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Who should get a say? Race, law enforcement guidelines, and systems of representation

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-06-15, 13:24 authored by Anthony KevinsAnthony Kevins, Joshua Robison
Most citizens agree that legislators should reflect their constituencies’ stances. Yet constituents rarely speak in a single voice. Instead, constituents often vary not only in their policy preferences, but also in the degree to which a given policy impacts their lives. Politicians thus at times pursue targeted representation, offering increased input to especially-affected groups. As efforts to address anti-Black police misconduct make clear, such measures can protect vulnerable minority groups – but they may also be perceived to sideline the less-affected majority. We fielded two national survey experiments to investigate how Americans respond when legislators give more attention to some citizens than others. Results suggest that members of targeted groups react more positively on average than non-members, and that reactions among non-members are strongly driven by racial resentment. The impact of racial resentment is largely unaffected by the race and partisanship of the politician proposing the measure, but it is exacerbated in cases of a clear preference conflict between the African-American community and the broader constituency.

Funding

European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme via a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (Grant no. 750556).

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Published in

Political Psychology

Volume

42

Issue

1

Pages

71 - 91

Publisher

Wiley

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Wiley under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Acceptance date

2020-05-29

Publication date

2020-09-24

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

0162-895X

eISSN

1467-9221

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Anthony Kevins. Deposit date: 15 June 2020

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