Gender and Racial Gaps in Support for Policing and Correctional Reforms: Are the Gaps a Consequence of Political Partisanship?

Divisive criminal justice issues are typically framed through gender and racial lenses, with little empirical work considering the increasing role of political partisanship. Using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study ( N = 55,000), we estimate multivariate models of support for four policing and correctional reforms. The models initially point to gender gaps and racial gaps. However, as with many public policy issues, support for criminal justice reforms are largely a product of political partisanship—the gender and racial gaps are largely a consequence of gender and racial gaps in partisanship and appear to be driven by white Republican men. As legislative bodies continue to be overrepresented with individuals with the same demographic profile, criminal justice reform prospects are limited.

The Participatory Implications of Racialized Policy Feedback

How do involuntary interactions with authoritarian institutions shape political engagement? The policy feedback literature suggests that interactions with authoritarian policies undercut political participation. However, research in racial and ethnic politics offers reason to believe that these experiences may increase citizens’ engagement. Drawing on group attachment and discrimination research, we argue that mobilization is contingent on individuals’ political psychological state. Relative to their counterparts, individuals with a politicized group identity will display higher odds of political engagement when exposed to authoritarian institutions. To evaluate our theory, we draw on the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study to examine the experiences of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. For all subgroups and different types of institutions, we find that, for those with a politicized group identity, institutional contact is associated with higher odds of participation. Our research modifies the classic policy feedback framework, which neglects group-based narratives in the calculus of collective action.

RELIGIOUS VOTING IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: TESTING ALTERNATIVE THEORIES

Scholars of American electoral politics have documented the recent partisan realignment of religious groups. Indeed, careful analysts often find that religious variables are better predictors of partisan choice than classic socioeconomic divisions. Still, there has been relatively little effort to put this religious realignment in both theoretical and historical perspective. In this article, we update our previous work on the historical evolution of religious partisanship, demonstrating the continued relevance of ethnocultural (or ethnoreligious) theory, utilized by political historians, and restructuring theory, an important sociological perspective. Both viewpoints help us understand presidential elections since the 1930s, as we demonstrate with data from a wide range of surveys. After utilizing the 2020 Cooperative Election Study to examine the contemporary voting of ethnoreligious groups in greater detail, we test the impact of religious variables controlling for other demographic, attitudinal, and partisan influences and find that religious identities and orientations often retain independent influence even under stringent controls for other factors shaping the presidential vote.

Does violence within a non-violent social movement help or hurt the movement? Evidence from the 2020 BlackLivesMatter Protests

The murder of George Floyd ignited one of the largest mass mobilizations in US history, including both non-violent and violent BlackLivesMatter protests in the summer of 2020. Many have since asked: did the violence within the largely non-violent movement help or hurt its goals? To answer this question, we used real-world data (ACLED, 2020) about the location of all BlackLivesMatter protests during the summer of 2020 to identify US counties that featured no protests, only nonviolent protests, or both nonviolent and violent protests. We then combined this data with survey data (N = 494, Study 1), data from the Congressional Cooperative Election Study (N = 43,924, Study 2A), and data from Project Implicit (N = 180,480, Study 2B), in order to examine how exposure (i.e. living in a county with) different types of protest affected both support for the key policy goals of the movement and prejudice towards Black Americans. We found that the 2020 BLM protests had no impact on prejudice among either liberals or conservatives. However, they were, even when violent, able to increase support for BlackLivesMatter’s key policy goals among conservatives living in relatively liberal areas. As such, this research suggests that violent, disruptive actions within a broader non-violent movement may affect those likely to be resistant to the movement. We connect these findings to the notion of disruptive action, which explains why these effects do not materialize in reducing prejudice, but in generating support for important policy goals of the movement.

Why Bother? Supporters of Locally Weaker Parties Are Less Likely to Vote or to Vote Sincerely

Voters are deterred from casting a vote and more likely to vote strategically if their preferred choice is less competitive in their electoral district. We use 2019 Canadian Election Study data to show that respondents’ answers to a “how likely are you to vote” question depend on their estimate of their preferred party's local chances of winning, relative to other parties. This deterrent effect on turnout from the competitiveness of a voter's preferred party is concentrated among certain parties (NDP, Green, People's Party of Canada). Under first-past-the-post (FPTP), voters with particular policy perspectives are systematically deterred from voting, relative to other voters. Furthermore, we find that despite supporters of all parties having an incentive to vote strategically if their party is outside the top two in the district, strategic voting is heavily concentrated among voters who prefer parties other than the nationally most competitive two parties.

