Tali Mendelberg is cited in this Op-Ed piece from the New York Times.

Few studies examine how often people of color voice their views or shape the discussion in civic or political decision-making groups. Existing studies do not link participants’ private preferences to what they say, and lack data on racial inequalities in individuals’ public speech. We analyze a large sample of citizens randomized to groups tasked with deciding on punishment for corporate malfeasance, an issue of consequence for communities of color. We develop systematic measures of racial inequality in voice and uptake during discussion. We find that members of color speak less and are less likely to mention their own preferences. These effects are not explained by racial differences in preferences or by being the lone racial minority. Race also shapes the uptake of preferences during discussion. A seat at the table does not suffice for equal voice.

Scholars have studied the carceral state extensively. However, little is known about the “shadow” carceral state, coercive institutions lacking even the limited safeguards of the carceral state. Pretrial incarceration is one such institution. It often lasts months and causes large resource losses. Yet it is imposed in rushed hearings, with wide discretion for bail judges. These circumstances facilitate quick, heuristic judgements relying on racial stereotypes of marginalized populations. We merge court records from Miami-Dade with voter records to estimate the effect of this “shadow” institution on turnout. We find that quasi-randomly assigned harsher bail judges depress voting by Black and Hispanic defendants. Consistent with heuristic processing, these racial disparities result only from inexperienced judges. Unlike judge experience, judge race does not matter; minority judges are as likely to impose detention and reduce turnout. The “shadow” carceral state undermines democratic participation, exacerbating racial inequality

Many citizen decision-making bodies, from juries to boards, have the potential to rep-resent racial minority views because they must deliberate and decide unanimously. However, little is known about the effects of racial diversity on group decisions. Existing studies use observational data, include too few people of color (POC), or cannot disentangle race and preferences. We study one such body, the civil jury, which can check economic actors whose actions disproportionately affect minoritized populations. We analyze 2,694 citizens randomly assigned to 449 mock juries tasked with deciding punitive damages against corporations. The number of POCs on a jury affects private opinions, even accounting for other group and individual characteristics. However, group decisions are less affected, because POC dissenters carry less influence than White dissenters: POCs can change minds more easily than votes. Deliberation and veto power do not eliminate racial barriers to substantive representation.

Socioeconomic disadvantage is a major correlate of low political participation. This association is among the most robust findings in political science. However, it is based largely on observational data. The causal effects of early-life disadvantage in particular are even less understood, because long-term data on the political consequences of randomized early-life anti-poverty interventions is nearly nonexistent. We leverage the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to test the long-term effect of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods—and thus out of deep poverty—on turnout. MTO is one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments ever implemented in the United States. Although MTO ameliorated children’s poverty long term, we find that, contrary to expectations, the intervention did not increase children’s likelihood of voting later in life. Additional tests show the program did not ameliorate their poverty enough to affect turnout. These findings speak to the complex relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and low political participation.

Unlike media coverage of previous drug epidemics, coverage of opioids focuses on Whites and is often sympathetic. Treatment policies garner widespread support. Does sympathetic coverage of Whites cause support for public health over punishment? Does sympathetic coverage of Blacks have the same effect, or is sympathy racially selective? Prior research neglects these questions, focusing on negative messages about non-Whites. In preregistered experiments, including a national population-based survey, we vary both valence and race using fully controlled yet realistic news stories. Sympathetic frames of White and Black users both increase White support for treatment, but the former has larger effects. This racially selective sympathy is explained by racial attitudes. Unsympathetic frames have no effects, pointing to the limits of racial antipathy. Sympathetic stories about Blacks’ stigmatized behavior can increase support for assistance over punishment, but the weaker effect highlights the importance of racially selective sympathy as a distinct concept from racial antipathy.

Whether education affects political participation is a long-standing and central question in political philosophy and political science. In this review, we provide an overview of the three main theoretical models that explain different causal pathways. We then synthesize the surge in research using causal inference strategies and show that this literature has generated mixed results about the causal impact of education, even when using similar methods and data. These findings do not provide clear support for any of the three theories. Our next section covers research on civic education and political participation. The quantity of civic education matters little for political participation, but how civic education is taught does matter. Namely, strategies falling under the rubric of active learning show promise. These strategies seem especially effective for historically marginalized students. Our final section calls for more research on how civic education is taught.

