Los Angeles has a history of considerable racial and ethnic conflict, ranging from the “zoot suit riots” of 1943 through the Watts riots of 1965 and the so-called “Rodney King” rioting in 1992. Politics in Los Angeles has often reflected this intergroup conflict, from Sam Yorty’s mayoralty campaign against the black Tom Bradley, that many observers felt was laced with quasi-racist appeals, through the high-intensity contentions over busing for school integration in the 1970's and over illegal immigration in the 1990's, to the ethnic rivalries that surfaced in the 2001 mayoralty race between James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa.

At the end of World War II Los Angeles County had an overwhelmingly white population. That has changed over time, most dramatically in the last two decades. Now there is no majority ethnic group in Los Angeles County. The largest consists of Latinos, with about 41% of the total population, according to the 2000 Census. Trailing well behind are non-Hispanic whites, at 32%. True “minority” groups include Asian Americans (12%) and African Americans (10%). This combination of a history of ethnic and racial conflict in the area, and the sharply changing demographics that are bound to alter the social dynamics of ethnic relations in Los Angeles, led us to focus the 2001 Los Angeles County Social Survey on perceptions of and attitudes about ethnic and racial conflict.

The dominant theories in the study of political partisanship and policy attitude formation tend to focus on the role of either individual-level processes or large-scale political events. The series of studies that comprise this dissertation project seek to bridge that divide -- highlighting the interaction of individual variation in social identities with external political events -- to explain differences in partisanship and policy attitudes among members of three groups: white Catholics, Latinos, and Jewish Americans. The three studies show that the strength with which a person identifies as a member of each group is consequential to their issue priorities, and subsequently to their partisanship under conditions of partisan differentiation. Taken together, these studies provide a well-supported theoretical framework that connects and builds on research from political science, psychology, and communication studies.

The collapse of communism two decades ago — and the subsequent political and economic transformation of Central and Eastern Europe — has raised new questions about the ability of citizens to adapt to changing institutional orders. This dissertation project starts with a large and fundamental puzzle: over the past twenty years, post-communist nations have shown improved convergence toward Western standards of economic and political performance, yet public opinion has grown increasingly disapproving of the changes that have taken place. Why?

While rational-choice theories expect individuals to engage in simple cost-benefit analyses of altering realities, psychological accounts suggest impediments to such practicable adjustments; theories of socialization and attitude "persistence," in particular, emphasize the perseverance and continuing influence of values acquired earlier in life. This dissertation seeks to integrate these various insights and provide a more comprehensive understanding of transition at the individual- level. Utilizing a unique mix of (a) cross-sectional, repeated survey data (European Values Study/World Values Study, 1990-2005), (b) longitudinal survey data (German Socioeconomic Panel, 1999-2010), and (c) macro indicators of economic and political outputs, it investigates the relative importance of early ("primacy") experiences, (re-)learning procedures, and contemporary societal factors for the development of post-communist beliefs. Incorporating a range of statistical techniques, it also probes related mechanisms of change, including within-person attitude stability, alterations in cohort composition over time, migration, and the intergenerational transmission of values, so as to better address the prospects for convergence.

The findings reveal numerous challenges to the task of attitudinal adaptation. Although post-communists are found to partially respond to changing circumstances — and to move some way toward the norms espoused by their Western counterparts — these shifts are shown to be neither linear over time, nor symmetrical for all involved. Rather, even decades after regime change, significant (leftist) biases remain, particularly for members of older cohorts. Supplementary analyses unearth additional evidence of resistance, illustrating how these stable, socialist distinctions might linger further into the long-term, defying physical relocation and potentially even population replacement. Such an inquiry is hoped to illuminate transitions beyond Europe (e.g., China, Middle East), where citizen adaptation to post-authoritarian climates will be critical for democratic consolidation.

This dissertation project addresses three observations: the degree to which researchers routinely use data collected only on survivors, ignoring that who is included in samples is pre-determined by non-random mortality; that historical mortality gaps between blacks and whites have generated a cumulative demographic contraction among blacks that constitute a non-trivial vanishing electorate; and that differences in infant mortality rates (IMRs) between blacks and whites strongly correlate with the party that controls the presidency. I used data from several sources including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Multiple Causes of Death, MIDUS, and the U.S. Census Bureau among others.

