Arc of the moral universe
The Persistent Effect of U.S. Civil Rights Protests on Political Attitudes
Soumyajit Mazumder
American Journal of Political Science, October 2018, Pages 922-935
Abstract:
Protests can engender significant institutional change. Can protests also continue to shape a nation's contemporary politics outside of more formalized channels? I argue that social movements can not only beget institutional change, but also long‐run, attitudinal change. Using the case of the U.S. civil rights movement, I develop a theory in which protests can shift attitudes and these attitudes can persist. Data from over 150,000 survey respondents provide evidence consistent with the theory. Whites from counties that experienced historical civil rights protests are more likely to identify as Democrats and support affirmative action, and less likely to harbor racial resentment against blacks. These individual‐level results are politically meaningful - counties that experienced civil rights protests are associated with greater Democratic Party vote shares even today. This study highlights how social movements can have persistent impacts on a nation's politics.
Protecting the Right to Discriminate: The Second Great Migration and Racial Threat in the American West
Tyler Reny & Benjamin Newman
American Political Science Review, November 2018, Pages 1104-1110
Abstract:
Taking advantage of a unique event in American history, the Second Great Migration, we explore whether the rapid entry of African Americans into nearly exclusively White contexts triggered “racial threat” in White voting behavior in the state of California. Utilizing historical administrative data, we find that increasing proximity to previously White areas experiencing drastic Black population growth between 1940 to 1960 is associated with significant increases in aggregate White voter support for a highly racially-charged ballot measure, Proposition 14, which legally protected racial discrimination in housing. Importantly, we find that this result holds when restricting the analysis to all-White areas with high rates of residential tenure and low rates of White population growth. These latter findings indicate that this relationship materializes in contexts where a larger share of White voters were present during the treatment and exercised residential-choice before the treatment commenced, which is suggestive of a causal effect.
How Increasing Party Diversity May Lead to Worsening Reported Racial Attitudes
Christopher Stout & Keith Baker
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Method: We implement a survey experiment where individuals are told their party harbors either racial or religious prejudice and then are asked to vote on a party primary election in which the race of the candidates varies.
Results: We find that white Republicans modify their racial attitudes in response to accusations of racism. However, this effect disappears when white Republicans are presented with evidence of racial/ethnic diversity in their party.
Visualizing the Increasing Effect of Racial Resentment on Political Ideology among Whites, 1986 to 2016
Ryan Jerome LeCount
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, September 2018
Abstract:
The author constructs an over-time coefficient plot to allow visualized evaluation of the role played by indicators of racial resentment on political ideology among Whites since 1986. The visualization makes clear that the role of racial resentment in the formation of political ideology is one that (1) has been a consistently significant factor in U.S. politics for 30 years and (2) was increasing in importance prior to the candidacy of Donald Trump.
Sunbelt Capitalism, Civil Rights, and the Development of Carceral Policy in North Carolina, 1954-1970
Kirstine Taylor
Studies in American Political Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates an important yet poorly understood aspect of the origins of the U.S. carceral state. Many explanations attribute the rise of mass incarceration to the conservative tide in American politics beginning in the late 1960s: “tough on crime” policies advanced by southern Democrats and Republicans, white backlash against black civil rights, and the law-and-order politics of Nixon's “Southern Strategy.” But in focusing on conservatives, prevailing theories have ignored how the changing economic and political landscape of the post-WWII South shaped how policymakers thought about crime. This article examines how key elements of the carceral state emerged in the rapidly growing, metropolitan, and business-minded Sunbelt South between 1954 and 1970, using North Carolina as a test case. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, it unearths how moderate southern politicians with material links to extra-regional sources of capital, political links to northern liberal elites, and ideological links to postwar liberalism pioneered state-level carceral policy. It argues that the swift development of crime policy in midcentury North Carolina was the product of how the state's moderate elites chose to govern the emerging Sunbelt economy in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement. The problems of rampant civil disorder, racial extremism, and lawlessness, they argued, threatened the economic progress of North Carolina and required the implementation of strong yet race-neutral crime policy. This study offers an analysis of how the Sunbelt South, in shedding Jim Crow and entering the national political and economic mainstream, came to help spearhead the carceral turn in American politics.
