No abstract

Objective Research examining the factors shaping gun policy attitudes has focused on the general population or whites. Little is known about how self‐interest, political values, or racial prejudice shape the gun policy preferences of minorities. We seek to assess the effect of self‐interest, political values, and racial prejudice on the gun policy attitudes of whites, Latinos, and blacks. We also introduce a measure of prejudice difference in group violence—which has not been previously used in the literature on gun policy opinion. Methods We use data from a new survey (2015) and analyze whites, blacks, and Latinos separately. Results We find that many of the drivers of support for gun control found in the general population apply to minorities as well, but the substantive effects vary across groups. Similar to prior general population findings, we find that for all groups concern about crime is associated with more support for gun control, and that gun ownership, being the victim of a crime, and conservative political values are associated with less support. Conclusion In contrast, we find that racial prejudice is negatively correlated with support for gun control among whites and Latinos, while one type of racial prejudice—racial resentment—increases support for gun control among blacks.

Children of immigrant backgrounds—children who are immigrants themselves or were born to immigrant parents—are the largest segment of growth in the U.S. school population. In this exploratory interdisciplinary analysis, Filindra, Blanding, and Garcia Coll ask whether the context of policy and political receptivity, even when they are not directed at school reform or at immigrants, nonetheless affects the high school completion of children of immigrant backgrounds. The novelty of this work is its theoretical integration of insights from multiple disciplines and its emphasis on the larger context in analyzing the educational outcomes for children of immigrants. The authors' findings suggest that policy matters and that it matters in different ways. Specifically, they find a strong positive association between the immigrant inclusion in state welfare programs and high school graduation rates for the children of immigrants. At the same time, the study suggests that multiculturalism policies, targeting racial and ethnic minorities rather than immigrants specifically, may have the opposite effect. Finally, the authors suggest that politics also matters, as seen in the gap in graduation rates between the children of immigrants and the children of U.S.-born parents, which is narrower in Democrat-dominated states than it is in Republicancontrolled states.

Gun ownership is a key predictor of gun policy preferences, political advocacy on behalf of gun rights, and political engagement. Theories have linked both racial and gender ideologies to gun ownership among white Americans, but the evidence is spotty. Statistical analyses provide some limited confirmation that racial resentment is a key predictor of gun ownership, but the role of sexism has not been tested quantitatively especially in conjunction with racial resentment. We use the 2004–2016 ANES and a 2015 Gun Survey to statistically test the relative importance of racial resentment and sexism in predicting gun ownership, rationales for owning firearms, and NRA membership among whites. We find strong evidence that racial resentment is associated with gun ownership, rationales for owning firearms, and NRA membership, but the results for sexism are generally not consistent with expectations.

This study initiates a methodological critique of the state‐level immigration policy literature through the lens of the racial threat and group power perspectives. First, I highlight the conceptual problems related to the application of such theories to legislature‐level data analysis. Next, I demonstrate the methodological and analytical problems that raise concerns about ad hoc theorizing in this field. Using counts of hostile and welcoming immigration legislation (2005–2011), I demonstrate that outgroup size measures correlate positively with both dependent variables while measures of population growth rate yield null results unless used on their own. These results suggest that the use of legislature‐level models with demographic indicators does not allow us to gain a clear understanding of whether and how population dynamics influence immigration policymaking. Based on these findings, I recommend that when using demographic indicators as key explanatory variables, researchers provide evidence of result consistency across multiple model specifications and also test the models with both hostile and inclusive policy variables. Such protocols would help avoid ad hoc theorizing.