Political race
Hatred and Profits: Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan
Roland Fryer & Steven Levitt
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we analyze the 1920s Klan, those who joined it, and its social and political impact, by combining a wide range of archival data sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S censuses. We find that individuals who joined the Klan in some cities were more educated and more likely to hold professional jobs than the typical American. Surprisingly, we find little evidence that the Klan had an effect on black or foreign-born residential mobility or vote totals. Rather than a terrorist organization, the 1920s Klan is best described as social organization with a wildly successful multi-level marketing structure fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.
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Obama and 2012: Still a Racial Cost to Pay?
Charles Tien, Richard Nadeau & Michael Lewis-Beck
PS: Political Science & Politics, October 2012, Pages 591-595
Abstract:
Will President Obama lose votes in 2012 because of racial prejudice? For 2008, we estimated, via a carefully controlled, national survey-based study, that on balance he lost about five percentage points in popular vote share due to intolerance for his race on the part of some voters. What about 2012? There are at least three possibilities: (1) the presidency has become postracial, and the vote will register no racial cost; (2) intolerance has increased, and the vote will register an increased racial cost; and (3) intolerance has decreased, and the vote will register a decreased racial cost. Our evidence, drawn from an analysis comparable to that carried out for 2008, suggests Obama will pay a racial cost of three percentage points in popular vote share. In other words, his candidacy will experience a decrease in racial cost, if a small one. In 2008, this racial cost denied Obama a landslide victory. In the context of a closer election in 2012, this persistent racial cost, even smaller in size, could perhaps cost him his reelection.
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Living the Dream: Barack Obama and Blacks' Changing Perceptions of the American Dream
Christopher Timothy Stout & Danvy Le
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: Our objective is to examine whether positive symbols of progress for the black community, such as Obama's election as president, increase black optimism in the American Dream.
Method: Logit regression and ordered logit regression with predicted probabilities and odds ratios.
Results: Using several surveys conducted between 1987 and 2010, we show that blacks are much more optimistic about the American Dream after Obama is elected to the White House, in spite of their worsening economic status.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that positive symbols of progress are a better gauge of the American Dream for blacks than objective economic indicators. Moreover, previous racial gaps in beliefs in the American Dream may be attributed to lack of black representation at high levels of government, rather than solely based on differences in socioeconomic standing.
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Reassessing the Unequal Representation of Latinos and African Americans
Scott Clifford
Journal of Politics, July 2012, Pages 903-916
Abstract:
Recent research has adopted a proximity approach to measuring unequal representation, focusing on the ideological distance between citizen and legislator. This approach has produced evidence that Latinos and African Americans receive unequal representation relative to whites. In this article, I argue that work employing the proximity approach conflates two conceptual standards of equal representation, leading to ambiguous results. I clarify these conceptual standards and reevaluate analyses from two previous articles. My results confirm previous findings that Latinos and African Americans are ideologically further from their Representatives than whites. However, my analyses uncover no evidence that Representatives place greater weight on the views of white constituents. This seeming contradiction arises from minorities tending to reside in more ideologically diverse districts. These findings emphasize the importance of conceptual clarity and the role of heterogeneity in studies of unequal representation.
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James Avery & Jeffrey Fine
Political Behavior, September 2012, Pages 391-410
Abstract:
We make the case for why the racial threat hypothesis should characterize the relationship between states' racial composition, whites' racial attitudes, and black representation in the United States Senate. Consistent with this claim, we find that senators from states with larger percentages of African-Americans among the electorate and more racially conservative preferences among whites provide worse representation of black interests in the Senate than their counterparts. We also apply theories of congressional cross-pressures in considering how senator partisanship and region moderate the effect of white racial attitudes on black representation. Finally, consistent with the racial threat hypothesis, we show that the negative effect of white racial attitudes on the quality of black representation is stronger when state unemployment rates are higher.
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Latinos and the Skin Color Paradox: Skin Color, National Origin, and Political Attitudes
James Faught & Margaret Hunter
Sociological Quarterly, Autumn 2012, Pages 676-701
Abstract:
For African Americans and Latinos, skin color is a significant predictor of many social and economic stratification variables including income, education, housing, occupational status, spousal status, poverty rates, criminal justice sentencing, and rates of depression. Given these patterns, some scholars have surprisingly found that skin color is not a significant predictor of many political attitudes for African Americans, and called this phenomenon the "skin color paradox." This article investigates the role of skin color, race, and national origin in predicting political marginality and political commonality among Latinos. The models suggest that skin color is not a significant predictor of political attitudes, consistent with the skin color paradox theory but that national origin does predict some political attitudes.
