Shadow of the past
Helping Hands: Race, Neighborhood Context, and Reluctance in Providing Job-Finding Assistance
Lindsay Hamm & Steve McDonald
Sociological Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In order to explain persistent racial inequality, researchers have posited that black Americans receive fewer job benefits from their social networks because of their reluctance to provide assistance to others who are looking for work. We test this idea on a national scale using geo-coded data from the General Social Survey. Our results show that, on average, blacks offer more frequent job-finding assistance to their friends than do whites. However, additional analyses reveal that race-based job-finding assistance is context dependent, as blacks living in areas characterized by concentrated black poverty have lower odds of helping others search for jobs than members of other races and in other community contexts.
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Javier Rodriguez et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Excess mortality in marginalized populations could be both a cause and an effect of political processes. We estimate the impact of mortality differentials between blacks and whites from 1970 to 2004 on the racial composition of the electorate in the US general election of 2004 and in close statewide elections during the study period. We analyze 73 million US deaths from the Multiple Cause of Death files to calculate: (1) Total excess deaths among blacks between 1970 and 2004, (2) total hypothetical survivors to 2004, (3) the probability that survivors would have turned out to vote in 2004, (4) total black votes lost in 2004, and (5) total black votes lost by each presidential candidate. We estimate 2.7 million excess black deaths between 1970 and 2004. Of those, 1.9 million would have survived until 2004, of which over 1.7 million would have been of voting-age. We estimate that 1 million black votes were lost in 2004; of these, 900,000 votes were lost by the defeated Democratic presidential nominee. We find that many close state-level elections over the study period would likely have had different outcomes if voting age blacks had the mortality profiles of whites. US black voting rights are also eroded through felony disenfranchisement laws and other measures that dampen the voice of the US black electorate. Systematic disenfranchisement by population group yields an electorate that is unrepresentative of the full interests of the citizenry and affects the chance that elected officials have mandates to eliminate health inequality.
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Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality
David Chae et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2015
Abstract:
Racial disparities in health are well-documented and represent a significant public health concern in the US. Racism-related factors contribute to poorer health and higher mortality rates among Blacks compared to other racial groups. However, methods to measure racism and monitor its associations with health at the population-level have remained elusive. In this study, we investigated the utility of a previously developed Internet search-based proxy of area racism as a predictor of Black mortality rates. Area racism was the proportion of Google searches containing the "N-word" in 196 designated market areas (DMAs). Negative binomial regression models were specified taking into account individual age, sex, year of death, and Census region and adjusted to the 2000 US standard population to examine the association between area racism and Black mortality rates, which were derived from death certificates and mid-year population counts collated by the National Center for Health Statistics (2004-2009). DMAs characterized by a one standard deviation greater level of area racism were associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause Black mortality rate, equivalent to over 30,000 deaths annually. The magnitude of this effect was attenuated to 5.7% after adjustment for DMA-level demographic and Black socioeconomic covariates. A model controlling for the White mortality rate was used to further adjust for unmeasured confounders that influence mortality overall in a geographic area, and to examine Black-White disparities in the mortality rate. Area racism remained significantly associated with the all-cause Black mortality rate (mortality rate ratio = 1.036; 95% confidence interval = 1.015, 1.057; p = 0.001). Models further examining cause-specific Black mortality rates revealed significant associations with heart disease, cancer, and stroke. These findings are congruent with studies documenting the deleterious impact of racism on health among Blacks. Our study contributes to evidence that racism shapes patterns in mortality and generates racial disparities in health.
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Bad Credit and Intergroup Differences in Loan Denial Rates
Sheila Ards et al.
Review of Black Political Economy, June 2015, Pages 19-34
Abstract:
Research has found wide disparities in loan denial rates among different racial/ethnic groups. Two competing explanations for these gaps arise. One argument is that these disparities result from underlying racial disparities in credit worthiness. A competing view is that the disparities arise from a pattern of racial discrimination among mortgage lenders. This paper adopts a stratification economics approach to evaluate these competing claims. Using Freddie Mac's Consumer Credit Survey dataset, we test the hypothesis that measures of discrimination disappear when one accounts for racial differences in credit scores. A novel contribution of the paper, built upon the premise that inter-group inequalities sustain themselves through self-fulfilling mechanisms, is to test the hypothesis that loan denials explain misperceptions of credit worthiness. We demonstrate that one cause of the appearance of poor credit risk among black applicants is that blacks with good credit risk underestimate their credit worthiness and apply for loans in lower numbers. Our findings suggest that even nondiscriminatory lending behavior has the unintended effect of screening out low-risk blacks and thereby yields higher denial rates among blacks. This in turn confirms prior beliefs about the poor credit of average black applicants. Much, but not all, of the racial disparity in loan outcomes can be explained by racial differences in credit scores and the resulting racial disparity in loan outcomes explains much of the racial difference in false perceptions about bad credit. Thus, a possible self-fulfilling mechanism remains within the credit market that perpetuates views about black bad credit.
