The final issue of 2022 brings together articles illuminating the effect of immigration status, race, and racial attitudes in multiple dimensions. Collectively, these studies show that race and racial priors structure partisanship, influence how we interact with the police, what we judge as civil or uncivil behavior, and even how we evaluate the political knowledge of others.
First, Traci Burch analyzes when and how police departments use the “justified killing” narrative to explain officer shootings of civilians. The study suggests that this narrative is more frequently employed when the deceased civilian is Black. Moving on from police narratives to the impact of contact with police on citizens, Christiani and Shoub continue the investigation of the relationship between contact with the police and political participation by looking at how “light” contact affects political behavior. Contrary to the expectations of earlier studies, the authors find that negative “light” encounters with the police are likely to mobilize people to become politically engaged. This is especially the case for White Americans and those with prior positive evaluations of the police. Xu and Zhu move forward the research agenda on the relationship between immigration and welfare politics. Their work investigates the relationship between immigration exclusion and social inequality. The authors show that in states that excluded legal permanent residents from Temporary Assistance for Needy Children (TANF), immigrant TANF caseloads declined markedly.
The second set of articles focuses more on the relationship between race and partisanship, bringing a wealth of theory and evidence to bear. First, Dyck and Johnson unpack the dynamics of macropartisanship by disaggregating the measure by race and ethnicity. Macropartisanship is an aggregate measure that trends party identification in the American population over time. Traditionally, scholars have used a single measure, even though there is good evidence that trends in party identification are different by race and ethnicity. The analysis shows key racial differences in macropartisanship: the measure is more unstable for Latinos than Black people, while among Whites, the measure has become less responsive to economic conditions over time.
Second, Ramanathan and Kalmoe take us almost two centuries back to investigate whether partisanship or rejection of slavery –and thus racial factors—motivated White northern men to fight in the Civil War. The authors link Union war participation records with election returns to show that county-level participation in the War was driven by Republican partisanship than beliefs about racial equality. An analysis of partisan newspapers shows that Republicans de-emphasized slavery in their mobilization while antiwar Democrats linked antiabolition and White supremacy. Third, Zhirkov and Valentino argue that the racial realignment led to the formation of racialized images of the two major parties in the United States. These underlying racial images now structure voter loyalties and preferences.
Additional insights are provided by Utych, Navarre, and Rhodes-Purdy, who dig deeper into voter political psychology, asking how economic insecurity and prejudice become intertwined through emotions. They show that economic concerns increase anger and anxiety. Furthermore, anger boosts prejudice but only towards groups one is already ideologically predisposed to be biased against. Furthermore, Gubitz tells us that there are systematic differences in how people evaluate uncivil discourse based on the identity of those targeted by uncivil speech. White Americans tend to downplay incivility when the target is African American, but they are more likely to recognize it when the target is a woman or a copartisan. Equally important, Coll and Juelich argue that the intersection of age and race/ethnicity matters for voting. Using a wealth of data going back 20 years along with the Cost of Voting Index, they demonstrate that young voters of color are affected differently than young White voters by laws that make voting more difficult. Finally, Enders and Thornton examine the impact of a respondent’s race and skin tone on an interviewer’s subjective evaluation of the respondent’s political knowledge. The results show that White interviewers systematically judge Black respondents as less knowledgeable than do Black interviewers.
