White Americans are much more likely to support gun rights than their non-white counterparts, but not because they want arms for self-protection

Does fear of criminal victimization contribute to white Americans’ enthusiastic support for ‘gun rights’? While those in favor of less arms control link gun rights to fear of crime and self-protection, Alexandra Filindra takes a look at the notion that Americans support gun ownership on the grounds of personal protection. Finding that the gun owning population is much whiter than the American population as a whole, the authors prove that fear of crime, real or imagined, does not explain why Americans have been more supportive of gun rights in the past years

Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment

Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare policy, including decisions about the eligibility of immigrant residents. Leveraging state-level data from before and after reform, we estimate a difference-in-difference model to identify the effect of variation in immigrant inclusivity on educational attainment. We find that when states broaden the inclusivity of the social safety net to immigrants, young Latinos are more likely to graduate from high school. This effect is present beyond the group of Latino residents who receive additional benefits, suggesting that policy decisions about immigrants spill over to broader communities and communicate broader messages about social inclusion to racial and ethnic groups. We find similar patterns among Asian youth, but not among black and non-Hispanic white youth. We conclude that immigrant inclusion has consequences for the life prospects of the growing population of youth in high-immigrant ethnic groups

In the wake of the Parkland mass shooting, the public's now continual anxiety about gun crime may lead to a greater push for stricter gun laws

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month has put the issue of gun control back on to the public and political agendas in the US. In light of this latest mass shooting, Alexandra Filindra and Loren Collingwood look at the relationship between the public's response to such events and their attitudes towards gun control. They find that after such shootings, there is an increase in public anxiety about crime, which is then linked to greater support for more restrictive gun laws. While this anxiety often goes away in time, they write that as mass shootings become more common – and more deadly – a sustained sense of public anxiety may lead to more long-lasting public support for gun control

Excluding Latino immigrant families from the social safety net hurts their children’s educational outcomes – and effects spill over onto Latino children who are not excluded

Recent years have seen growing discussion in media, academic, and policy circles about the problems of inequality in America. What often does not get a great deal of attention is that inequality among families with children has grown much faster than inequality overall. In new research Meghan Condon, Alexandra Filindra, and Amber Wichowsky look at how being excluded from social safety nets affects low-income Latino children. They find that not only does such exclusion lead to poorer educational outcomes for these children, these effects actually spill over within immigrant communities and affect children who have not lost eligibility for benefits

When Partisans and Minorities Interact: Interpersonal Contact, Partisanship and Public Opinion Preferences on Immigration Policy

Objective: Many studies investigating contact theory have suggested that contact effects are not universal but rather conditional. In this article, we test one form of conditional contact effects. Our approach posits that contact with out-groups produces support for pro-minority public policies only when in-group members are not subject to contrary messages from co-partisans. Methods: We use data from an original survey to test this theory in the immigration policy domain. Results: We find strong confirmatory evidence that the emergence of contact effects on support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants is dependent on party identification. Conclusion: When information from the social environment and that from the party coincide, they reinforce each other, producing more tolerant policy preferences. However, when the two are not congruent, individuals may use partisanship to help interpret contextual information, thus canceling out the positive effects of intergroup contact on policy opinions

Technology, Tradition, and “The Terror of the People”

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court mandated a text, history, tradition, and analogy–only approach to Second Amendment cases. No longer can policymakers rely on empirical data alone to carry their litigation burden. Now such data must conform to a still-emerging “historical tradition of firearm regulation” to meet constitutional muster. Some despair that reams of data, careful experiments, and rigorous statistical analyses no longer have any relevance to the gun debate. But those that claim that Bruen signals the end of empirically grounded policy solutions badly misread the opinion. Empirical studies can still inform meaningful gun policy, but the boundaries that make such studies legally significant are now set by Bruen\u27s text, history, tradition, and analogy–only approach. This Article uses an original survey experiment to measure the “chill” caused by public weaponry, and connects those experimental findings to the long-standing tradition of regulating weapons to protect the peace and to prevent “the terror of the people.” The Article shows that, far from being irrelevant, modern empirical data can help bridge the gap between modern problems and technology and the historical record of gun rights and regulation

Are immigrants allowed to criticize the government? Ingroup identity, economic threat, and majority group support for immigrant civil liberties in the US, Switzerland, and Turkey

Assaults on immigrants’ civil liberties have been on the rise across Western countries. This study asks whether majority-group natives exhibit less political tolerance (i.e., support for restrictions on civil rights and liberties) toward immigrants who criticize the government compared to citizens, adding thereby a neglected element to the discussion on the conflicted nexus between migration and citizenship. Drawing on social identity theory and theories of economic threat, we find that across three countries (US, Switzerland, and Turkey) immigrant critics are more strongly penalized. However, the size of the penalty is not moderated by ingroup identity salience, but there is evidence in the US that ingroup victimhood—a different measure of ingroup attitudes—does moderate the treatment effect. Moreover, in all three countries, the treatment effect is amplified by economic threat, and in the US and Turkey, but not in Switzerland, we find significant three-way interactions between the treatment, ingroup identity salience, and economic threat, showing that economic threat activates the effect of ingroup salience. Our findings add to the inconclusive existing evidence on the link between identity salience and political intolerance, by showing that only in combination with realistic feelings of threat (economic threat or victimization) will national or white identity amplify political intolerance towards immigrants

Motivated Innumeracy: Estimating the Size of the Gun Owner Population and Its Consequences for Opposition to Gun Restrictions

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Joslyn, M. R. and Haider‐Markel, D. P. (2018), Motivated Innumeracy: Estimating the Size of the Gun Owner Population and Its Consequences for Opposition to Gun Restrictions. Politics and Policy, 46: 827-850. doi:10.1111/polp.12276, which has been published in final form at http://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12276. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.Past research suggests that people substantially overestimate the size of minority populations. Labeled “innumeracy,” inflated estimates of minority populations can have a negative impact on intergroup relations and influence policy attitudes toward minority groups. Our research examines people’s estimates of the gun owner population in the United States. We discover that people vastly overestimate gun ownership and similarly misjudge its future growth. Estimations of size are influenced by several determinants including gun ownership and affective orientations toward gun owners. Gun owners, compared to nongun owners, reported higher estimations of the gun owner population. In addition, positive feelings toward gun owners were associated with increased estimates of gun ownership. Affective orientations toward minority populations are in fact a key predictor neglected by prior innumeracy studies. Finally, estimations of the gun owner population, and judgments about its future growth, were both significant determinants of gun policy preferences

The Politics of Welfare Exclusion: Immigration and Disparity in Medicaid Coverage

The rapid growth of the immigrant population in the U.S., along with changes in the demographics and the political landscape, has often raised questions for understanding trends of inequality. Important issues that have received little scholarly attention thus far are excluding immigrants’ social rights through decisive policy choices and the distributive consequences of such exclusive policies. In this paper, we examine how immigration and state policies on immigrants’ access to safety net programs together influence social inequality in the context of health care. We analyze the combined effect of immigration population density and state immigrant Medicaid eligibility rules on the gap of Medicaid coverage rates between native- and foreign-born populations. When tracking inequality in Medicaid coverage and critical policy changes in the post-PRWORA era, we find that exclusive state policies widen the native-foreign Medicaid coverage gap. Moreover, the effect of state policies is conditional upon the size of the immigrant population in that state. Our findings suggest immigrants’ formal integration into the welfare system is crucial for understanding social inequality in the U.S. states