Research

In the United States today, mass preferences for fiscal and social spending policies appear minimally responsive to rising earnings inequality and rapidly deteriorating job protections. Theories of political behavior and political economy maintain that because individuals’ preferences for redistribution depend on whether they perceive racial outgroups to be policy beneficiaries, racial animus may explain the mismatch between contemporary inequality and redistributive preferences. However, this literature largely conceptualizes redistribution as zero-sum. In this paper, I ask how redistributive preferences change when both ingroup and outgroup stand to benefit from a policy outcome. I consider one redistributive outcome – unionization – and look at its relationship to the ethnoracial composition of the 170 largest retail firms in the U.S. Using survey data collected through The Shift Project in the spring of 2023 (n=18,544), I find that greater workplace ethnoracial diversity is associated with lower support for unionization. I conduct sensitivity analyses and find that the result is robust to a number of demographic controls and is not driven by firm- or state-level trends. I explore several moderating variables that highlight how within-firm structural factors may explain the relationship between diversity and unionization.

Existing research has documented the effects of partisan segregation for contact between groups, discriminatory behavior and local political participation in the US. However, previous work has almost exclusively focused on partisan segregation in residential settings. We argue that workplaces may hold independent explanatory power in the study of sorting based on political preferences and identity. In this paper, we investigate the effects that coworker and worker-firm (management) ideological misalignment separately have on workers’ decisions to exit ideologically incompatible jobs. Then, we compare the effects of partisan sorting on intentions to transition out of jobs to material drivers of turnover. We find no evidence of the potential for sorting by ideology for workers in our sample. Ideological misalignment with coworkers and management at the firm-level is not associated with workers’ intentions to exit jobs at baseline. Instead, the workers in our sample appear motivated by material job amenities, such as benefits and stable scheduling practices. By focusing on a large but understudied segment of the American workforce — low-wage service sector workers — we bring attention to the way that partisan sorting through work may operate for workers with different levels of market power. Our findings advance research on the drivers of partisan sorting and contribute to a nascent agenda focused on better understanding the effects of work on Americans’ political behavior.

Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

Prior research shows the pro-Trump, anti-democratic January 6th insurrection (J6) led to a short-term reduction in Republican support for President Trump. However, less research explains why the anti-Trump backlash occurred among his base. We theorize white Republicans concerned about the declining status of Anglo whites in the American ethno-racial hierarchy will be the least likely to backlash against Trump after J6. Leveraging an unexpected-event-during-survey design (UESD) and a large survey fielded shortly before and after J6, we find the anti-Trump backlash post-J6 among white Republicans is cancelled out by those who strongly perceive anti-white discrimination (Study 1). We replicate this result with another UESD with a separate survey fielded during J6 (Study 2) and a difference-in-differences approach with additional panel surveys fielded around J6 (Study 3). Moreover, across 4 cross-sectional surveys, we find the negative relationship between J6 disapproval and Trump support post-J6 between 2021-2024 is attenuated among status-threatened white Republicans (Studies 4-7). Our evidence suggests status threat undercuts the ability for the white Republican mass public to hold co-partisan anti-democratic elites accountable for norm violations.