This study examines the factors that influence the use of declination powers by U.S. Attorney Offices (USAO) in Indian Country (IC) cases. The research aims to shed light on the tribal law enforcement factors that influence the actions of USAOs in IC cases. The study utilizes the “National Caseload Data” to identify crimes that occurred in IC and whether the USAO declined to prosecute a case. The findings suggest tribes with larger law enforcement forces and external funding to improve their criminal justice system have significantly lower rates of declination. The study also examines the effects of the Tribal Law and Order Act (TLOA) on the rates of declination of IC cases. The findings suggest there are clear differences in these effects as a function of the passage of TLOA. Overall, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the challenges and opportunities in the criminal justice system in IC.

How do race, ethnicity, and gender shape a legislator’s approach to bill sponsorship and cosponsorship? This paper examines how institutional marginalization influences the legislative strategies of racial and gender minority representatives. Constrained by systemic barriers that limit their ability to sponsor legislation, minority legislators prioritize cosponsorship to achieve policy goals, build coalitions, and demonstrate responsiveness to their constituencies. Using the quasi-experimental context of the 2016 and 2018 U.S. congressional elections, I apply the synthetic difference-in-differences estimator and find that minority legislators sponsor fewer bills but cosponsor significantly more than their non-Hispanic White counterparts. Additionally, race-gendered effects reveal that women of color sponsor significantly less legislation than non-minority legislators and men of color. These patterns cannot be explained by factors like freshman status or primary election competitiveness. The findings highlight the strategic adaptations of minority legislators to navigate structural inequities and amplify their legislative influence. This study is the first to use a causal inference approach to explore the intersection of race, gender, and sponsorship and cosponsorship of congressional bills, contributing to a deeper understanding of legislative behavior among marginalized groups.

Different participatory mechanisms for the representation of Indigenous peoples have been proposed across states. Since their creation in 1867, the Māori electorates in the national Parliament have led to dedicated representation for Māori (Indigenous peoples of New Zealand). However, only half of Māori choose to vote on the Māori roll, the remainder choosing to vote on the General roll, illustrating that roll choice is not based simply on group representation. This survey aimed to ask Māori (N = 1,958) in their own words why they made their roll choice. Through a deductive codebook thematic analysis, a range of codes were constructed around the reasoning behind roll choice. Māori on the Māori roll made their choice because they valued Māori representation; as an expression of their identity; to support the electorates; as a strategic choice; or they had been influenced by others or through education. Those on the General roll felt their roll was the default or a more familiar option; the Māori roll had less of an impact; it was a strategic choice, or they appreciated greater candidate variety; or they valued the smaller geographic electorate size. Some felt Māori no longer needed separate representation or felt less connected to their identity as Māori. The results have implications for both Māori and Indigenous representation through dedicated representational mechanisms.

This paper asserts that critiques of political science for neglecting Indigenous politics highlight a critical gap that risks overlooking significant conceptual and practical innovations. It emphasizes how Indigenous autonomy claims challenge traditional notions of sovereignty. Scholars of Indigenous politics in Latin America, publishing in area studies journals, provide essential insights into these autonomy claims and contribute valuable perspectives to the discipline. We identify rigorous scholarly work in English language, peer-reviewed journals exploring Indigenous autonomy, conceptualizing it as a multifaceted notion that encompasses political visions, practices, and social movement agendas. Through a comprehensive meta-analysis of literature in Latin American area studies, we argue that this field offers four fundamental insights. First, Indigenous peoples deploy diverse strategies to assert their rights, positioning themselves as active citizens and political agents rather than passive groups. Second, the emergence of multicultural institutions that integrate individual and collective rights is fundamentally reshaping politics and citizenship, leading to innovative governance structures. Third, accumulation by dispossession remains a crucial driver of wealth creation, severely undermining Indigenous autonomy and degrading their environments. Finally, a renewed emphasis on Indigenous territorial autonomy decisively challenges conventional views of state sovereignty, as Indigenous peoples assert territorial and nonterritorial rights.

