Suchergebnisse

"This book shows how ordinary Americans imagine their communities and the extent to which their communities' boundaries determine who they believe should benefit from the government's resources via redistributive policies. By contributing extensive empirical analyses to a largely theoretical discussion, it highlights the subjective nature of communities while confronting the elusive task of pinning down "pictures in people's heads."" "A deeper understanding of people's definitions of their communities and how they affect feelings of duties and obligations provides a new lens through which to look at diverse societies and the potential for both civic solidarity and humanitarian aid. This book analyzes three different types of communities and more than eight national surveys. Cara J. Wong finds that the decision to help only those within certain borders and to ignore the needs of those outside rests, to a certain extent, on whether and how people translate their sense of community into obligations."--Jacket

These comments in response to Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative of Integration focus on the problems of measurement that arise from the next step of putting her theory of integration into practice. In fact, thinking about measurement helps us with the theory as well, since it highlights issues that may not have seemed as central or salient at first glance. Contemplating the units of analysis used in the measurement of segregation, how to measure integration, and what counts as diversity or integration in the minds of ordinary Americans forces us to think more concretely about what it means for a society to have integration, which is defined by Anderson as 'the free interaction of citizens from all walks of life on terms of equality and mutual regard'. This article concludes with a couple of thoughts on political trade-offs that may be forced by integration.

AbstractIn discussions of political obligation, it is commonly assumed that duties follow from citizenship. However, the performance of a duty by aliens can lead to citizenship status in at least one critical case: service by noncitizen soldiers. While politicians and pundits recently have called citizenship a just reward for bearing arms and these "green card troops" another example of immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States, there is a good deal of ideological ambivalence about the policy. A clear discussion of its merits is crucial, particularly because in upending the traditionally accepted relationship between obligation and membership in a community, it gives new meaning to citizenship; it also forces a choice between our egalitarian and civic republican values. In this essay, I provide a theoretical framework for evaluating the policy normatively, as well as a political analysis of why—regardless of one's normative stance—the practice of granting citizenship for military service is likely to continue into the future.

AbstractPrevious research has shown that racial or ethnic prejudice is one of the most influential antecedents of opposition to more expansive immigration policies. In this paper, we explore whether a theoretical perspective derived from the group position model might represent an additional and complementary explanation for immigration attitudes. We also compare how well the prejudice and group position models explain immigration attitudes among both White and Black Americans. Most of the previous work in this literature focuses solely on Whites' attitudes, and it remains unclear how well models designed with this group in mind might also apply to African Americans. We rely upon the 2004–2005 National Politics Study to explore the power of these models. In general, we find that measures derived from the group position model account for immigration attitudes even after controlling for various forms of out-group prejudice. The pattern of results also differs considerably across the two racial groups in our study.

Racial identity means different things to members of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. However, while the study of race and politics is often the study of White racial attitudes (Dawson & Cohen, 2003), research on racial identity almost always refers to non‐White identity. This article addresses this hole in the literature by examining the extent and effects of White identity. We compare White identification and Black identification using National Election Studies data (1972–2000) and examine the relationships between racial identity and racial and political attitudes. This study adds a missing case to the study of racial identity, tests how well the theories about the concept travel across cases, and highlights the need for more frequent studies of the racial identity of all groups.

Multiculturalism has emerged to challenge liberalism as an ideological solution in coping with ethnic diversity in the United States. This article develops a definition of political multiculturalism which refers to conceptions of identity, community and public policy. It then analyses the 1994 General Social Survey and a 1994 survey of Los Angeles County to assess the contours of mass support and opposition to multiculturalism, testing hypotheses concerning the role of social background, liberalism-conservatism and racial hostility. The main conclusions are that 'hard' versions of multiculturalism are rejected in all ethnic groups, that a liberal political self-identification boosts support for multiculturalism, and that racial hostility is a consistent source of antagonism to the new ethnic agenda of multiculturalism. There is strong similarity in the results in both the national and Los Angeles samples. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

By a large margin, Californians passed the English Proficiency, Multilingual Education Initiativein November 2016, despite the fact that Proposition 58 gutted Proposition 227, which effectivelyended bilingual education in 1998. We conclude that it would be simplistic to call thismassive change in policy a result that the "times had changed," either demographically or evenin terms of underlying attitudes toward language. Instead, the victory of Prop 58 seems due inlarge part to political strategy rather than a radical shift in the electorate. The proportions of Latinoand Asian registered voters have certainly increased over the last decade and a half, as hasthe proportion of liberal Democrats. Nevertheless, there is a limit to what these demography-asdestinyaccounts can explain. Instead, using survey experiments in three California-wide surveys,we show that underlying attitudes about teaching the English language have been relatively stable,and that many voters supported Prop 58 without being aware that it reinstated bilingual education.When this was made clear, voters changed their positions, particularly among whites andconservatives. What was salient were the first two words on the ballot label, "English Proficiency"and this is an almost universally accepted goal.