Attention to the American carceral state has focused largely on its bookends: policing and sentencing. Between these bookends lies an underresearched but far-reaching “shadow” carceral state, a hybrid of criminal and commercial systems that often contravenes the principles of liberty, due process, and equal protection. Pretrial detention is an iconic example. It accounts for the majority of people in local jails on a given day. Up to half of detainees will not be convicted, yet detention often lasts months and triggers significant losses. Most are detained because they are too poor to pay bail, and they are disproportionately Black. How does this widespread punitive, arbitrary, and unequal experience affect political behavior? Using administrative records and as-if random assignment of bail magistrates, we find that pretrial incarceration substantially decreases voting among Black Americans. These results point to the neglected but important shadow carceral state.

Going to college doesn’t turn students into Marxists. If anything, it tends to make them more skeptical of redistributing wealth

College is a key pathway to political participation, and lower-income individuals especially stand to benefit from it given their lower political participation. However, rising inequality makes college disproportionately more accessible to high-income students. One consequence of inequality is a prevalence of predominantly affluent campuses. Colleges are thus not insulated from the growing concentration of affluence in American social spaces. We ask how affluent campus spaces affect college’s ability to equalize political participation. Predominantly affluent campuses may create participatory norms that especially elevate low-income students’ participation. Alternatively, they may create affluence-centered social norms that marginalize these students, depressing their participation. A third possibility is equal effects, leaving the initial gap unchanged. Using a large panel survey (201,011 students), controls on many characteristics, and tests for selection bias, we find that predominantly affluent campuses increase political participation to a similar extent for all income groups, thus leaving the gap unchanged. We test psychological, academic, social, political, financial, and institutional mechanisms for the effects. The results carry implications for the self-reinforcing link between inequality and civic institutions.

Women earn approximately half of all bachelor’s degrees in political science but they comprise only 22% of full professors. Scholars have offered various likely explanations and proposed many interventions to improve women’s advancement. This article reviews existing research regarding the effectiveness of these interventions. We find that many of the proposed interventions have yet to be fully evaluated. Furthermore, some of the policies that have been evaluated turn out to be ineffective. Women’s mentoring and networking workshops are the most promising of the fully tested interventions. The potential for failure underscores the need for additional evaluation of any proposed intervention before widespread implementation.

A key question in the study of minority representation is whether descriptive representatives provide superior substantive representation. Neglected in this literature is the distinction between two forms of substantive representation: rhetoric versus policy. We provide a systematic comparison of presidential minority representation along these two dimensions. Barack Obama was the first African American president, yet his substantive representation of African Americans has not been fully evaluated. Using speech and budget data, we find that relative to comparable presidents, Obama offered weaker rhetorical representation, but stronger policy representation, on race and poverty. While we cannot rule out non-racial explanations, Obama’s policy proposals are consistent with minority representation. His actions also suggest that descriptive representatives may provide relatively better policy representation but worse rhetorical representation, at least when the constituency is a numerical minority. We thus highlight an understudied tension between rhetoric and policy in theories of minority representation.

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s Democracy for Realists makes a persuasive case that standard theories of democracy rest on shaky empirical ground, and that optimistically interpreted empirical findings about public competence do not save the day. However, I argue that the solution does not lie with theories of elite competition or accountability to other institutions. Instead, I turn to theories of symbolic politics. These theories capture the empirical reality of how voters engage with politics and make decisions. While they tend to emphasize human irrationality, they also contain the potential for a symbolic kind of rationality that could provide a solid foundation for democratic politics.

Do women benefit from participating in women-only, “enclave” groups? Specifically, do such groups benefit their individual members? This question underlies a number of influential normative theories of inequality but remains underexplored despite the ubiquity of these groups in the organizational life of legislative, party, civic, education, and interest-group settings. This article develops multiple objective and subjective dimensions of individual empowerment that such groups may produce, specifies the institutional conditions that facilitate these benefits, and conducts a comparison with men’s groups. To address selection effects, we use a controlled experiment randomizing gender composition and other group characteristics. We find that female enclaves benefit their members, but only under unanimous rule and for most, but not all, forms of empowerment. Men-only groups do not help men, suggesting that enclaves work because they empower the powerless.

Affluent Americans support more conservative economic policies than the nonaffluent, and government responds disproportionately to these views. Yet little is known about the emergence of these consequential views. We develop, test, and find support for a theory of class cultural norms: These preferences are partly traceable to socialization that occurs on predominantly affluent college campuses, especially those with norms of financial gain, and especially among socially embedded students. The economic views of the student's cohort also matter, in part independently of affluence. We use a large panel data set with a high response rate and more rigorous causal inference strategies than previous socialization studies. The affluent campus effect holds with matching, among students with limited school choice, and in a natural experiment; and it passes placebo tests. College socialization partly explains why affluent Americans support economically conservative policies.