What factors explain Latino support for conspiracy theories? Contemporary scholarship offers valuable insights on how psychological, social, and political factors shape support for conspiracy theories. At the same time, scholarly understanding of the dynamics that foster conspiracy beliefs among racial and ethnic minorities is much more limited. Utilizing survey responses from more than 1,000 Latinos, we theorize explicitly about the factors that explain their support for conspiracies. Consistent with the scholarship highlighting in-group diversity among Latinos, we reveal significant differences among Latinos in their propensity to harbor conspiracy beliefs. Some of the factors that influence their support for conspiratorial statements align with the broader literature, other results appear unique to Latino Americans. Religiosity, lack of trust in institutions, and conservative political ideology are associated with higher levels of conspiracy beliefs among Latinos. We also find that Latinos from later generations, those who consume Spanish media, and who disagree that Latinos face discrimination and White privilege exists are more likely to believe in certain conspiracy theories.

This paper explores whether attitudes toward ethnic nationalism among Black and Asian Americans influence attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter Movement. Acceptance of a nationalist ideology typically makes an individual animus towards outgroups. Moreover, ethnic/Black nationalism is known to flare in times of perceived intense oppression. Given current racial tensions in the United States, we are interested in examining factors that may help facilitate alliance-building between Black and Asian Americans—two nonwhite groups that exist on different planks of the U.S. racial hierarchy. We begin by recounting historical and contemporary instances of Afro-Asian solidarity and conflict. This is followed by a review of past theoretical articulation and empirical research on nationalist ideology within each community. We develop a set of group-specific indicators of ethnic nationalism for Black and Asian Americans from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. Our results show clear evidence that being sympathetic to ethnic nationalism can unite rather than divide the two racialized communities in their attitudes toward present-day projects such as the Black Lives Matter Movement.

This paper investigates the increasing, but complex, support for reparations among Democratic elected officials—highlighting their tendency to endorse the concept while deferring discussion of policy details. This strategic ambiguity is common in policy discourse and can be embedded within policy design, such as legislative proposals to create commissions tasked with studying and recommending future actions on reparations. The effectiveness of these reparations commissions is uncertain. They could represent productive steps toward genuine reparations or simply serve to alleviate political pressure without any substantial policy changes. We explore these potential outcomes in three inter-related analyses: a compilation and comparison of all bills mentioning slavery reparations introduced at the federal and state level, the first nationally representative public opinion poll asking about support for reparations commissions, and a content analysis of legislative bill texts establishing reparations commissions. Our findings suggest that while reparations commissions offer an effective way for Democratic policymakers to manage conflicting constituency pressures in the short term, their potential to propel forward, rather than stall, the reparations debate hinges on their design and execution.

Discrimination is widely studied, with extensive research measuring discrimination on the housing and labor markets. This study examines how local governments address this well-documented issue, by conducting content analysis on 45 policy documents and by performing semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 alder(wo)men and diversity officers across nine Belgian cities. We introduce a temporal framework combining why, what, how, and when local anti-discrimination policy and actions are established. Such a framework is useful, as we do not approach policy as fixed, but pay attention to how actions evolve over time, even within one so-called anti-discrimination policy.This enables scholars and policymakers to identify decision-making patterns, predict changes over time, and understand contextual influences. Besides, unlike existing models rooted in integration or diversity policy, our framework captures the unique aspects of anti-discrimination policy, enabling a thorough understanding of the (non-)adoption of concrete anti-discrimination actions.

Research on campaign finance suggests that Americans prefer candidates who are not funded by Political Action Committees (PACs). However, prior research has not examined how perceptions of a candidate who is PAC-funded vs. PAC-free might differ for racial minority and female candidates compared to White, male candidates. Using experimental vignettes, we test the causal impact of PAC funding, race, and gender on voter perceptions of the candidate. We find that refusing PAC funds, for example, is associated with appearing more ethical and more likely to work for voters’ interests over special interests, less corrupt, and more capable of winning elections. However, we show that race, more than gender, interacts with PAC funding to impact voter perceptions. We find that White female and male candidates benefit the most from PAC refusal. While Black female and male candidates receive little or no significant change in perceptions, Black PAC-funded candidates are perceived favorably compared to White PAC-funded candidates. Our results have implications for White and Black political candidates considering their funding strategies. Additionally, we contribute to existing literature by showing that refusing PAC funds status does not signal the same qualities for all candidates.

