How do perceptions of racial resilience of African Americans influence the frequency and substance of their participation in American politics? To date, there are few accounts of how racial resilience, or an individual resilience matters in politics. Nor are there accounts of how racial resilience influences political engagement and participation, particularly in costly political acts. This dissertation examines the role of racial resilience among African Americans – a racial group that votes at higher rates compared to non-black minorities, and as a bloc for the Democratic party - and the influence of racial resilience in American politics. This project presents a novel framework and an original measure of racial resilience to investigate how the varied response to adversity – including an orientation to Black triumph, and an awareness of Black economic subjugation – shape political involvement and engagement among African Americans. The main theoretical argument is that African Americans’ experience of prolonged adversity has bestowed a unique worldview of responding to adversity with persistence, which in turn, pushes African Americans to embrace the politics of resilience, which is associated with increased participation in politics. Using surveys, survey experiments, and qualitative data, I create, construct, and validate a novel measure of racial resilience. I explore the demographic contours associated with higher racial resilience. I find that racial resilience is a salient attribute and is consistently associated with higher cost political engagement among African Americans. The findings of this dissertation also have implications for how Black political behavior is motivated through shared group attributes. Furthermore, the contributions of this dissertation expand beyond racial and ethnic politics to understand how politics, today, requires extra-ordinary effort and engagement, and resilience to adversity is central to participation.

How does institutional differences across state legislatures representation and the political pathways of women, people of color, and working class state legislators? While some studies have focused on institutional elements of state legislatures, few have focused on how representational pathways are affected for individual legislators. Furthermore, studies that have focused on legislator pathways have generally analyzed one particular state legislature. This project will contribute to the literature on state legislatures by taking a mixed methods, interstate, and institutional approach to studying representation. The theoretical framework for analyzing the constraint among legislators is an ‘Hourglass of Representation,’ in which legislators (and particularly people of color legislators) are pinched between ‘bottom up’ pressures from their district along with social movements and interest groups, and ‘top down’ forces, including the leadership structure and culture of the legislature and state-level political and institutional forces. I argue that people of color, women, and working class legislators are particularly constrained by this situation both because the bottom up forces facing them are more intense and the roadblocks facing them for obtaining power and advancing agendas are more severe.

There are three key contributions this dissertation makes to the Political Science literature on representation in state legislatures. The first study contains an analysis of legislator interaction with constituents, including constituent work, in-district legislator events, and other forms of legislative styles that emerge among legislators. This work is related to Richard Fenno's Homestyle and related work on credit claiming and the personal vote for a representative. It is in conversation with, and expands on the work found in Homestyle by using a variety of methods to analyze legislator activities. Furthermore, it is one of relatively few studies which studies both legislative lawmaking and constituent services in the same project. Additionally, it combines legislative activity with their subsequent progressive advancement to Congress and other legislative bodies or elected offices. In the course of this research, I argue that many people of color legislators place a greater effort on Homestyle Politics than would be predicted simply from electoral incentives. This is in part that many people of color legislators face unique pressures from their district; frequently their districts are among the most left-leaning in the state legislature, they are likely to be indebted to ideological groups who helped them run for office and originally recruited them, and also these districts operate in a context of hostility from the state government at large. To address this question, I assembled a unique data set of legislator communication via public twitter accounts in 2016 and 2017.

The second study contains an analysis of visible and less visible legislative actions to secure substantive representation for people of color groups. There will be a discussion of how focusing on latter stages in the legislative process may obscure the unique legislative styles of people of color legislators. It also contains a cross-state analysis of the varying role of legislative institutions and their effects on the opportunities and trade offs legislators are faced with. Discussion of how some forms of constraint on legislators are relatively identity neutral, while others more strongly inhibit the choices of women, people of color, or particularly women of color. To address this question, I assembled a unique data set of bill and resolution sponsorship, including its eventual passage in the legislature, among all state legislatures in 2016 and 2017 via legiscan.com.