Because researchers are always dealing with samples truncated by non-random mortality, paradigms in social research like the relationship between age and participation are partially spurious. I find that the effect that age exerts on participation is mediated by mortality rates linked to differences in SES because, as time progresses, low-SES individuals (i.e., low-level participants) die younger than high-SES individuals (i.e., high-level participants). I also set forth a model for the impact of racial mortality gaps on the total vote lost among blacks (1970-2004). Because the dead cannot vote or voice opinions, excess deaths exacerbate the imbalance of socio-political power, especially between blacks and whites, where health differences are most pronounced. I show that the total number of excess deaths among blacks is large enough to affect the outcome of presidential elections. And, finally, I investigate the fluctuations of national and black and white IMRs associated with the political party in power. Party differences in policy preferences lead to different results in many aspects of social development, of which health is no exception. Results show that a good portion of the comparative international underperformance of the U.S. for IMR as well as of persistent black-white disparities in IMR is related to variations imparted under Republican presidents between 1965 and 2010.

While considerable research has examined the structure (e.g., reliability), origins (e.g., predictors) and consequences (e.g., policy attitudes) of anti-Black symbolic racism among White American respondents, far less research has probed this construct among non-White respondents or non-Black target groups. The current dissertation examined the structure, origins and consequences of symbolic racism as it applied to a broader ethnic context, specifically, as it was expressed among White respondents towards Latino targets (e.g., anti-Latino symbolic racism; Study 1) and as it was expressed among Latino respondents towards Black targets (Study 2). I used multiple years of the Los Angeles County Social Survey, employing reliability analysis, correlational analysis and regression analysis to probe my questions of interest. I found that Whites’ anti-Latino symbolic racism showed roughly comparable structure, origins and consequences as their anti-Black symbolic racism. In contrast, Latinos’ symbolic racism did not show comparable structure, origins, or consequences, relative to White respondents who had been prompted with the same anti-Black symbolic racism questions. Implications regarding the use of symbolic racism as a measure of bias towards non-Black targets and among non-White respondent populations are discussed.

The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce and test a new theoretical framework for explaining and predicting the political behavior of mixed-race individuals I call relative racial salience (RRS). Relative racial salience is defined as the relative salience of one of the racial groups within a mixed-race individual’s heritage, as compared to the other, within a given social context. Through the RRS framework I argue that racial group boundaries are relatively permeable for mixed-race individuals, meaning they can avail themselves of the different racial identities in their heritage as they vary contextually in fit and accessibility. In the first section, I draw from an unprecedented wealth of new and independently crafted datasets to demonstrate that racial context is indeed a basal component in the construction and expression of mixed-race individuals’ racial identity choices, partisanship, political attitudes, and candidate evaluations. In the second section, I use voter files to introduce a unique model of causal assessment that substantiates the likely causal effect of racial context on Biracials’ partisanship. In the third and final empirical section, I leverage ensemble machine learning categorization which takes into account every single variable available in my two largest datasets (800+ variables) to provide the most comprehensive empirical portrait of the general political characteristics of mixed-race individuals to date. In doing so, I demonstrate that Latino-Whites and Asian-Whites are actually more similar to Whites than they are to their single-race minority counterparts (Latinos and Asians, respectively), while Blacks-Whites remain resolute in their resemblance of Blacks. I comport these findings as evidence that the continuation of current demographic trends is likely to lead to fading boundaries between Latinos, Asians, and Whites, and the reification of the racial group boundary separating Blacks from all others as the most salient color line in the United States.

Because racial and ethnic minorities each have recent histories of continuous acts of subordination and discrimination in the United States, members of these groups may be more aware of and sympathetic to other types of discrimination. In this dissertation, I address the question: do perceptions of marginalization within one disadvantaged group increase support for policies favoring another marginalized group? Using two multi-racial, nationally representative surveys, I examine the role of perceived marginality on support for a variety of policies. For racial minorities, I find that perceptions of discrimination against one’s racial ingroup and linked fate with the ingroup predict support for of policies favoring other marginalized groups. As racial minorities perceive a more open society with opportunities for social mobility, the more likely they are to favor the status quo and oppose policy interventions.