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Social Class Identification Among Black Americans: Trends and Determinants, 1974-2010
Matthew Hunt & Rashawn Ray
American Behavioral Scientist, November 2012, Pages 1462-1480
Abstract:
Although much research documents the growth of a "professional middle class" among African Americans over the past several decades, we know comparatively little about how Blacks see themselves in social class terms, and whether this has changed over time. In the current study, we use data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Surveys to analyze trends in, and the determinants of, Blacks' social class identifications (SCI) over the past four decades. Our results show that Blacks' tendency to identify as "middle class" has increased in concert with Blacks' socioeconomic status (SES) gains since the 1970s. Regarding the determinants of SCI, education and household income appear more consequential than occupational prestige and self-employment in shaping Blacks' self-reports of their own class positions. Finally, we see little evidence of change over time in the relationship between various SES characteristics and SCI, with one exception: Self-employment has become a more potent predictor of Blacks' SCI over the past several decades. Our results provide an important update to our knowledge of the dynamics of SCI among Black Americans. They also raise important questions for future research on the relationship between, and relative impact of, "race" and "class" in shaping Blacks' identities and their orientations toward American society.
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The Next Link in the Chain Reaction: Symbolic Racism and Obama's Religious Affiliation
Angie Maxwell, Pearl Ford Dowe & Todd Shields
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: During the 2008 presidential election, questions about Barack Obama's religious affiliations spread rapidly over the Internet and became a regular story in the national news. Despite Obama's repeated testimony that he is a Christian, surveys indicated that a sizeable portion of the public believed that he was a Muslim, while others indicated that they were "unsure" of his religious allegiances. We evaluate the extent to which racial attitudes played a role in how the public viewed Obama's religious affiliations.
Methods: We used nationally representative surveys conducted by the Pew Foundation and a state-level survey conducted in Arkansas.
Results: Our findings suggest that attitudes about Obama's religious affiliation were significantly influenced by symbolic racism.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that the American public dialogue about racial politics has evolved in recent years to include religious denominations.
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Perceiving Ethnic Diversity on Campus: Group Differences in Attention to Hierarchical Representation
Kevin Binning & Miguel Unzueta
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A field study tested whether Asian and White students use different criteria when judging the racial and ethnic diversity of their university. The university under study had roughly equal numbers of Asians and Whites, but Asians were heavily concentrated in the student body and had relatively low numbers in high-status university positions (the faculty and administration). Results showed that, as long as the student body was deemed diverse, the status asymmetry did not prevent Whites from regarding their university as diverse or from opposing efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on campus. Asians, by contrast, were attentive to the status asymmetry: they incorporated faculty/administrative diversity into their judgments of the university and saw diversity in the student body as a reason to increase diversity in high-status positions. The results suggest that people perceive and support diversity in ways that align with the interests of their ethnic in-groups.
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Nolan León Cabrera
Race Ethnicity and Education, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research critically examines racial views and experiences of 12 white men in a single higher education institution via semi-structured interviews. Participants tended to utilize individualized definitions of racism and experience high levels of racial segregation in both their pre-college and college environments. This corresponded to participants seeing little evidence of racism, minimizing the power of contemporary racism, and framing whites as the true victims of multiculturalism (i.e. ‘reverse racism'). This sense of racial victimization corresponded to the participants blaming racial minorities for racial antagonism (both on campus and society as a whole), which cyclically served to rationalize the persistence of segregated, white campus subenvironments. Within these ethnic enclaves, the participants reported minimal changes in their racial views since entering college with the exception of an enhanced sense of ‘reverse racism,' and this cycle of racial privilege begetting racial privilege was especially pronounced within the fraternity system.
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J.A. Zumoff
Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Fall 2012, Pages 53-89
"During the Great Depression, the Communist Party (CP) of the United States was in the forefront of denouncing anti-black racism and discrimination...In the South, communists organized black and white workers and sharecroppers and bravely fought against Jim Crow racism and capitalist oppression. In the urban North, black and white communists fought against eviction and for relief. Communists fought against the frame-up of the Scottsboro Boys, exposing and fighting Jim Crow 'lynch law justice.' Despite this work in the 1930s, the CP's approach to what it called the "Negro question" during the first decade of its existence would not indicate the likelihood of such a development. Upon its founding in 1919, the CP had one black member, and throughout the 1920s it probably counted less than 100 black members out of a total membership of at least 15,000. In 1929, it still had no more than 300 black members...Using sources from Comintern and other archives, this article examines the evolution of the communist position on the American Negro question from the formation of the communist movement in 1919 through 1924, emphasizing the interaction of a trinity of historical agents in the early communist movement. First, it examines the history and views of the early communist leadership in the United States, which was almost entirely white and largely indifferent to the Negro question. Second, it examines the first black communists who struggled to make the CP address black oppression. Finally, it examines the intervention of the leadership of the Comintern into the American CP to make its leadership understand the importance of the Negro question."
