The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests in many cities throughout the United States. Protesters’ demands ranged from constraints on police use of force to defunding and disbanding the police altogether. These have led some to worry about the possibility of a “Ferguson Effect,” where police withdraw from policing, and in particular discretionary stops and searches, with deleterious consequences for crime. Drawing on data from four cities, we evaluate whether the 2020 BLM protests impacted police behavior, and whether changes in policing negatively impacted public safety. Regression discontinuity-in-time estimates suggest that although depolicing followed the BLM protests, in some respects the quality of policing improved, and public safety was not clearly impacted. Our findings have important implications for research on policing, social movements, and structural inequality in cities.

Minority voters have experienced a renewed effort to curtail their access to the ballot box in recent years. Although a host of research has examined the impact of election changes on Black and Latino voters, scholars have dedicated much less attention to the rights of Native Americans, even as they face challenges to voting in states where they comprise a significant portion of the population. Many of these states are likewise increasingly important to national elections. Such laws may impact Native Americans when they intersect with the political geography of living on a reservation, and voting rights advocates have challenged them in places like Montana, Nevada and North Dakota. This paper empirically evaluates how such laws might uniquely impact Native American voters. We draw on North Dakota's voter identification law as a case study, but our analysis has wider implications, since residency is the primary means by which election administration uniquely impacts this group. Drawing on two rich survey datasets collected in 2015 and 2017, we offer descriptive evidence of the barriers individuals may encounter while trying to obtain an ID under North Dakota's law, and find that Native Americans are statistically less likely to have access to an ID than are whites. This gap is largely due to the requirement that an ID has a physical address and attendant difficulties in obtaining such an ID, given the remote nature of reservations. We bring needed attention to the impact of carefully crafted electoral rules on this often-overlooked group.

How do involuntary interactions with authoritarian institutions shape political engagement? The policy feedback literature suggests that interactions with authoritarian policies undercut political participation. However, research in racial and ethnic politics offers reason to believe that these experiences may increase citizens’ engagement. Drawing on group attachment and discrimination research, we argue that mobilization is contingent on individuals’ political psychological state. Relative to their counterparts, individuals with a politicized group identity will display higher odds of political engagement when exposed to authoritarian institutions. To evaluate our theory, we draw on the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study to examine the experiences of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. For all subgroups and different types of institutions, we find that, for those with a politicized group identity, institutional contact is associated with higher odds of participation. Our research modifies the classic policy feedback framework, which neglects group-based narratives in the calculus of collective action.

This essay explores four key dimensions of political science literature on the U.S. criminal legal system, by way of introducing articles in the special issue on criminal justice featured in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Politics. We situate police as an institution of social control, rather than providing safety for people vulnerable to crime. The vast array of policy tools to surveil, track, and detain citizens, which lack commensurate restraints on their application, amount to a finely tuned carceral machine that can be deployed against groups newly identified as deviant. We therefore turn attention to this dynamic with our second theme: the criminalization of immigrants, the expansion of interior immigration enforcement, and the consequent targeting of Latinx people. We likewise discuss lessons for reform that can be drawn from research on representation and the political socialization that occurs as a consequence of involuntary contact with the system. We conclude with a brief discussion of directions for future research. The criminal legal system is a key force for persistent racial and class inequality. By turning attention to the politics of the criminal legal system, we forward a critical and understudied facet of American political life that intersects with all corners of the discipline.

This paper examines the effect of institutional contact on political participation among non-White communities. While both formal and informal institutions help shape community citizen participation, their effects vary on the historical inclusion (or exclusion) of certain racial groups. Formal institutions, like political parties, have historically excluded or neglected non-White and immigrant voters. We argue that for the excluded or neglected, non-traditional political institutions, like community based organizations, serve as supplements to facilitate political incorporation and engagement. These informal institutions help develop skills and resources among their constituents, and offer routine opportunities to participate. We use the 2008 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to test the differential effects of self-reported voter mobilization through nonpartisan and partisan institutional contact to explain variations among racial groups by the intensity of contact, occurrence of co-ethnic outreach, and type of institutional mobilization. We find that while contact by a partisan/political institution, like a political party or campaign, has an overall positive effect on political participation for all voters, contact by a nonpartisan/civic or community group is substantively more important for Latino and Asian American voter mobilization. Our analysis therefore offers cohesive evidence of how voters interact with and are affected by mobilization efforts that attends to differences across racial and ethnic boundaries, and variations in institutional contact.

A growing body of research explores the influence of involuntary criminal justice contact on political participation, demonstrating that all types of contact weaken political participation. We posit, however, that personal connections to civil society organizations (CSOs) moderate the negative effects of involuntary criminal justice contact on political participation, particularly political activism beyond registering to vote and voting. We test this proposition with individual-level and aggregate-level data from metropolitan and municipal Chicago. Our findings confirm a paradox of participation by custodial citizens. One, we demonstrate positive, statistically significant, and substantive effects of personal connections to CSOs on nonvoting political participation by custodial citizens. Two, the negative effects of involuntary criminal justice contact on voting participation among individuals and communities may endure, despite personal connections to CSOs, even in a state where the franchise is restored immediately after incarceration. Our study suggests that an associational account of political participation deepens our understanding of the political behavior of custodial citizens and their communities in the age of mass incarceration.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Muslim American women who wear the hijab may be particularly vulnerable to the experiences of stigmatization because the hijab represents one of the most obvious and dominant markers of “otherness.” Yet, extant research has surprisingly neglected to systematically examine how such external markers of difference can increase perceptions of discrimination. Drawing from two nationally representative datasets, we examine perceived discrimination among Muslim Americans, and find that veiled women report experiencing both societal and institutional discrimination at much higher rates than their counterparts. In fact, our findings show that the hijab is one of the most important predictors of self-reported discrimination among all Muslim Americans. Interestingly, however, we also find that men are more likely than women to perceive discrimination once we account for the role of the hijab. Our analysis makes an important contribution to existing research by highlighting the unique experiences of a religious minority group and identifies one important and previously underexplored mechanism by which individuals may be targeted for discrimination—the hijab.

This paper examines the political implications of the criminal justice system for those who experience it indirectly: the friends and extended families of individuals who become caught up in the criminal justice system through heightened police surveillance, arrest, probation/parole and incarceration, which scholars have termed “custodial citizenship” (Lerman and Weaver 2014, 8). Contact with the criminal justice system is increasingly common in the United States, which incarcerates more of its citizens than any other western democracy (West, Sabol, and Greenman 2010). In addition to the 2.3 million people currently behind bars scholars estimate that more than 19 million have a felony (Uggen, Manza, and Thompson 2006). Fully 23% of Black adults have a criminal background, and Latinos make up 50% of federal inmates, highlighting extreme racial disparities in American criminal justice (Meissner et al. 2013). A growing body of research explores the impact of criminal justice contact on political participation finding that depressed voter turnout is the result whether one has been incarcerated, arrested, or lives in a high-contact community (Burch 2011, 2013; Lerman and Weaver 2014).