Light Privilege? Skin Tone Stratification in Health among African Americans
Taylor Hargrove
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Skin tone is a status characteristic used in society to evaluate and rank the social position of minorities. Although skin color represents a particularly salient dimension of race, its consequences for health remains unclear. The author uses four waves of panel data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study and random-intercept multilevel models to address three research questions critical to understanding the skin color-health relationship among African American adults (n = 1,680): What is the relationship between skin color and two global measures of health (cumulative biological risk and self-rated health)? To what extent are these relationships gendered? Do socioeconomic characteristics, stressors, and discrimination help explain the skin color-health relationship? The findings indicate that dark-skinned women experience more physiological deterioration and self-report worse health than lighter skinned women. These associations are not evident among men, and socioeconomic factors, stressors, and discrimination do not explain the dark-light disparity in physiological deterioration among women. Differences in self-ratings of health among women, however, are generally explained by education and income. The results of this study highlight heterogeneity in determinants of health among African Americans. They also provide a more nuanced understanding of health inequality by identifying particularly disadvantaged members of racial groups that are often assumed to have monolithic experiences.
Unequal Marriage Markets: Sex Ratios and First Marriage among Black and White Women
Philip Cohen & Joanna Pepin
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, August 2018
Abstract:
Using the marital events data from the American Community Survey for the first time, we examine the association between the quantity and characteristics of unmarried men and first marriage for Black and White women ages 20 to 45. We incorporate both unmarried sex ratios and the economic status of unmarried men within each racial group using multilevel logistic models. We find higher marriage odds in markets with more (same-race) unmarried men, holding constant women’s own characteristics. In addition, local men’s education and employment rates also predict higher odds of White women’s first marriage. The findings imply that if White and Black women experienced similar unmarried sex ratios in their local markets, the gap in first marriage rates would be much smaller. We conclude that marriage promotion policies may be ineffective in part because they are targeting women who face structural barriers to marriage in their local marriage markets.
Black-White Mental Status Trajectories: What Ages Do Differences Emerge?
DeAnnah Byrd, Gilbert Gee & Wassim Tarraf
SSM - Population Health, December 2018, Pages 169-177
Method: Data come from the Americans’ Changing Lives Study (ACL) (n=3,617). Participants, ranging from ages 25-95 years old at baseline, were followed from 1986 to 2011 over 5 waves. Mental status was assessed at each wave using a 5-item Short Portable Mental Status Questionnaire. Growth models were used to estimate the associations between age, race, baseline status, and longitudinal changes in mental status, controlling for sociodemographic (e.g., education, income) and other health risk factors (diabetes, stroke, tobacco use, depression).
Results: Racial disparities were seen beginning in midlife and this relationship was curvilinear. Specifically, blacks had a steeper rate of mental status decline than whites and these disparities persisted after accounting for social and health risk factors (b=0.0090, p<0.0001).
Vanishing racial disparities in drowning in Florida
Marina Mileo Gorsuch et al.
Injury Prevention, forthcoming
Objectives: To examine the change in the racial disparity in drowning in Florida from 1970 to 2015 and to analyse the contextual factors associated with white, black and Hispanic drowning rates in Florida from 2007 to 2015.
Methods: Our outcome variable is county-level annual drowning rates by race, ethnicity, sex and age group. We computed county-level contextual data, including emergency weather events, temperature, extreme weather, number of pools, quality of pools, coastline, swimming participation rates and prominent black competitive swim teams.
Results: Between 1970 and 1990, the disparity in drowning rates between white and black males in Florida decreased dramatically. By 2005, the overall age-adjusted drowning rates converged. This convergence was most striking for those aged 10-34 and 35-64. While the gap has declined dramatically, there remains a racial disparity in drownings among those aged 10-34.
The Gendered Division of Sterilization “Fertility Work:” The Role of Educational and Racial/Ethnic Heterogamy
Mieke Eeckhaut
Journal of Family Issues, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing on data from the 2006 to 2010 and 2011 to 2013 rounds of the National Survey of Family Growth, this study examines the division of sterilization “fertility work” among couples who have completed intended childbearing. Results show that use of female versus male sterilization varies by couples’ racial/ethnic composition, but not by couples’ educational composition. Couples in which the man is non-Hispanic White and the woman is of minority background were found to have an increased likelihood of relying on male versus female sterilization. This finding supports the gender perspective, as it shows the male partner to be most willing to participate in sterilization “fertility work” when he is a member of the dominant racial/ethnic group and his partner is of minority background.
Race and Social Boundaries: How Multiracial Identification Matters for Intimate Relationships
Krystale Littlejohn
Social Currents, forthcoming
Abstract:
While researchers have explored in detail how multiracial identification shapes symbolic boundaries (conceptual distinctions), they have paid less attention to its effects on social boundaries (how people behave). This study examines multiracial individuals’ odds of marriage and cohabitation with blacks and whites to examine whether this population challenges current race-based social boundaries via partner choice. Analyses of data from the 2008-2012 American Community Survey (ACS) show that while those who identify with more than one race are indeed more likely to have a black (white) partner than their nonblack (nonwhite) monoracial counterparts, this phenomenon is driven by the choices of multiracials with at least a part black (white) identity. For example, multivariate results show that multiracial individuals who do not report any white identity are not more likely than nonwhite monoracials to marry a white partner. Moreover, part-white multiracials are more likely than nonwhite multiracials to have a white partner. These findings largely reflect expectations derived from theories of ingroup/outgroup behavior. In sum, although multiracial individuals may contribute to challenging symbolic boundaries, the results suggest that they are not necessarily disproportionately likely to challenge race-based social boundaries via their partner choices.