The third study continues the legislative institutional argument by looking at the role of state party and legislative institutions on equality of access to legislative office and progressive advancement to Congress. This is followed by a discussion of how these sources of constraint occur at many stages in the career of a legislator. Many of these forms of constraint most negatively affect legislators wanting to advance radical redistributive politics across class and racial lines, along with advocating for those in which there is a consensus across both political parties of marginality (non-citizens, criminals, prisoners, people expressing anti-American or irreligious viewpoints, etc.) To address this question, I assembled a unique data set of the occupational backgrounds and electoral history of all state legislators and members of Congress for the year 2020 from existing public data. Three key findings were found from the aforementioned studies, and they are as follows: State legislators from non-white backgrounds, particularly Black legislators devote more effort to constituency service and particularly constituent service events. Furthermore, these legislatures showed much higher levels of tailoring events and information to diverse groups of constituents rather than relying on generic information, another sign of legislative effort. This may come from group consciousness held by the legislator in some cases, although it also may be informed by the constraint faced by these legislators in other avenues. Legislators constrained from taking action in the legislative arena (e.g. committee work) may devote more attention to activities where they have more autonomy.

Legislators from legislatures with higher variation in legislative activity are less likely to ascend to higher office, including moving from the state house to the state senate. The variation in legislative activity is theorized to be reflective of inequality within the legislature in power and open avenues for lawmaking. Although in theory a legislature with no variation in legislative activity could also be a sign of legislative constraint, this was not found to be the case within any legislature. Future work will explore other measures of legislative success besides election to higher office and reelection.

Members of Congress with past legislative experience were far more likely to come from legislatures with more professionalized state legislatures. Professionalized state legislatures were also more likely to show lower levels of legislative inequality and constraint. However, it is important to note that even in the "best" state legislatures on these measures, the legislatures were still quite unequal in legislative power and the constraint facing their members. Furthermore, they all showed evidence of bias in recruitment networks that made it less likely for legislators of nontraditional backgrounds to run for higher office and win.

This dissertation contributes to the growing understanding of the role of formal and informal political institutions on the representation of marginalized groups and the political pathways of legislators in unequal legislative environments. Furthermore, it makes a contribution to the literature on credit claiming, electoral threat, and homestyle politics literature in Political Science.

Rampant voter suppression post Shelby County v. Holder has targeted Black southern voter participation. Despite these deterrents, Black voter turnout remains consistently high. I posit that this paradox can be explained by the countermobilizing efforts of Black socio-cultural institutions (the Black church and Black civic and community organizations) serving as cost reducing mechanisms for Black voters. I argue that while voter suppression increases the cost of voting, these institutions reduce the cost of voting by increasing voters’ willingness to commit Counteractive Political Activities - activities that directly counteract the barriers placed by voter suppression. I posit that these non-traditional and rarely measured activities are critical to bolstering political participation among Black voters in environments where voting is not a straightforward or easy task.

To investigate this, I ask three research questions: 1) To what extent does involvement in socio-cultural institutions influence voters’ willingness to overcome voter suppression? 2) What factors influence the effectiveness of Black socio-cultural institutions in mobilizing Black voters against suppressive electoral policies? 3) To what extent do Black socio-culturalinstitutions influence Black voter turnout in jurisdictions implementing suppressive electoral policies, ceteris paribus? I answer these questions with a mixed methods approach, utilizing original survey data of Black and white respondents nationally, original survey data of Black religious voters, in-depth interviews with leaders of a prominent mobilizing institution, and election data from the 2022 midterm election. Using the state of Texas as a case study, I show that engagement in socio-cultural institutions works to reverse the negative effects of being low-income and less formally educated on political participation for African Americans. I show that among Black religious voters, when an individual’s church works to ease the logistical burden of voting, that individual increases in willingness to overcome voter suppression. I uncover the strategies of one of Texas’ prominent political churches qualitatively and quantitatively and show that their mobilizing strategy is made effective by partnering material resource provision with racial and spiritual appeals toward civic participation. The findings of this dissertation extend our understanding of Black political participation and the critical role that Black institutions play in countering the effects of voter suppression.