This article reviews the growing literature on the ways in which gender informs our understanding of political psychology and how studies of political psychology shed light on the meaning of gender in society and politics. It focuses on gender gaps in contemporary American politics, where men tend to be more conservative and to engage in more influence-seeking action than women. The article develops explanations for these gaps and tests them with experimental data. The gender gaps in political attitudes and behaviors are not immutable but rather strongly responsive to the context. Two important features of the context are the gender composition of those present and the rules that govern how decisions are made and consequently how individuals communicate.

Does gender equality in public meetings improve as women’s numbers grow? Research applying critical mass theory to the exercise of influence in public discussion and decision making reveals a complicated story. Women have made significant progress in education, employment, and the attainment of elected office; yet, they continue to lag behind their male counterparts in substantive, symbolic, and authoritative representation. Across political, nonpolitical, and experimental settings, women’s participation and influence does not follow necessarily from their numerical proportion. We review previous studies of how women’s lower status is manifested in group interaction, and we argue that research can better identify when and how numbers matter by attending to the group’s context, institutional features, and informal norms. We describe cutting-edge research designed to explore the effects of institutional rules and norms on women’s authority. Women’s increasing numbers in positions of potential influence constitutes a timely, promising, and challenging agenda for further scholarship.

Some contemporary politicians try to mobilize racial attitudes by conveying implicit racial messages against their opponents—messages in which the racial reference is subtle but recognizable and which attack the opponent for alleged misdeeds. Although targeted politicians have tried a number of different strategies to respond to implicit racial appeals, little is known about the effectiveness of these strategies. Using two survey experiments, we answer the following question: Does calling the appeal “racial” work? That is, does it neutralize the negative effects on the attacked candidate? We find mixed evidence that it does. However, offering a credible justification for the attacked behavior works more consistently. We also test whether effects vary by candidate race. The results suggest that Black candidates’ rhetorical strategies are more constrained than identical White candidates’, but that White Americans are more open to credible arguments and justifications than the previous literature implies.

In this brief response, we take up several themes raised by the scholars who responded to our work, paying special attention to the interaction between individuals and group contexts. We argue that our study represents a productive first step in the attempt to understand how norms shape individual behavior, discursive dynamics, collective outcomes, and overall authority in small-group settings.

Critical mass theory argues that women's numbers are a major cause of women's status and authority in a group. Applications of the theory to political settings have yielded mixed support for the theory. We unpack one mechanism that can explain when, why, and how numbers aid women. That mechanism is the norm of communication during group discussion. Our focus is on how women build or lose authority while they interact with men. We argue that numbers – and group procedures – shape norms that advance or hinder women's authority. Women's authority in turn affects the group's decision about economic redistribution – the higher the women's authority, the higher the group's generosity to the poor. We suggest that future work further explore how rules and norms affect women's status in a group by equalizing their participation and influence, with the ultimate goal being equal gender authority.

Scholars and policy-makers have worked for decades to understand and to improve the representation women receive from national and international political organizations. Many of these efforts have focused on increasing the number of women in decision-making bodies. Through ground-breaking experimental research, The Silent Sex argues that these efforts to increase and improve the representation of women will often fall short unless they also address institutional rules that impede women's voices. Unbalanced institutional rules can offset the positive consequences of increasing the number of women in a deliberative body. Group composition and procedures interact to either advance women's authority or hamper it. Similar rules have different impacts depending on the balance between men and women. Men and women enter deliberative settings facing different expectations about their influence and authority. The wrong institutional rules can exacerbate women's deficit of authority; the right rules can elevate women's authority. These rules increase women's participation, establish more cooperative norms of group behavior, and can have important consequences for the descriptive and substantive representation of women and their interests.

When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of interruptions when speaking, and these women then lose influence in their own eyes and in others’. But when the group is assigned to unanimous rule, or when women are many, women experience a positive balance of interruptions, mitigating the deleterious effect of small numbers. Men do not experience this pattern. We draw implications for a type of representation that we call authoritative representation, and for democratic deliberation.