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The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income-Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records
Eitan Hersh & Clayton Nall
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why does the relationship between income and partisanship vary across U.S. regions? Some answers to this question have focused on economic context (in poorer environments, economics is more salient), whereas others have focused on racial context (in racially diverse areas, richer voters oppose the party favoring redistribution). Using 73 million geocoded registration records and 185,000 geocoded precinct returns, we examine income-based voting across local areas. We show that the political geography of income-based voting is inextricably tied to racial context, and only marginally explained by economic context. Within homogeneously nonblack localities, contextual income has minimal bearing on the income-party relationship. The correlation between income and partisanship is strong in heavily black areas of the Old South and other areas with a history of racialized poverty, but weaker elsewhere, including in urbanized areas of the South. The results demonstrate that the geography of income-based voting is inseparable from racial context.
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A Tale of "Two Souths": White Voting Behavior in Contemporary Southern Elections
Seth McKee & Melanie Springer
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: We empirically demonstrate that the long-held political distinction between the Deep South and the Peripheral South persists to this day.
Methods: Data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) are employed in logistic regression models to assess differences in the likelihood of voting Republican among Deep and Peripheral South whites in gubernatorial, senatorial, and presidential contests. Additionally, recent data on the partisan and racial composition of various elective offices document the sharp decline in Democratic officeholders.
Results: In contemporary Southern elections, Deep South whites, after controlling for several factors such as partisanship, ideology, religion, and income, are consistently and significantly more likely to vote Republican than their Peripheral South peers.
Conclusions: Race remains the most salient issue in Southern politics and it structures the alignment of whites and blacks into opposing parties. Because of this, whites are more Republican in their voting behavior in the more culturally conservative subregion where the proportion of African Americans is higher: the Deep South. Dixie is now dominated by the GOP, and especially in the Deep South, with grim representational implications for African Americans because they are no longer part of coalitional majorities at virtually every level of governance.
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Joshua Bloom
American Sociological Review, April 2015, Pages 391-415
Abstract:
Political opportunity theory has proven extremely generative, highlighting the importance of macro-structural shifts in making established authorities vulnerable to insurgent challenge. But as critics point out, political opportunity theory flattens both culture and agency, and has fared poorly in explaining the timing of insurgency. Re-theorizing opportunity as leveraged by particular practices, rather than independently conferring to groups, redresses these limits, revealing the proximate causes of mobilization and influence. For a strategic test, this article revisits the forging ground of opportunity theory. Why did President Harry S. Truman, initially an apologist for the slow pace of racial reform in 1945-46, suddenly become an avid advocate of civil rights? Opportunity scholars argue that macro-structural forces caused Truman to advocate civil rights, generating the opportunity for insurgency by blacks as a group. But event structure analysis reveals how Black Anti-colonialist practices leveraged opportunities afforded by the earlier Progressive Challenge to compel Truman to adopt civil rights advocacy. Civil rights advocacy, in turn, allowed Truman to repress Black Anti-colonialist practices, even while setting the stage for the Civil Rights Movement to come. Different forms of insurgent practice leveraged opportunities created by different institutional cleavages; the same opportunities did not advantage all insurgency by a social group.
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Property Law as Labor Control in the Postbellum South
Brian Sawers
Law and History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 1860, unfenced land across the South was open to the public. No state criminalized trespass, and the range was closed in only part of one county. Elsewhere, some states had closed the range, but most unfenced land in the United States was open to the wanderer. In the former Confederacy, fresh elections were held in 1865, and legislatures moved quickly to criminalize trespass, restrict hunting and fishing, and close the range.
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Roland Neil & Jason Carmichael
Sociological Inquiry, May 2015, Pages 309-332
Abstract:
Recent scholarship has indicated that political and ethnic threat theories - which maintain that the use of prison is not only determined by the extent of crime in society but also by various features related to power, ideology, and access to resources - provide powerful accounts as to why the use of punishment varies within and between societies. However, no study to date has tested these theories within Canada, a country in which such theories are quite plausible. This study begins to fill this void by assessing these theoretical claims using a pooled time series analysis of the variation in imprisonment rates across Canadian provinces from the years 2001 to 2010. After accounting for several measures including charge rates, the results show that Canadian incarceration rates are largely driven by ethnic threat. The size of the Aboriginal and visible minority populations across each province are the most significant determinants of the variation in punishment. Furthermore, we find a nonlinear relationship consistent with a political version of the threat hypothesis. Results, however, do not support political accounts which stress the power of right-wing parties or a conservative public.