Senators at Home: Local Attentiveness and Policy Representation in Congress

Is local attention a substitute for policy representation? Fenno (1978) famously described how legislators develop personal ties with their constituents through periodic visits to their districts and carefully crafted communications. Existing work suggests that such interactions insulate incumbents electorally, creating less need to represent constituents’ policy preferences. Surprisingly, this important argument has never been tested systematically. In this paper, I use data on senator travel and staffing behavior along with survey data from the 2011–2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to investigate this claim. In addition to showing that areas with important campaign donors are significantly more likely to receive resources, I find that local visits may decrease approval among ideologically opposed constituents. Furthermore, I find inconsistent evidence regarding the effectiveness of local staff. These results suggest that local attention does not always cultivate goodwill in the district. Under polarized politics, home style does not effectively substitute for policy representation.

Making America Exceptional Again: Donald Trump's Traditionalist Jeremiad, Civil Religion, and the Politics of Resentment

Donald Trump's campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” captivated the imagination of millions of Americans by contextualizing disparate sources of social resentment as emblematic of a broader story of American decline. Employing a “traditionalist civil religious jeremiad,” Trump called for a reassertion of American exceptionalism, and extolled a romanticized golden age predating transformative social changes (e.g., sexuality, gender roles, racial equality). As such, his rhetoric legitimized the defense of white male privilege as a vital component of this restoration. While this use of civil religious themes emboldened those who harbor prejudicial views, it alienated others who interpret such rhetoric as an assault on the soul of the nation. Relying on a unique module within the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that adherence to the tenets of American civil religion significantly exacerbated the effects of symbolic racism and modern sexism on support for Trump.

The paradox of poor representation: How voter–party incongruence curbs affective polarisation

Research on the relationship between ideology and affective polarisation highlights ideological disagreement as a key driver of animosity between partisan groups. By operationalising disagreement on the left–right dimension, however, existing studies often overlook voter–party incongruence as a potential determinant of affective evaluations. How does incongruence on policy issues impact affective evaluations of mainstream political parties and their leaders? We tackle this question by analysing data from the British Election Study collected ahead of the 2019 UK General Election using an instrumental variable approach. Consistent with our expectations, we find that voter–party incongruence has a significant causal impact on affective evaluations. Perceived representational gaps between party and voter drive negative evaluations of the in-party and positive evaluations of the opposition, thus lowering affective polarisation overall. The results offer a more nuanced perspective on the role of ideological conflict in driving affective polarisation.

Does the Public Hold Governors Accountable for Policy Outcomes?

What are the origins of gubernatorial popularity? Past studies debate whether governors are substantively evaluated based on their performance in office, with some arguing that the origins of approval may be idiosyncratic to particular governors. These studies typically consider gubernatorial approval in a handful of states or patterns of approval in the aggregate. We improve on this research by drawing on a richer data source: the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We consider both individual-level and state-level explanations of gubernatorial popularity with a sample of over 300,000 respondents across the 50 states from 2006 to 2018. We explore how party, policy outcomes, and government performance shape levels of gubernatorial approval. We show that people evaluate governors based on the ideological direction of policy outcomes in the states. When state policy outcomes align with their ideological preferences, people report higher levels of approval for the job performance of their governor. We also confirm the importance of party and state economic performance for gubernatorial approval.

Levels of Conceptualization and Municipal Politics: Replication in a New Context

Since Angus Campbell and colleagues introduced the Levels of Conceptualization (LoC) framework as a measure of political sophistication, only a very small number of scholars have applied this approach to understanding how electors view political actors. In 2008, Michael Lewis-Beck and colleagues replicated this foundational study and found similar results using much more recent data on American national elections. In this brief research report, we replicate the work of Lewis-Beck and colleagues in the Canadian municipal context. Using survey data from the Canadian Municipal Election Study, we make use of open-ended responses about attitudes towards mayoral candidates to conduct a qualitative examination of the manner in which survey respondents from eight Canadian cities view mayoral candidates. Despite the relative dearth of ideological cues at the local level, we nevertheless find that a noteworthy portion of the electorate views candidates in ideological terms. Like previous work on the subject, we find that high levels of conceptualization are positively associated with turnout, education, political knowledge, and ‘political involvement’.