Deliberation plays an important role in a number of political institutions and is also an increasingly common way that citizens participate in politics. This chapter divides political psychology research on small-group deliberation into three clusters of variables: the context in which deliberation takes place, the process by which deliberation proceeds, and the outcomes that deliberation produces. The existing literature shows that deliberation can have meaningful effects on important outcome variables like policy attitudes, citizen knowledge, and subsequent political engagement. However, research on how the context and process of deliberation produce these outcomes is still in its infancy. This chapter argues that as the political psychology literature on deliberation matures, it must pay more attention to process and context questions, in large part because the normative value of deliberation depends less on what the outcomes of deliberation are than on how those outcomes are produced.

Does low descriptive representation inhibit substantive representation for women in deliberating groups? We address this question and go beyond to ask if the effects of descriptive representation also depend on decision rule. We conducted an experiment on distributive decisions, randomizing the group's gender composition and decision rule, including many groups, and linking individuals’ predeliberation attitudes to their speech and to postdeliberation decisions. Women's descriptive representation does produce substantive representation, but primarily under majority rule—when women are many, they are more likely to voice women's distinctive concerns about children, family, the poor, and the needy, and less likely to voice men's distinctive concerns. Men's references shift similarly with women's numerical status. These effects are associated with group decisions that are more generous to the poor. Unanimous rule protects women in the numerical minority, mitigating some of the negative effects of low descriptive representation. Descriptive representation matters, but in interaction with the decision rule.

The Romney campaign has launched a series of ads attacking President Obama’s position.

Can men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing women's descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the group's gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alternatives, using experimental data with many groups and links between individuals' attitudes and speech. We find a substantial gender gap in voice and authority, but as hypothesized, it disappears under unanimous rule and few women, or under majority rule and many women. Deliberative design can avoid inequality by fitting institutional procedure to the social context of the situation.

Scholarship in political science on race and its impact on political preferences has undergone substantial transformation in the last quarter century. Once defined racially by black and white, today the U.S. population is characterized by a multiplicity of racial and ethnic group divisions. Hispanics are now the largest minority population in the United States, followed by African Americans and then Asian Americans and Native Americans. The “multi-racial” population-a category formed by counting more than one racial group and allowed by the census since 2000-is among the fastest-growing groups.1 The United States is in the midst of the most significant wave of immigration in a century, and the vast majority of the newest Americans are no longer from Europe as they once were in the nineteenth century. Instead, more than half of today’s immigrants are from Latin America and another quarter come from Asia. While black migrants from Africa and the Caribbean constitute a much smaller share of new immigrants, their presence creates important diversity within the racial category of black.2 In this chapter we take the increased racial and ethnic diversity of the United States as a starting point, and analyze the significance of race and the group bases of political preferences. We begin with a discussion of categories of race and ethnicity in the United States and argue that these divisions are based not in “objective” biological difference, but rather in social constructions formed through the institutions and practices of U.S. government and society.3 Next we focus on individual-level measurements of psychological attachment to groups-group identity and consciousness-as critical intervening variables between racial group classification and the formation of political preferences. The contours of the relationships between racial group identity, racial group consciousness, and public opinion, particularly for Latinos and Asian Americans, are especially challenging for scholars because these populations and their politics are in flux. Finally, we proceed to analyze additional factors that may differentially influence the political opinions of individuals, depending in part on their racial group classifications and attachments, including party identification and mobilization, interpersonal contact and the racial and economic context, and perceptions of and experiences with discrimination.

Deliberation has become, in the words of one scholar, “the most active area of political theory in its entirety” (Dryzek 2007, 237).  Our exploration of the relationship between experiments and deliberation thus begins with normative theory as its starting point.  Experiments can yield unique insights into the conditions under which the expectations of deliberative theorists are likely to be approximated, as well as the conditions under which theorists' expectations fall short.  Done well, experiments demand an increased level of conceptual precision from researchers of all kinds who are interested in deliberative outcomes. However, perhaps most important, experiments can shed greater scholarly light on the complex and sometimes conflicting mechanisms that may drive the outcomes of various deliberative processes.  In other words, experiments allow researchers to better understand the extent to which, the ways in which, and under what circumstances it is actually deliberation that drives the outcomes deliberative theorists expect.

A growing body of work suggests that exposure to subtle racial cues prompts white voters to penalize black candidates, and that the effects of these cues may influence outcomes indirectly via perceptions of candidate ideology. We test hypotheses related to these ideas using two experiments based on national samples. In one experiment, we manipulated the race of a candidate (Barack Obama vs. John Edwards) accused of sexual impropriety. We found that while both candidates suffered from the accusation, the scandal led respondents to view Obama as more liberal than Edwards, especially among resentful and engaged whites. Second, overall evaluations of Obama declined more sharply than for Edwards. In the other experiment, we manipulated the explicitness of the scandal, and found that implicit cues were more damaging for Obama than explicit ones.