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Decomposing the Effect of Crime on Population Changes
Andrew Foote
Demography, April 2015, Pages 705-728
Abstract:
This article estimates the effect of crime on migration rates for counties in U.S. metropolitan areas and makes three contributions to the literature. First, I use administrative data on migration flows between counties, which gives me more precise estimates of population changes than data used in previous studies. Second, I am able to decompose net population changes into gross migration flows in order to identify how individuals respond to crime rate changes. Finally, I include county-level trends so that my identification comes from shocks away from the trend. I find effects that are one-fiftieth the size of the most prominent estimate in the literature; and although the long-run effects are somewhat larger, they are still only approximately one-twentieth as large. I also find that responses to crime rates differ by subgroups, and that increases in crime cause white households to leave the county, with effects almost 10 times as large as for black households.
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Neighborhood Foreclosures, Racial/Ethnic Transitions, and Residential Segregation
Matthew Hall, Kyle Crowder & Amy Spring
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we use data on virtually all foreclosure events between 2005 and 2009 to calculate neighborhood foreclosure rates for nearly all block groups in the United States to assess the impact of housing foreclosures on neighborhood racial/ethnic change and on broader patterns of racial residential segregation. We find that the foreclosure crisis was patterned strongly along racial lines: black, Latino, and racially integrated neighborhoods had exceptionally high foreclosure rates. Multilevel models of racial/ethnic change reveal that foreclosure concentrations were linked to declining shares of whites and expanding shares of black and Latino residents. Results further suggest that these compositional shifts were driven by both white population loss and minority growth, especially from racially mixed settings with high foreclosure rates. To explore the impact of these racially selective migration streams on patterns of residential segregation, we simulate racial segregation assuming that foreclosure rates remained at their 2005 levels throughout the crisis period. Our simulations suggest that the foreclosure crisis increased racial segregation between blacks and whites by 1.1 dissimilarity points, and between Latinos and whites by 2.2 dissimilarity points.
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Is Timing Everything? Race, Homeownership, and Net Worth in the Tumultuous 2000s
Sandra Newman
Real Estate Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate how net worth was affected among low- and moderate-income households who became first-time homebuyers at different points during the volatile 2000s. We address selection using propensity score matching and estimating difference-in-difference models, and use quantile regressions to account for the skew in net worth outcomes. Results highlight the significance of race in the relationship between first-time homebuying and net worth during the decade. Although timing was critical to the short-term trajectory of net worth for whites, total net worth declines for black first-time homebuyers regardless of economic climate. The most dramatic differences between black and white new homebuyers is their neighborhood locations, with blacks purchasing in predominantly black neighborhoods with lower housing prices and price appreciation, and lower and declining rates of homeownership.
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Race, Trust, and Return Migration: The Political Drivers of Post-disaster Resettlement
Gina Yannitell Reinhardt
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
After several disasters in the United States, the return-migration rate of blacks to post-disaster areas has been lower than that of other races. Does this pattern have a political explanation? I investigate political trust as the causal mechanism through which race affects people's decisions of where to live after forced evacuation. After accounting for economic, demographic, and sociological influences on return migration, I use mediation analysis to find that political trust acts as a mediator between race and return migration. I am thus able to explain the salience of race to the return-migration decision: race does not have a direct effect on return migration but rather works through the causal mechanism of political trust to determine return-migration decisions. As blacks are more likely to have low levels of political trust, and those with lower political trust are less likely to return, blacks are less likely to return to post-disaster areas.
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Protest Campaigns and Movement Success: Desegregating the U.S. South in the Early 1960s
Michael Biggs & Kenneth Andrews
American Sociological Review, April 2015, Pages 416-443
Abstract:
Can protest bring about social change? Although scholarship on the consequences of social movements has grown dramatically, our understanding of protest influence is limited; several recent studies have failed to detect any positive effect. We investigate sit-in protest by black college students in the U.S. South in 1960, which targeted segregated lunch counters. An original dataset of 334 cities enables us to assess the effect of protest while considering the factors that generate protest itself - including local movement infrastructure, supportive political environments, and favorable economic conditions. We find that sit-in protest greatly increased the probability of desegregation, as did protest in nearby cities. Over time, desegregation in one city raised the probability of desegregation nearby. In addition, desegregation tended to occur where opposition was weak, political conditions were favorable, and the movement's constituency had economic leverage.