Political self-efficacy, the civic duty to vote, and a homogeneous political atmosphere have been identified as important antecedents of turnout. However, little is known about how they explain voting behavior among minorities, who have an inherent motivation to protect their minority rights. In this article, I examine how belonging to a minority, political self-efficacy, the civic duty to vote, and a shared party identification are connected to intentions to vote. Analyzing nationally representative panel data in a structural equation model, I compare Swedish-speaking minority adolescents and Finnish-speaking majority adolescents—groups that mainly share similar background characteristics in all but language and their minority or majority status. According to the results, the significantly higher voting intentions found among the minority can partly be derived from their higher level of political self-efficacy. The unilingually Swedish-speaking adolescents also seem to benefit from their more pronounced and homogenous political atmosphere.

In this paper, I examine the factors associated with public attitudes toward foreign policy among white Americans and argue that racial attitudes play an important role. To test this hypothesis, I perform quantitative studies across four iterations of the American National Election Survey (ANES)—(1) 2012, (2) 2016, (3) 2020, and (4) the Cumulative Survey (1986–2020). While the results include white public opinion across several different areas of foreign policy across several decades of data, the findings are consistent: American foreign policy opinion among white Americans is highly racialized—meaning that their views on foreign policy are strongly associated with their views on race and racism. This study contributes to our knowledge of a relatively poorly understood phenomenon in American politics: how the American public forms their attitudes on foreign policy. Overall, I find strong evidence that racial attitudes play an important yet understudied role in the foreign policy attitudes of white Americans. This study also extends our knowledge of the role of racialization in public opinion and reminds us that while racism is one of the most central problems for U.S. domestic politics, we should also be wary of how these hierarchies of domination extend beyond our borders through its foreign relations.

A large literature considers the mid-century a key turning point in punitive public opinion in the United States. This article examines racial and geographic heterogeneity in changing public opinion during the mid-century using data on death penalty support from as early as 1953. I find that the punitive turn is characterized by divergence in death penalty support between Black and White people, and that White Southerners grew more supportive than Whites in the non-South from before to after the turn. Additional tests identify that this regional divergence is unlikely to have arisen by chance. Heterogeneity in partisanship and responsiveness to regional violent crime support is consistent with the idea that crime rates themselves were meaningful in punitive attitude formation only insofar as they were mediated by additional socio-political forces.

Some theorists and practitioners argue that public schools in liberal democracies should teach students to be engaged, participatory citizens. Others argue that schools function as disciplinary training grounds, producing docile workers and obedient members of society. How can we reconcile these normatively different views? In exploring this question, we analyze school documents from a national random sample of U.S. public charter schools, examining the terms schools use most frequently and how schools discuss normative conceptions of citizenship. Using text-as-data methods and qualitative analysis, we suggest that both models appear in U.S. schools, but are implemented largely along racialized lines, with majority White schools tending to emphasize democratic values and majority non-White schools emphasizing obedience.

This article examines the dynamics of youth identity formation at a boarding school for “at-risk” children. The school prepares its young boarders for adulthood through systematic intervention in their everyday cultural practices. By inducing a state of social liminality, or felt in-betweenness, the school seeks to guide its students—mainly youth of color—towards particular social roles, norms, and beliefs. However, children respond and adapt to this ambivalence, which leads to lasting effects as they transition into young adulthood. Utilizing extensive fieldwork and longitudinal data, the analysis employs an interpretive approach to provide context-specific insights into these dynamics. The study details the cultural interventions observed in 2013-14 and revisits the children, now young adults, a decade later, to understand the policy and ethical implications of those interventions. In so doing, this study contributes to understanding the complex interaction between authority, conformity, and identity management within institutions devoted to transforming the lives of children at the social margins.

Since 2021, 18 states in the USA have restricted education on race and structural inequality. Conservative coalitions frame these restrictions as a war on “woke” ideologies. Through interviews with youth and educators in locales (Florida; Georgia; and York, Pennsylvania) that restrict education on race and structural inequality, I investigate the following: What discourses do students and educators use to describe bills that restrict race-related studies? What, if anything, do their discourses suggest about the perceived political implications of these restrictions?

In this study, I argue that gleaning students’ and educators’ views on “anti-woke” legislation sheds light on the perceived political consequences of these bills for American democracy. I find that students and educators perceive restrictions on race-related studies as epistemic injustices that divest society of the knowledge to identify, problematize, and redress the structural conditions that (re)produce racial subordination. For participants, the health of democracy is contingent on addressing racial disempowerment. Hence, they suggest that restrictions on race-related studies encumber democracy precisely because these policies impose epistemologies of racial ignorance that impede racial redress and allow systems of racial inequality to fester.