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Jason Shelton & Anthony Greene
American Behavioral Scientist, November 2012, Pages 1481-1508
Abstract:
Does class position influence Blacks' beliefs about the causes of poverty and racial inequality? Prior research has established that Blacks are more structural in orientation than Whites. However, existing studies have not adequately assessed the role that class position plays in shaping intraracial attitudinal differences among Blacks. Both multivariate and trend analyses of nearly four decades of data from the Houston Area Survey indicate that privileged Blacks often sharply differ from disadvantaged Blacks and privileged Whites across a range of racially specific and racially neutral individualistic and structural attributions. The results of this study directly concern ideological tensions within the Black community over whether racism and/or personal merit most strongly influences a Black person's prospects for success.
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Does the Political Environment Matter? Arab-American Representation and September 11th
Jeffrey Fine & Nadia Aziz
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: Studies of minority representation customarily focus on groups whose social position remains steady over the time period in question. We consider whether and how Arab-American representation shifted following September 11th as the group's social status changed rapidly.
Methods: We analyze the determinants of Senate voting alongside the Arab-American Institute from 2000 to 2008. We employ ordinary least square (OLS) regression models that account for the time series cross-sectional (TSCS) nature of our panel data.
Results: Our findings suggest that Arab-American representation significantly declined in the wake of September 11th, both among Democratic and Republican senators. As the political environment improved over time, representation slowly rose in subsequent years.
Conclusions: We show that the quality of Arab-American representation declined after September 11th despite no significant change in either their size or in electoral outcomes. We also show that broad theories of minority representation apply to even small ethnic groups, as the determinants of Arab-American representation parallel those of African Americans and Latinos.
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People, Race and Place: American Support for Person- and Place-based Urban Policy, 1973-2008
Michael Manville
Urban Studies, November 2012, Pages 3101-3119
Abstract:
This article examines an idea that is often asserted but rarely tested: that Americans associate big cities with African Americans and that, as a result, racial attitudes influence support for urban policy. Thirty-five years of public opinion data show that cities are in fact a ‘racialised' concept, and that the relationship between racial attitudes and support for place-based urban policy is as large as that between racial attitudes and support for person-based assistance to the poor. The sources of these racial associations, however, appear to differ. Attitudes about race and cities correlate more closely with attitudes about crime, while attitudes about race and person-based redistribution correlate more with opposition to residential integration. Lastly, the evidence shows that even Americans who do not hold prejudiced views associate urban problems with African Americans, suggesting that social policy, be it person- or place-based, will always need to contend with racial attitudes.
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Measuring Ethnic Voting: Do Proportional Electoral Laws Politicize Ethnicity?
John Huber
American Journal of Political Science, October 2012, Pages 986-1001
Abstract:
I develop four related measures of the "ethnicization" of electoral behavior. Each measure increases as ethnic identity becomes more central to vote choice, but the measures differ along two theoretical dimensions. The first dimension contrasts a group-based perspective (which focuses on cohesion in the voting patterns of group members) with a party-based perspective (which focuses on the composition of groups supporting political parties). The second dimension contrasts a fractionalization perspective (which assumes that more groups or parties cause more problems) with a polarization perspective (which assumes that problems are greatest when there are two equal-sized groups or parties). Using survey data to implement the measures in 43 countries, the article shows that proportional electoral laws are associated with lower levels of ethnicization - the opposite of what is widely assumed. I argue that the lower levels of ethnicization in PR systems should be unsurprising.
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Joshua Dyck
Political Research Quarterly, September 2012, Pages 615-628
Abstract:
Current research has argued that direct legislation makes democracies better by helping to encourage better democratic citizenship. In this study, the author tests whether these effects are conditional on the diversity of the electorate. Theoretically, he argues that policy making by majority rule will create conflict because of the perceived threat of large numerical minorities by majority groups. The author hypothesizes that in areas of greater diversity, democratic citizenship socialization effects can be mitigated, especially as it relates to trusting strangers. Using pooled data from the American National Election Study, the author demonstrates the diversity conditional effects of ballot initiative context on generalized trust.
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Beyond Black and White: Color and Mortality in Post Reconstruction Era North Carolina
Tiffany Green & Tod Hamilton
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
A growing empirical literature in economics and sociology documents the existence of differences in social and economic outcomes between mixed-race blacks and other blacks. However, few researchers have considered whether the advantages associated with mixed-race status may have also translated into differences in mortality outcomes between subgroups of blacks and how both groups compared to whites. We employ previously untapped 1880 North Carolina Mortality census records in conjunction with data from the 1880 North Carolina Population Census to examine whether mulatto, or mixed-race blacks may have experienced mortality advantages over to their colored, or non-mixed race counterparts. For men between the ages of 20-44, estimates demonstrate that all black males are more likely than whites to die. Although our results indicate that there are no statistically significant differences in mortality between mulatto and colored blacks, there are some indications that mulatto males may have enjoyed a slight mortality advantage compared to their colored counterparts. However, we find a substantial mortality advantage associated with mixed-race status among women. These findings indicate that mixed-race women, rather than men, may have accrued any mortality advantages associated with color and white ancestry.