The essays in this volume examine democracy’s development in the United States, demonstrating how that process has shaped—and continues to shape—the American political system.

Scholars of American politics commonly describe the political development of the United States as exceptional and distinct from that of other advanced industrial democracies. They point to the United States as the longest-lived and most stable liberal democracy in history. What they often fail to mention, though, is that it took considerable time to extend democracy throughout the country.

The contributors to this volume suggest that it is intellectually fruitful to consider the U.S. case in comparison to other countries. They argue that the development of democracy is ongoing in America; that even with a written constitution grounded in liberal democracy, the meaning and significance of U.S. democracy are still evolving. This volume shows that democratization and the pursuit of democracy are processes affected by multiple and continuing challenges—including such issues as citizenship, race, institution building, and political movements—as patterns and practices of politics and governance continue to change.

This innovative approach contributes significantly to comparative democratization studies, a field normally confined to Latin America and former communist countries. The U.S. case is a unique reference point for students of American political development and comparative democratization.

This comment addresses the growing controversy over the effects of implicit racial messages in politics. Many scholars find evidence that these implicit messages work and that they have racializing effects. However, the biggest study to date finds that racial messages—implicit or explicit—have no effects. In this paper I conduct a thorough review of several relevant literatures in order to adjudicate between these competing claims. I find that the large study's null findings conflict with 17 public opinion experiments involving over 5,000 subjects, 2 aggregate studies, and a large social psychology literature. Using different methods, samples, and settings, these studies show that racial cues do in fact racialize opinion. I explain the large study's null results by noting that its participants perceived only small differences across messages, that racial predispositions were measured just before exposure to the ad, thereby neutralizing the effect of the ad's racial cue, and that WebTV studies such as this one have failed to provide many subjects with their assigned ad. Thus, the weight of the evidence heavily favors the racial effect of racial cues and messages. I offer several directions for future research on racial communication and politics.Tali Mendelberg is Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University ([email protected]). She is the author of The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton University Press, 2001). She wishes to thank Oleg Bespalov and Dan Cassino for research assistance, Adam Berinsky, Claudine Gay, Martin Gilens, Vince Hutchings, Jon Krosnick, Shawn Rosenberg, and Nick Valentino for helpful feedback, and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for research support.

Can stereotypes of ethnic groups have an indirect impact on voters’ judgments even if voters reject them? We examine the
case of Jewish leaders and hypothesize that acceptable political stereotypes (Jews are liberal) are linked in voters’ minds
to unacceptable social stereotypes (Jews are shady); consequently, a cue to the candidate’s shadiness works indirectly by
increasing the perception that the candidate is liberal, even as the shady cue is rejected. Using three national survey-
experiments we randomly varied a candidate’s Jewish identity, ideology, and shadiness. The cue to the rejected social
stereotype indeed activates the more legitimate political stereotype. Moreover, voters give more weight to the candidate’s
perceived liberalism in their evaluation. Consequently, the candidate’s support suffers. However, when the candidate takes
a more extreme ideological position on issues, the effects disappear. The indirect influence of discredited stereotypes and the
limits of those stereotypes have implications for our understanding of voting and of the legacies of discrimination.

Should citizens be encouraged to deliberate about matters of politics? A review of several literatures about group discussion yields a mixed prognosis for citizen deliberation. Group discussion sometimes meets the expectations of deliberative theorists, other times falls short. Deliberators can, as theorists wish, conduct themselves with empathy for others, equality, and open-mindedness. But attempts to deliberate can also backfire. Social dynamics can often account for both discussions that appear deliberative and for those that clearly fail to meet deliberative criteria.

Did George Bush’s use of the Willie Horton story during the 1988 presidential campaign communicate most effectively when no one noticed its racial meaning? Do politicians routinely evoke racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments without voters’ awareness? This controversial, rigorously researched book argues that they do. Tali Mendelberg examines how and when politicians play the race card and then manage to plausibly deny doing so.

