As Black Lives Matter protests swept across the United States in recent years, protesters encountered a mix of police reactions: Some news reports described police in military gear and widespread arrests, whereas others reported minimal police involvement. We developed an original dataset of BLM protests that shows that police reactions varied widely, even when comparing protests with similar messages and tactics. We then investigated this variation with a survey experiment and found that observers are more likely to describe protesters as violent when a protest is met with a heavy police presence. These findings highlight the role of the police in shaping public perceptions of violence and social movements and extend a growing body of empirical research on BLM by shifting the focus from protest activity to the impact of protest policing.

Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments. We find no evidence that candidates of colour are disadvantaged in state legislative general elections relative to narrowly nominated white candidates from the same party. These findings challenge the leading explanations for the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority groups, with implications for candidate selection across the United States.

ABSTRACT IMPACT: Knowledge of which aspects of social connectedness most strongly associate with caregiver health and health behaviors can inform intervention targets to improve caregiver health OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Stressed dementia caregivers are at risk of poor health. Social connectedness may reduce adverse health effects, yet it is unknown about which aspects relate most strongly to health. This is a barrier to intervention development. Our study identifies aspects of social connectedness most strongly associate with caregivers’ daily health behaviors. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Data. Enrolled spousal caregivers completed 14 consecutive days of online surveys. Measures. We examined multiple health behaviors each day, which included: 1) number of occurrences of 3 potential binge-eating behaviors (range 0 to 30), 2) whether participants engaged in at least 30 minutes of physical activity, and 3) perceived sleep quality, rated 1 (very bad) to 5 (very good). We also examined a count of health symptoms caregivers experienced (e.g., backache; range: 0 to 7). Measures of social connectedness included: spousal emotional support, perceived spousal appreciation, emotional support from any source, and loneliness. Analysis. We applied bivariate multi-level mixed effects models to examine the association between each aspect of social connectedness and health behaviors day-to-day. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Since November 2020, 5 of N=40 participants were enrolled, of whom 3 had completed all diary surveys. Participants were women ages 59 to 73, and included 4 non-Hispanic white and 1 Hispanic caregivers. Data included 51 days of surveys (93% adherence). No differences in eating behaviors nor physical activity according to social connectedness were found. Emotional support from any source was positively associated with sleep quality (B= 0.20; SE=0.08; p-value 0.015). On days when caregivers indicated their spouse appreciated them ‘A lot’ versus ‘Not at all,’ sleep quality was marginally better (B=0.73, SE=0.42; p-value-0.08). Finally, days when caregivers felt lonely at least ‘Some of the time’ versus ‘Not at all’ were associated with experiencing more adverse health symptoms (B=1.54; SE=0.58; p-value<0.001). DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: Improved emotional support from any source may support better sleep quality among caregiving spouses, while loneliness appears to contribute to more adverse health symptoms. Findings, if confirmed, can be translated to develop intervention programs that target loneliness and perceived emotional support among caregivers.

This paper presents new causal estimates of incarceration’s effect on voting, using administrative data on criminal sentencing and voter turnout. I use the random case assignment process of a major county court system as a source of exogenous variation in the sentencing of misdemeanor cases. Focusing on misdemeanor defendants allows for generalization to a large population, as such cases are very common. Among first-time misdemeanor defendants, I find evidence that receiving a short jail sentence decreases voting in the next election by several percentage points. Results differ starkly by race. White defendants show no demobilization, while Black defendants show substantial turnout decreases due to jail time. Evidence from pre-arrest voter histories suggest that this difference could be due to racial differences in exposure to arrest. These results paint a picture of large-scale, racially-disparate voter demobilization in the wake of incarceration.

Contact with the criminal legal system has been shown to reduce individuals’ political participation, but its effect on friends and family members is less clear. Do people who see loved ones arrested or incarcerated become mobilized to change the system, or do they withdraw from political life? I address this question using administrative data from one large county, identifying registered voters who live with someone facing misdemeanor charges. Court records and vote histories allow me to accurately measure proximate criminal justice exposure and voting for a broader sample of people than survey data would. Using case timing for arrests shortly before and shortly after the election allows me to avoid bias from omitted variables. I find evidence of a short-term demobilization effect for people who see household members convicted or jailed in the weeks before the election, but no evidence of a lasting turnout effect from these experiences.

Past research shows that growing inequality often does not result in citizen demands for redistribution. We examine one mechanism that could explain why people do not protest growing inequality: a particular sub-prediction of system justification theory (SJT). SJT argues that humans have a psychological need to justify their social system. The specific sub-prediction of SJT tested here is the idea that inequality itself increases system justification. This could yield a negative feedback loop in which political responses to inequality grows ever less likely as inequality grows more extreme. Previous research on this hypothesis relied on cross-sectional survey data and provided mixed results. We take an experimental approach and ask whether exposure to economic inequality makes people more likely to defend the system. In one main study and two replications with varying samples, experimental treatments, and outcome measures, we find no evidence that information about economic inequality increases system justification motivation.

Prior research demonstrates that responses to surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. We build upon this research by empirically testing how information about researcher identity in online surveys affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher in the advertisement for the experiment and on the informed consent page in order to cue different racial and gender identities. We fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in how respondents answer questions when assigned to a putatively black/white or male/female researcher.

For decades, scholars have attributed Black Americans' unified political and policy views, despite growing internal class and status differences, to a strong perception of linked fate. In recent years, the concept has been measured in other racial and ethnic groups and with regard to gender, but not applied to social statuses such as class or religion. Without broad comparisons across groups and different statuses, however, one cannot determine the appropriate empirical test or most distinctive correlates of this canonical construct. Using a new national survey, we examine Americans' views of linked fate by race or ethnicity, and also by gender, class, or religion. We find expressions of linked fate to be similar across racial or ethnic groups, robust to experimental manipulation, and as strong for class as for racial or ethnic identity. Intra-individual correlations on linked fate items are very high, while a sense of linked fate is rarely associated with political views or political participation. Expressions of linked fate are not always closely related to feelings of closeness to one's group or perceptions of discrimination against that group. We speculate on the broader meaning of responses to this standard item, and conclude that the enormously fruitful theory of racial linked fate is due for further conceptual development and empirical experimentation.

Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of different putative ethnicities. Emails sent from Latino aliases are significantly less likely to receive any response from local election officials than non-Latino white aliases and receive responses of lower quality. This raises concerns about the effect of voter ID laws on access to the franchise and about bias in the provision of services by local bureaucrats more generally.