Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part One: Historical Foundations -- Chapter 1. Republican Ideology in Early America -- Chapter 2. An Exclusive Vision of Virtue and Citizenship -- Chapter 3. Militias and the Institutionalization of Ascriptive Republicanism -- Chapter 4. Cultural Transmission -- Part Two: The Origins and Worldview of the NRA -- Chapter 5. The Emergence of the NRA -- Chapter 6. An Organization of White Men -- Chapter 7. Political Virtue -- Chapter 8. Political Corruption -- Chapter 9. The NRA's Theory of Democracy -- Part Three: Ascriptive Republicanism in Contemporary White Public Opinion -- Chapter 10. Ascriptive Republicanism and White Gun Attitudes Today -- Chapter 11. From "Stand Your Ground" to "Stand Back and Stand By" -- Conclusion. Democratic Stability in Peril -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index.

Abstract
Scholars have associated gun culture with liberal individualism, but this is inconsistent with participants' emphasis on political duty and obligation, the dominance of White men in this space, and the centrality of negative racial and gender priors. I argue that militarism – the valorization of firearms as a sign of good citizenship – is a constitutive part of one dimension of American identity which I call "ascriptive martial republicanism," which combines the ideal of armed service with White male supremacy. I trace the origins of this conception of Americanism to the American Revolution and the military institutions that developed in the early republic. As a product of the 19th century military establishment, the National Rifle Association (NRA) brought this ideology into the 21st century, long after government abandoned it under pressure from the progressive movements of the 1960s. Through its political and legal advocacy, the group succeeded in making it once again part of the country's institutional core via Supreme Court decisions. This new institutional regime represents a threat not only to the multicultural ethos but to democratic stability.

This study initiates a methodological critique of the state‐level immigration policy literature through the lens of the racial threat and group power perspectives. First, I highlight the conceptual problems related to the application of such theories to legislature‐level data analysis. Next, I demonstrate the methodological and analytical problems that raise concerns about ad hoc theorizing in this field. Using counts of hostile and welcoming immigration legislation (2005–2011), I demonstrate that outgroup size measures correlate positively with both dependent variables while measures of population growth rate yield null results unless used on their own. These results suggest that the use of legislature‐level models with demographic indicators does not allow us to gain a clear understanding of whether and how population dynamics influence immigration policymaking. Based on these findings, I recommend that when using demographic indicators as key explanatory variables, researchers provide evidence of result consistency across multiple model specifications and also test the models with both hostile and inclusive policy variables. Such protocols would help avoid ad hoc theorizing.