In the age of equality, politicians cannot prime race with impunity due to a norm of racial equality that prohibits racist speech. Yet incentives to appeal to white voters remain strong. As a result, politicians often resort to more subtle uses of race to win elections. Mendelberg documents the development of this implicit communication across time and measures its impact on society. Drawing on a wide variety of research—including simulated television news experiments, national surveys, a comprehensive content analysis of campaign coverage, and historical inquiry—she analyzes the causes, dynamics, and consequences of racially loaded political communication. She also identifies similarities and differences among communication about race, gender, and sexual orientation in the United States and between communication about race in the United States and ethnicity in Europe, thereby contributing to a more general theory of politics.

Mendelberg’s conclusion is that politicians—including many current state governors—continue to play the race card, using terms like “welfare” and “crime” to manipulate white voters’ sentiments without overtly violating egalitarian norms. But she offers some good news: implicitly racial messages lose their appeal, even among their target audience, when their content is exposed.

Are Americans less prejudiced now than they were thirty years ago, or has racism simply gone “underground”? Is racism something we learn as children, or is it a result of certain social groups striving to maintain their privileged positions in society? 

In Racialized Politics, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists explore the current debate surrounding the sources of racism in America. Published here for the first time, the essays represent three major approaches to the topic. The social psychological approach maintains that prejudice socialized early in life feeds racial stereotypes, while the social structural viewpoint argues that behavior is shaped by whites’ fear of losing their privileged status. The third perspective looks to non-racially inspired ideology, including attitudes about the size and role of government, as the reason for opposition to policies such as affirmative action. Timely and important, this collection provides a state-of-the-field assessment of the current issues and findings on the role of racism in mass politics and public opinion. 

Contributors are Lawrence Bobo, Gretchen C. Crosby, Michael C. Dawson, Christopher Federico, P. J. Henry, John J. Hetts, Jennifer L. Hochschild, William G. Howell, Michael Hughes, Donald R. Kinder, Rick Kosterman, Tali Mendelberg, Thomas F. Pettigrew, Howard Schuman, David O. Sears, James Sidanius, Pam Singh, Paul M. Sniderman, Marylee C. Taylor, and Steven A. Tuch.

Although deliberation has a central place in democratic theory, scholars know little about how it actually works. Most deliberative theorists emphasize the many good consequences of deliberation. By contrast, Mansbridge suggests that deliberation in certain circumstances may exacerbate conflict. Scholarship on racial politics suggests that each hypothesis is complicated by implicitly racial language. Using a quasi-experiment, we contrast the rhetoric in two town meetings about school desegregation: a segregated meeting with homogeneous interests, in which segregated Whites unanimously argued against desegregation, and an integrated meeting with heterogeneous interests, in which segregated Whites argued against integrated Whites, Hispanics, and African Americans. We find that (a) deliberation at the segregated meeting maintained consensus among segregated Whites; (b) these citizens used coded rhetoric that appeared universal, well-reasoned, and focused on the common good, but in fact advanced their group interest; (c) deliberation at the integrated meeting maintained the conflict between segregated Whites and others; and (d) there, rhetoric that seemed universal to segregated Whites was decoded by the integrated audience as racist and group interested. We highlight the problem posed by the contested meaning of language and suggest ways to make deliberation more effective.

Most research on the environmental determinants of whites' racial attitudes focuses on the "threat" hypothesis, i.e., that white racism increases with the competition posed by a larger black population. We argue that in the segregated United States, contextual effects are more complicated than this, involving both race and socio-economic status. Cross-level data on individual racial attitudes and the environment's racial and education composition, constructed from the 1991 Race and Politics Survey and the 1990 Census, support this assertion. Living amongst more uneducated whites has a greater impact on whites' racial attitudes than does living amongst more blacks. Further analysis shows that the sources of this effect come less from interracial competition and more from a psychological response of out-group hostility generated by low status contexts. We also find that whites' views on racially targeted policies are shaped by racial contexts but only where the contextual parameter coincides with the policy outcome. Our findings suggest specific limitations to the threat thesis and highlight other ways that social contexts shape racial attitudes.

Despite the heroic efforts and real achievements provided by the Civil Rights movement, the United States remains today a profoundly segregated society. Here we investigate whether racial isolation affects the extent to which prejudice becomes insinuated into the opinions white Americans express on matters of racial policy. Analyzing national survey data well suited to this question, we find that racial isolation generally enhances the impact of prejudice on opinion; that the political potency of prejudice increases insofar as racial isolation prevails in whites' everyday lives. In the conclusion of the article, we locate our results in the broader literature on segregation and draw out their implications for racial politics into the future.