian, gay, and bisexual people of color; some disappointments that emerged, especially from the results of the content analysis; and a few thoughts extending those already offered in this outstanding set of major contribution articles. Particularly impressive is the quantity and quality of scholarship presented in this set of articles, how they build on one another, and the utility for future researchers, teachers, and scholars in the field of multicultural psychology. Selected disappointments include continued invisibility of various persons in subordinate groups within this area of scholarship and problematic sampling and recruitment strategies used in much of the past research. The authors who contributed to this major contribution identify and use many excellent strategies to overcome a number of the disappointments that are noted.


Author(s):  
Charles W. Mills

This reflection argues that ignoring—as mainstream Kantians tend to do—Kant’s own racism with respect to people of color and, correspondingly, obfuscating their radically different experience in modernity (as subpersons rather than recognized persons) only continues in a different form the disrespect historically shown to them. Drawing on Eviatar Zerubavel’s concept of “time maps,” that is “[competing] sociomental representations of the past,” it is suggested instead that we self-consciously theorize the demands of dignity for nonwhites in a framework of corrective justice—not in the “white time” of the racially privileged but in the “nonwhite time” of the racially subordinated.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keneshia N. Grant

AbstractThe Great Migration fundamentally reshaped Northern electorates. Millions of Black voters, who had been unable to vote in the South, became eligible to vote through their resettlement in the North. In many instances, parties and politicians believed that Black voters were the balance of power in elections. This belief led them to change their approaches and make specific appeals to Black voters in an effort to win their support. Although scholars of American politics have revised the dominant narrative about the development of the Democratic Party on issues related to race, they fail to account for the role of Black voters in contributing to the Party’s change. The goal of this work is to describe how the Great Migration influenced Democratic Party interactions with Black voters in presidential elections from 1948–1960. I argue that increasing competition between the Democratic and Republican Parties, coupled with Black migrants’ location in electorally important states, made Black voters an important target of presidential campaign strategy in the post-war era.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document