Suchergebnisse

Understanding the factors that lead Americans to racialize putatively race-neutral policies is increasingly important in a diversifying society. This paper focuses on the case of disaster relief for Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. I draw on a framework of racial and ethnic subordination with two dimensions: inferiority–superiority, operationalized by skin color, and foreignness–Americanness, operationalized by language. I conduct a nationally representative survey experiment that varies the skin tone (light or dark) and language (English or Spanish) of otherwise similar actors who portray hurricane victims. The results suggest that two stigmatized attributes, dark skin and foreign language, do not always render an individual "doubly stigmatized." Instead, for an already racialized group like Puerto Ricans, perceived foreignness may offset Americans' stereotypes about the cultural pathologies of a racial underclass. Therefore, this paper underscores the importance of a multidimensional and intersectional approach to the study of racial and ethnic politics.

Abstract
Researchers are often interested in whether discrimination on the basis of racial cues persists above and beyond discrimination on the basis of nonracial attributes that decision makers—e.g., employers and legislators—infer from such cues. We show that existing audit experiments may be unable to parse these mechanisms because of an asymmetry in when decision makers are exposed to cues of race and additional signals intended to rule out discrimination due to other attributes. For example, email audit experiments typically cue race via the name in the email address, at which point legislators can choose to open the email, but cue other attributes in the body of the email, which decision makers can be exposed to only after opening the email. We derive the bias resulting from this asymmetry and then propose two distinct solutions for email audit experiments. The first exposes decision makers to all cues before the decision to open. The second crafts the email to ensure no discrimination in opening and then exposes decision makers to all cues in the body of the email after opening. This second solution works without measures of opening, but can be improved when researchers do measure opening, even if with error.

AbstractHow do legislators respond to coethnic and cominority constituents? We conduct an audit study of all state legislators to explore white legislators' responsiveness to different minority groups and minority group legislators' responsiveness to each other. Black and Latino Americans currently make up about one-third of the overall U.S. population and an even larger share of some state populations. In light of this growing diversification of the American electorate, legislators may have incentives to appeal to a broad racial constituency. In our experiment, state legislators are randomly assigned to receive an email from a white, Black, or Latino constituent. Our findings suggest a lack of legislators' discrimination, on average, against Black relative to white constituents. Instead, we find that all legislators, on average, respond more to both white and Black constituents relative to Latinos. The evidence suggests that Black legislators do not exhibit coethnic solidarity toward their Black constituents or cominority solidarity toward their Latino constituents; however, Latinos do exhibit coethnic and cominority solidarity (though there are too few Latino legislators to definitively establish this claim). We also estimate effects among white legislators by party and racial composition of districts in order to provide suggestive evidence for white legislators' intrinsic vs. strategic motivations.

This article traces the development of the study of race and class in American political behavior. It starts by challenging the American exceptionalism thesis, particularly its premises regarding the diminutive role of social class and the absence of serious discussions about race. It then critically reviews the conventional scholarship on American political behavior and its reliance on objective indicators of social class as predictors of political preferences and participation. The article also highlights studies that have conceived of class as an important social identity and have thus measured it subjectively. It then discusses the surge of identity studies in the field of race, ethnicity, and politics (REP) and the turn toward an intersectional approach that rarely includes social class. The article ends with a discussion of the handful of studies that do consider the intersections of race and class, and underscores the need for more research of this type to advance our understanding of contemporary American political behavior.