Democratic reversals and the size of government
Jeffrey Jensen & Sidak Gebre Yntiso
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
While the fiscal and redistributive consequences of democracy is one of the central debates in political economy, most empirical studies analyze this question solely in the context of transitions to democracy. In this paper, we explore the consequences to taxation of democratic reversal using the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in the US South between 1880 and 1910. Following the federally-imposed extension of the franchise to the former slaves during Reconstruction (1865-1877), Southern states erected a series of legal restrictions, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, aimed primarily at preventing Southern African Americans from registering to vote. Using an original dataset of local and state taxes and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we demonstrate that the adoption of literacy tests for voting eligibility in each state was followed by a significant decline in tax revenues that is highly correlated to the share of each county's population who was African American. We also find that black disenfranchisement led to a shift of the tax burden onto urban counties and a greater reliance on indirect taxation. Our results survive a battery of robustness checks, alternative specifications and additional tests of the redistributionist thesis. The findings are not only consistent with standard models of redistribution following democratization, but also indicate that the elasticity of taxes with respect to enfranchisement is substantial and larger than the one suggested by the cross-national literature.
Paying for Their Stay: Race, Coresiding Arrangements, and Rent Payments Among Fragile Families
Ellen Whitehead
Journal of Family Issues, forthcoming
Abstract:
Coresiding with extended relatives represents a beneficial form of resource sharing for disadvantaged individuals that is particularly common among Black, Hispanic, and low-socioeconomic status communities, yet we know little about financial arrangements within coresidential families. Given ongoing racial inequality in extended family resources, this study explores whether contributing rent is patterned by race among coresidential families. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,103), this project explores coresident and rent payment arrangements among mothers of young children. The analysis reveals that Black and Hispanic mothers carry unique financial burdens, being more likely, in comparison to White peers, to live with extended relatives and pay rent to the householder. Furthermore, among coresiders, Hispanic mothers are more likely than White mothers to pay rent even when the household is socioeconomically advantaged. This work reveals a form of inequality within coresidential housing, with White mothers having advantaged access to rent-free housing arrangements.
Destroyed by Slavery? Slavery and African American Family Formation Following Emancipation
Melinda Miller
Demography, October 2018, Pages 1587-1609
Abstract:
This study introduces a new sample that links people and families across 1860, 1880, and 1900 census data to explore the intergenerational impact of slavery on black families in the United States. Slaveholding - the number of slaves owned by a single farmer or planter - is used as a proxy for experiences during slavery. Slave family structures varied systematically with slaveholding sizes. Enslaved children on smaller holdings were more likely to be members of single-parent or divided families. On larger holdings, however, children tended to reside in nuclear families. In 1880, a child whose mother had been on a farm with five slaves was 49 % more likely to live in a single-parent household than a child whose mother had been on a farm with 15 slaves. By 1900, slaveholding no longer had an impact. However, children whose parents lived in single-parent households were themselves more likely to live in single-parent households and to have been born outside marriage.
Who desires in-group neighbors? Associations of skin tone biases and discrimination with Latinas’ segregation preferences
Ekeoma Uzogara
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although racial residential segregation and colorism, independently, strongly shape the lives of Latinas, previous studies rarely bridged both lines of research directly. This paper begins to fill this gap by examining within-group differences in perceived unfair treatment and preferences for housing segregation across Latinas of varying skin tones. Using the National Politics Survey (N = 222) and the Chicago Area Study (CAS; N = 152), cross-sectional analyses investigated the association of Latinas’ skin tones with different forms of unfair treatment. The CAS also examined preferences for Latinx in-group versus White neighbors. Findings suggested that medium-skinned Latinas perceived elevated levels of particular types of discrimination. In the CAS sample, lighter skinned Latinas were more likely to reside in predominantly White neighborhoods, while darker Latinas resided in mainly mixed-race neighborhoods. Darker Latinas also ideally preferred more Latinx in-group neighbors while lighter skinned Latinas preferred more White neighbors. Experiences of discrimination interacted with anti-Latinx sentiments (i.e., internalized racism) to predict preferences to reside near Latinx neighbors. Results implied that darker Latinas may be more motivated to remain in segregated regions while lighter Latinas may move to predominantly White neighborhoods. Implications for theory, policy, and health are discussed.