Scholars studying religion and politics have largely focused on how participatory religious behaviors--such as frequent church attendance--are important for political participation. This has been established not just for traditionally white, Christian populations, but for Black Americans and Latinos. Religious institutions have historically served as a central support system for Asian American immigrants. Asian Americans, however, practice a diversity of faiths, including non-Judeo-Christian faiths where frequent worship attendance is not a condition for high religiosity and instead, devotional behaviors are also important religious practices\textemdash which then may also provide a path to political participation. However, there are few studies examining the extent to which the religion-to-politics pathway extends to non-Christian religious traditions. This dissertation seeks to examine how external and internal religious behaviors serve as a resource for political participation among Asian Americans and across religious traditions for Asian American Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus. Across four sets of surveys, I find that external religious behaviors are consistently associated with non-voting political participation across religions, and may provide resources such as a salient political identity for political participation. This latter resource, however, is particularly important for places of worship that are primarily composed of Asian American immigrants, further centering the institutional importance of places of worship for immigrants in the U.S. I also find that internal religiosity is a predictor of civic engagement among Hindu Asian Americans and suggest that the role of internal and external religiosity may be conditioned by the socioeconomic status of immigrants. My findings have implications for the role that religion plays not just for resource acquisition but on the role of religious and ethnic identity across generations. This project contributes to our understanding of religion and politics, and the institutions beyond traditional actors like political parties that play an important role in Asian Americans political behavior.

This dissertation examines differences in government and community responses to local industrial pollution disasters and the differences in outcomes received by demographically different community types. It does so by asking two distinct research questions. First, what factors influence the mode of mobilization a community engages in, when responding to an industrial pollution disaster? Second, what factors influence government responsiveness to these mobilized communities? I examine these questions through the use of comparative case study analysis of Porter Ranch and Southeast Los Angeles. This study connects social movement theory with literature on environmental racism. It does so by extending Fredrick Harris’ (2006) argument that historically informed collective memory spurs or motivates participation in collective action, to also consider how collective memory influences the modes, or tactics, of mobilization. This dissertation also engages with Hahrie Han’s “issue publics” theory, to understand the motivation for collective action in polluted communities (2006). With the use of ethnographic, interview, and media sources, I find that the local collective memory of a community’s relationship with local government, determines the mode of mobilization in which that community engages when it experiences an industrial pollution disaster. Specifically, I find that communities with a collective memory of a positive relationship with the state, will utilize that tactics that demonstrate an expectation of government responsiveness; I call this the faith-in-government framework. Likewise, a community with a collective memory of a negative relationship with local government will utilize tactics that demonstrate no expectation of government responsiveness; I call this the no-faith-in-government framework. In response to the second research question, I engage with the literature on government emergency response. I argue in agreement with Birkland and De Young (2011) that coordination across different levels of government leads to procedural uncertainty and impacts the quality of local government responsiveness to pollution disasters. I find support for Birkland and De Young and also find that the ad hoc creation of industrial pollution legislation has exacerbated the uncertainty the authors described. These findings demonstrate the importance of creating comprehensive industrial pollution policies that consider both emergency prevention and emergency response and have implications for policy makers and community activists alike.

Under what conditions does intersectionality influence the strategies of social movement leaders? Social identities are crucial for social movement organizations (SMO), serving as one of the strongest mobilizers for movement participants. Activists utilize group identities to recruit and retain participants (Polletta and Jasper 2001), similarly, the social identities of the movement’s leadership are important for mobilization processes. Psychology research suggests people expect leaders to hold more privileged identities such as Whiteness or masculinity (Rosette, Leonardelli, and Phillips 2008; Scott and Brown 2006). While Black women can achieve leadership positions, they tend to do so in organizations on the decline (Rosette and Livingston 2012a). Between the downward trajectory of the organizations and discrimination from within (H. M. Hurwitz 2019) leaders with multiple marginalized, or intersectional, identities face tremendous challenges in leading activist organizations.I argue intersectional activists take resistance against their intersectional identity into account in their strategizing and therefore prefer more moderate tactics rather than techniques considered radical. I speculate this includes a hesitation to include intersectional political agendas into their organizing for fear of backlash. This framework identifies the concern of discriminatory resistance as a key factor in intersectional leaders' tactical selection and assesses the potency of this factor’s influence on public opinion. Social psychology research finds that as intersectional activists' leadership status is more fragile, they are more likely to act on behalf of the group and react more harshly when someone defies group norms (Ellemers and Jetten 2013). Given the symbiotic relationship between leaders and followers, I assess each group’s perception of public support for intersectional leadership and their freedom in emphasizing issues. This multi-method project seeks to understand intersectional leadership within social justice organizations and how these dynamics influence American political behavior. Utilizing survey experiments and in-depth interviews, I focus this analysis on Black women’s incorporation into activist organizations' public reception to movements focusing on them, public response to Black women’s leadership, and how Black women in social movements manage these attitudes while organizing.