The Political Origins of Racial Inequality

Abstract

Policy feedback theory argues that public policies shape mass political behavior by teaching citizens about their relationship to government. I reevaluate this argument by examining how criminal justice policy shapes the political orientations and participation of blacks and whites. I argue that, because these policies send different messages to blacks than to whites about the treatment they can expect from government, these groups have opposite reactions to criminal justice enforcement. Using data from a 2014 national survey and information on local criminal justice outcomes, I find that racially skewed criminal justice enforcement is associated with negative political orientations and lower rates of political participation for highly educated blacks. I also find that whites respond positively to similar criminal justice outcomes when they reside in areas with large black populations. The results show that unequal policy outcomes lead to political inequality.

Policy Feedback in a Racialized Polity

“…These findings are substantively important and they validate that key insights can derive from investigating how and why policy feedback differs across racial groups . In more recent work, Garcia‐Rios, Lajevardi, Oskooii, and Walker (), Maltby () and Rocha, Knoll, and Wrinkle () similarly consider how policy feedback effects vary across racial groups.…”

The Ripple Effect: The Political Consequences of Proximal Contact with Immigration Enforcement

“…The group consciousness literature nevertheless offers insight into how we might expect racial subgroups to respond to proximal contact with immigration enforcement. Race structures interactions with law enforcement of all types (Maltby 2017), where whites are much less likely to have any type of contact and more likely to know people who have had positive interactions with the system than are Blacks and Latinos, whose personal and proximal experiences are more likely to be antagonistic (Mondak et al 2017). Moreover, each racial subgroup has very different histories with institutional and social exclusion more generally, and the extent to which individuals view experiences with immigration as systemically unfair should likewise vary.…”

No Justice, No Peace: Political Science Perspectives on the American Carceral State

“…Researchers leverage administrative records of interactions that result from preemptive policing and associated tactics (Laniyonu 2018; 2019), state supervision rates at the block group level (Morris 2020), and variation in local criminal legal racial disparities (Maltby 2017) to assess the political effects of living in a community with high levels of criminal legal intervention. Researchers have likewise tried to understand the civic consequences of officer-involved shootings, where responses to such incidents appear most vividly via protest, marked especially by the rise of the movement for Black lives (Cohen et al 2019; Williamson et al 2018).…”

“…Yet, while much research confirms the capacity for the carceral state to erode political voice through declining trust (Maltby 2017) and diminished voting (Laniyonu 2019; Morris 2020; White 2019), revisiting the methods employed in extant studies, some researchers find a negligible relationship between incarceration and voting (Gerber et al 2017). Still, others find that exposure can be mobilizing, especially when contact is vicarious and in reference to protesting (Anoll and Israel-Trummel 2019; Laniyonu 2018; Walker 2014; 2020; Walker et al this volume; White 2016; Williamson et al 2018).…”