Rewiring Linked Fate: Bringing Back History, Agency, and Power

Linked fate, the concept introduced by Dawson almost three decades ago, reoriented the study of racism and political behavior in the United States. The scholarship traditionally had focused on the racial psychology of whites and how racism seeps into their political views and actions. Dawson proposed the Black utility heuristic theory and linked fate, its associated measure, to investigate the political behavior of Blacks, the minority group most harmed by racism. Since then, linked fate has become a ubiquitous variable of interest in research on minority group politics. Yet the research program around linked fate is due for some extension. Most studies gloss over the fact that the Black utility heuristic theory is historically and socially conditional. We call for bringing elite-level agency and group-level social practices back into the literature to clarify the macro- and meso-level conditions under which a group’s racial status translates into linked fate at the individual level. Greater inquiry into these dynamics is not only warranted but also has broad implications for the research on racial and ethnic politics.

Reconsidering Group Interests

This paper aims to explore attitudes toward immigration among two non-White groups, Asian Americans and Black Americans. For more than a decade, individuals from Asia have comprised the majority of immigrants entering the United States each year. Today, the majority of the Asian American U.S. population remains foreign-born. Yet using data collected from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey and the 2016 National Asian American Survey—a time period marked by high levels of saliency with regard to immigration issues—we find that Black Americans, the majority of whom are U.S.-born, exhibit even more progressive attitudes towards immigration, both legal and undocumented, than mostly foreign-born Asian Americans. Our research challenges economic and material theories related to immigration attitudes and suggests that political connections to and “linked fate” with other minorities better explain why Black Americans exhibit more progressive attitudes toward immigration than Asian Americans.

Messaging “en Español”: The Impact of Spanish Language on Linked Fate Among Bilingual Latinos

While the number of U.S. residents who speak non-English languages at home is on the rise, little is known about the sociopolitical implications of exposure to minority languages among multilingual speakers in the United States. This study analyzes whether exposure to Spanish, a U.S. minority language, impacts perceptions of linked fate among bilingual Latinos, and if so, whether the consumption of ethnic media amplifies this effect. Through a population-based survey experiment among bilingual Latinos, this study finds that Latinos who are exposed to content in Spanish are more likely to report in-group linked fate than their counterparts exposed to the same message in English. Moreover, these effects are stronger among consumers of Spanish-language news. This study contributes to our understanding of the role of minority languages and ethnic media on pan-ethnic identities and highlights the importance of the growing linguistic diversity in the United States.

From Inter-Racial Solidarity to Action: Minority Linked Fate and African American, Latina/o, and Asian American Political Participation

Recent literature in race, ethnicity, and politics has assessed how minority linked fate, defined as “the idea that ethnoracial minorities might share a sense of commonality that extends beyond their particular ethnoracial group to other ethnoracial groups (Gershon et al., in Politics Groups Identities 7(3):642–653, 2019),” shapes attitudes toward descriptive representation and support for coalition building. However, scholarship has yet to examine the influence of minority linked fate on political participation. We argue that similar to those who view the interests of co-ethnics as a proxy for their individual interests, Latina/os, Asian Americans, and African Americans who express linked fate with a more expansive minority community are more likely to take political action. This political participation results from senses of obligation to and solidarity with other racial minorities outside of their own. Results from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey show that controlling for conventional measures of linked fate, minority linked fate is associated primarily with more system-challenging modes of political activity for Latina/os, Asian Americans, and African Americans. We conclude by positioning minority linked fate as a complementary heuristic to traditional notions of intra-racial linked fate and note how shared inter-racial linked fate informs our understanding of recent political activism among people of color.

Linked Fate and Economic Optimism

In this chapter, I examine a key step of heuristic theory. That step is the perception in a person’s mind that her fate is linked to that of a larger group. I review some previous work on linked fate, and argue that it is a useful concept for understanding a wide range of countries and groups. I report results from a survey of Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Ethnic inequality and regional inequality provide good reason for believing that group members’ interests are tied together, and I show that many individual demographics do not do a good job of predicting who feels linked fate, while group-level variation, especially past experiences of discrimination, do shape linked fate. One key individual level variable that does predict linked fate is regional identity, which raises the salience of the regional cleavage.

Uncertainty, Labor Markets, and Group Heuristics

In this chapter, I examine the effect of uncertainty on the relationship between ethnic and regional incomes, linked fate, and attitudes toward redistribution. Uncertainty is a key ingredient in heuristic theory, as heuristics for learning about future interests are unnecessary where future interests are certain. I test the argument using data from a survey of Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Slovak data from the European Social Survey, and the British Household Panel Survey.

Within-Group Inequality, Prediction, and the Value of Heuristics

In this chapter, I argue that groups with greater within-group variation in income are less useful as predictors of future incomes for group members. This implies that members of groups with higher levels of within-group inequality should express lower levels of linked fate and display a lower correlation between the mean group income and attitudes toward redistribution. I test this argument by examining a survey of Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, followed by a global sample from the World Values Survey. I close by returning to the three-country survey to show that within-region inequality does not seem to reduce regional identity.