We analyze data from a national sample of the U.S. population to assess public support for policies that deny former offenders’ access to job training programs, food stamps, and public housing. We find that Americans generally oppose benefit restrictions, though support for these policies is higher among Republicans and people with higher levels of racial resentment. We also find that a legislator’s criminal justice reform positions generally do not significantly affect voters’ evaluation of him or her, and even voters with more punitive attitudes toward collateral consequence policies support legislators who advance particular kinds of reform proposals. These findings provide little evidence that any group of Americans would be mobilized to vote against a legislator who works to reform collateral consequence policies. We discuss the implications of these findings for American and comparative studies of the politics of punishment.

Recent studies find that voters regularly punish presidents for seemingly unrelated events, despite a clear understanding of how these issues become tied to the president. We contend that the media plays an important role in creating this link. Testing this, we examined how the 2010 BP oil spill shaped evaluations of President Barack Obama, paying particular attention to news coverage to isolate the event's applicability to the president. We estimate the causal effect of these different frames by matching respondents from a prespill control group to two separate treatment phases, finding that presidential confidence decreases once the media begins attributing political blame, but not before.

After years of gridlock on the issue, a bipartisan group of members of Congress struck a deal in 2020 to restore eligibility for inmates to access Pell Grants. Evidence indicates that college education programs in prison reduce recidivism and, consequently, state corrections expenditures, but legislators in prior decades feared that voters would resent government subsidy of college classes for criminals. To assess the contemporary politics of the issue, we analyze data from a framing experiment embedded in the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find that Americans, on average, neither support nor oppose the proposal to restore inmates’ Pell Grant eligibility; however, exposure to arguments about the proposal’s benefits to inmates in particular and American society more broadly both increased subjects’ support. We further explore how this framing effect varies across political partisanship and racial resentment. We find that both frames elicited a positive response from subjects, especially among Democrats and subjects with low or moderate racial resentment.

For much of the postwar era, conservative forces blocked progressive labor policy from reaching a floor vote. With huge Democratic majorities in Congress, the 1960s represented a rare opportunity for unions to substantively alter industrial relations policy. The decade served as an important moment of policy development for numerous groups in the coalition. Organized labor, however, made few gains during this prolific era. Despite labor's central position within the governing coalition, Democrats repeatedly failed to pass its most important legislative ambition, the repeal of Taft-Hartley's right-to-work clause. In 1965, Democrats nearly achieved this goal when such a bill passed the House, only to be blocked by a filibuster in the Senate. By analyzing the Democrats' legislative priorities during the Great Society, I show how coalitional politics structured the party's policy agenda, and how this ordering affected legislation in turn. With the infusion of new coalitional demands, party elites strategically placed labor's controversial issue at the end of a long legislative agenda, effectively eliminating any chance for passage.Rather than locating all blame with the usual suspects, this rarely studied episode suggests that President Johnson and his leaders in Congress played a central role in the bill's failure.