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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Does gender equality in public meetings improve as women’s numbers grow?Research applying critical mass theory to the exercise of influence in publicdiscussion and decision making reveals a complicated story. Women have madesignificant 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 experimentalsettings, women’s participation and influence does not follow necessarily from theirnumerical proportion. We review previous studies of how women’s lower status ismanifested in group interaction, and we argue that research can better identify whenand how numbers matter by attending to the group’s context, institutional features,and informal norms. We describe cutting-edge research designed to explore theeffects of institutional rules and norms on women’s authority. Women’s increasingnumbers in positions of potential influence constitutes a timely, promising, andchallenging agenda for further scholarship.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.