It has long been assumed that foreign-policy attitudes of the mass public are random, disorganized, and unconstrained if they exist at all. Further, foreign-policy thinking has not been found to be structured along standard ideological (liberal-conservative) lines, partisan lines, or class lines. We attempt to move the discussion from a question of whether foreign-policy attitudes are structured to a question of how they are structured. We propose and estimate (using a LISREL model) a hierarchically organized foreign-policy belief structure in which specific policy preferences are derived from postures (broad, abstract beliefs regarding appropriate general governmental strategies). These postures, in turn, are assumed to be constrained by a set of core values about the international community.

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To date, little is known about the precise impact of racially coded words and phrases. Instead, most of what we know about racialized messages comes from studies that focus on pictorial racial cues (for example, the infamous "Willie Horton" ad) or on messages with an extensive textual narrative that is laced with implicit racial cues. Because in a "post-Horton" era strategic use of racially coded words will often be far more subtle than those explored in past studies, we investigate the power of a single phrase believed by many to carry strong racial connotations: "inner city." We do so by embedding an experiment in a national survey of whites, where a random half of respondents was asked whether they support spending money for prisons (versus antipoverty programs) to lock up "violent criminals," while the other half was asked about "violent inner city criminals." Consistent with the literature on issue framing, we find that whites' racial attitudes (for example, racial stereotypes) were much more important in shaping preferences for punitive policies when they receive the racially coded, "inner city" question. Our results demonstrate how easy it is to continue "playing the race card" in the post-Willie Horton era, as well as some of the limits of such framing effects among whites with more positive racial attitudes.

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Although there exists a large and well-documented "race gap" between whites and blacks in their support for the death penalty, we know relatively little about the nature of these differences and how the races respond to various arguments against the penalty. To explore such differences, we embedded an experiment in a national survey in which respondents are randomly assigned to one of several argument conditions. We find that African Americans are more responsive to argument frames that are both racial (i.e., the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are black) and nonracial (i.e., too many innocent people are being executed) than are whites, who are highly resistant to persuasion and, in the case of the racial argument, actually become more supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against blacks. These interracial differences in response to the framing of arguments against the death penalty can be explained, in part, by the degree to which people attribute the causes of black criminality to either dispositional or systemic forces (i.e., the racial biases of the criminal justice system).

Research on mass support for democracies shows that popular support for democratic norms is at an historic high. At the same time, research on political tolerance draws considerably bleaker conclusions about the democratic capacity of mass publics. We attempt to synthesize the essential lessons of these two literatures into a general model of democratic learning which argues that exposure to the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics should enhance political tolerance. We provide a test of the model using multilevel data from a diverse set of 17 countries. At the macro-level, we find, consistent with our theory, that: (1) political tolerance is greater in stable democracies that have endured over time (the longer the better), independent of a nation’s socioeconomic development; and (2) that federal systems increase levels of tolerance, as well. At the micro-level, we find that democratic activism, or using civil liberties, enhances political tolerance, independent of a host of other individual-level predictors. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for studies of democratization and political tolerance.

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Past studies have found evidence of a connection between race and crime in the minds of many white Americans, but several gaps remain in our knowledge of this association. Here, a multimethod approach was used to examine more closely the racial component of whites' support for ostensibly race-neutral crime policies. Conventional correlational analysis showed that negative stereotypes of African Americans-specifically, the belief that blacks are violent and lazy-are an important source of support for punitive policies such as the death penalty and longer prison terms. A survey experiment further showed that negative evaluations of black prisoners are much more strongly tied to support for punitive policies than are negative evaluations of white prisoners. These findings suggest that when many whites think of punitive crime policies to deal with violent offenders, they are thinking of black offenders.