In this dissertation, I investigate why race is a salient political cleavage in some societies but not in others. Focusing on three countries marked by racial inequality but that differ in their racial dynamics -- Brazil, South Africa, and the United States -- I examine why the their racial formation processes resulted in strongly politicized racial identities in the two latter cases but not in the former.

I advance a theoretical argument that emphasizes the political roots of the development salient racial identities in these countries. I contend that, when a nation formation process has a built-in emphasis on racial hierarchies and prejudice and the state apparatus is employed for the enforcement of racial group boundaries in order to enact discriminatory policies against subordinate groups, this process unintentionally contributes to the formation of group consciousness among the members of political minorities, to reinforcement of major social cleavages, and to the emergence of political actors demanding social change. Apartheid in South Africa and the Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States, in using the state to oversee racial boundaries and to implement discriminatory practices against Blacks (and Coloureds, in the South African case) in favor of their White populations, fostered the development of strong group identities that ended up being crucial for the struggle against and eventual breakdown of those segregationist social systems. Brazil has not experienced legal forms of racial discrimination or segregation since the end of slavery in the late nineteenth and has celebrated race-mixing as a core element of its national identity, which resulted in permeable group boundaries and in the lack of consistent racial group identities.

To test this hypothesis empirically, I analyze data from cross-national surveys as the World Values Survey, the International Social Survey Programme, and the Social Hubble to assess group differences in perceptions of discrimination, political trust, and participation in political acts and voluntary organizations. Findings indicate the persistence of robust differences in institutional trust and participation between race groups in South Africa and the United States but not in Brazil. Results on perceived discrimination show that non-Whites do report higher levels of perceived discrimination compared to Whites yet the group gap is conditional on the context the type of discrimination. Importantly, results from Brazil and South Africa, when analyzed jointly are suggestive that group-levels of perceived discrimination cannot account for the the lack of group differences in political attitudes and behavior in Brazil and the political salience of race in South Africa. Prior literature is corroborated by findings for the United States.

Overall, results support the theoretical claim that the politicization of racial identities is dependent on contextual conditions such as the existence of strong social cleavages and the enforcement of group boundaries by the state. Once politicized, those identities have important political consequences.

Donald Trump is commonly believed to deviate from traditional Republican norms and ideals, both in terms of his policy platform as well as his boorish, often explicitly racist personal conduct. These claims have come from media and from Republican Party elites, both past and present. But was his outsider status, in terms of lack of prior political experience, unorthodox policy positions, as well as personal style, reflected by marked shifts in public opinion? Were Trump voters motivated by a new set of predispositions compared to prior Republican voters? In this dissertation, I argue that Trump is better interpreted as a continuation of preexisting Republican trends than as a rogue outsider who capitalized on a wholly distinct electorate motivated by a unique profile of attitudes and preferences. Rather, I argue, Trump is best interpreted as a continuation of Obama era trends. In Chapter One, I trace the legacy of polarization and racial attitudes in modern American politics. In Chapter Two, I trace the waning of the New Deal coalitions from 1980 to 2016, examining the demographic profiles of support for Trump and contextualizing them as trends that predated his campaign. Chapter Three, I assess whether Trump benefited from a different set of predispositions among the mass public relative to his predecessors in the prior four elections—specifically, those related to racial attitudes and political polarization. In Chapter Four, I assess how two difference indices of racial attitudes, one that emphasizes outgroup animosity (racial resentment) and one that incorporates ingroup solidarity (ethnocentrism) impact presidential approval, in order to assess whether both exert equal and similar influence on white voters’ presidential approval over the last 5 cycles. In Chapter Five, I assess the extent to which, should we see shifts over time in the nature and influence of racial attitudes among white voters over this period of time, these shifts can be traced to white Republicans becoming increasingly racially conservative during the dawning of the Trump era, or whether it is white racial liberals who are driving the divergence of public opinion. Ultimately, I argue, Trump inherited a highly racialized landscape; he did not introduce racial attitudes into an otherwise racially harmonious and civil landscape and disrupt the status quo, nor did he capitalize on a wholly new set of racist predispositions among the white electorate.