“Linked Fate Over Time and Across Generations” with Candis Watts Smith and Tehama Lopez Bunyasi. 2019. Politics, Groups, and Identities.

Given the ups and downs in racial progress over the past thirty years, have levels of Black and Latinx linked fate changed significantly over time, perhaps in response to critical moments? Do Blacks and Latinxs in different generational cohorts systematically differ in the extent to which they believe their individual well-being is tied into the well-being of their group? The answer to both of these questions appears to be “yes.”

“Willing but Unable: Reassessing the Relationship between Racial Group Consciousness on Black Political Participation” with Jared Clemons, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Miguel Martinez, Leann McLaren, and Ismail White.

In this paper, we offer a framework for understanding the role that racial group consciousness (RGC) plays in influencing Black Americans’ engagement in costly political action. Attempting to add clarity to decades of inconsistent and at times contradictory findings, we argue that the effect of RGC at inspiring political action among Black Americans is conditional on 1) the relevance of the political activity to achieving a well-recognized racial group outcome, and 2) individual capacity to assume the cost with engaging in the activity. Analyzing data from the ANES and two behavioral experiments, we find that RGC exhibits a consistently strong relationship with engagement in low-cost political behavior, regardless of whether the behavior has some explicit group relevant outcome or not. When engagement becomes more costly, however, Blacks who are high in RGC are only willing to assume these costs if the engagement has some clear potential for racial group benefit.

“Social Movements, Race, and Political Participation in the South: Evidence from 1961 and 2020” with John Aldrich, Jared Clemons, Edgar Cook, Kyle Endres, Michael Greenberger, Ashley Jardina, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Leann McLaren.

How have Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movements of the 1960s shaped the political attitudes and levels of political engagement of both Black and white southerners? We test this question by pairing survey data of southern Black and white political attitudes with geo-located data on social movement activity. First, we join data on the locations of anti-segregation sit-ins during 1960 with survey data from 1961, gathered by Donald Matthews and James Prothro. Next, we join data on the location of Black Lives Matter protests with survey data of southern Black and white respondents during the summer of 2020, gathered by these authors. Using this data, we find that while the socioeconomic and psychological determinants of political participation have not changed drastically from 1960 to 2020, changes in political context do seem to have affected the way that these two social movements translate to political mobilization and attitude change. We show that the sit-ins of 1960 and 1961 mobilized Black residents living in the same county as the anti-segregation protests but did not seem to mobilize white residents. On the other hand, we show that the BLM protests of the 2020 summer seem to have little mobilizing effect on Black or white southerners, but they did reduce expressed levels of anti-Black animus as measured by racial resentment. This work helps unpack the important question of when social movements translate into electoral mobilization, attitude change, and political engagement.

“That’s the Sound of the Police? Political Mobilization or Retreat?” with Arvind Krishnamurthy and Jesse Lopez.

“Expressive Partisan Identity and Costly Political Action” with Jared Clemons, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Miguel Martinez, Leann McLaren, and Ismail White.