With enough women, majority based decision making rules can help foster communication processes that support women’s authority

Recent years have seen growing calls for the greater representation of women in political bodies and corporate boards. But does greater representation for women lead to more power in decision making? Using data from an empirical study of group interaction around deliberation, J. Baxter Oliphant, Tali Mendelberg, and Christopher F. Karpowitz find that the rules around how decisions are made matter; when decisions are majority-based, and there are enough women to control the decision, then men begin to treat women with more respect. When decisions need to be unanimous, minority men are empowered and do not modify their behavior towards women

Unconscious bias in the suppressive policing of Black and Latino men and boys: neuroscience, Borderlands theory, and the policymaking quest for just policing

his article applies neuroscience and Borderlands theory to reveal how unconscious bias currently stabilizes suppressive policing practices in America despite new efforts at reform. Illustrative cases are offered from Oakland and Santa Barbara, California, with a focus on civil gang injunctions (CGIs) and youth gang suppression. Theoretical analysis of these cases reveals how the unconscious biases of validity illusions and framing effects operate despite the best intentions of law enforcement personnel. Such unconscious or implicit biases create contradictions between the stated beliefs and actions of law enforcement. In turn, these unintended self-contradictions then work to the detriment of Latino and Black boys. The analysis here also extends to how unconscious biases and unintended self-contradictions can influence municipal policymaking in favor of suppressive police tactics such as CGIs, thereby displacing evidence-based policies that are proven to be far more effective. The article concludes with brief discussion of some of the means by which the unconscious biases – effects to which everyone is involuntarily prone – can be disrupted

The politics of racial ambiguity: Origin and consequences of implicitly racial appeals.

This thesis details the consequences of political campaign rhetoric for white public opinion on race. It argues that contemporary egalitarian norms and African American enfranchisement coexist uneasily with continuing racial conflict. The result of this tension is racial ambivalence among white voters, an electoral dilemma for elites, and a political scenario ripe for subtle racial appeals. The first part of the dissertation traces the history of racial campaign appeals. It discusses the rise and fall of racial rhetoric in electoral contexts, and explains some of its continuing features. The historic break with explicit defenses of racial inequality in political contexts is established, and located in the rise of the civil rights movement. The rise of ambiguously racial appeals is documented, and its roots in conservative political strategy are shown. In the second part of the dissertation, experiments are used to contrast the consequences of elections featuring different types of campaign appeals: explicitly racial, implicitly racial, counter-stereotypical and nonracial messages. The results demonstrate that campaigns highlighting implicitly racial messages transform public choices into a racial referendum. The tone elites set for public discourse about race determines whether whites' racial predispositions are mobilized into a collective social force. In this sense, attending to elite rhetoric illuminates the interplay of racial groups and democratic discussion in the American political process. It shows that at least as much as the substance and quantity of political information, the symbolic meaning conveyed by its style matters profoundly for the way it is processed, at least in the domain of race.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104350/1/9513428.pdfDescription of 9513428.pdf : Restricted to UM users only

Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation

Can men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing women\u27s descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the group\u27s gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alternatives, using experimental data with many groups and links between individuals\u27 attitudes and speech. We find a substantial gender gap in voice and authority, but as hypothesized, it disappears under unanimous rule and few women, or under majority rule and many women. Deliberative design can avoid inequality by fitting institutional procedure to the social context of the situation

Do enclaves remediate social inequality?

© 2018 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved. Do women benefit from participating in women-only, “enclave” groups? Specifically, do such groups benefit their individual members? This question underlies a number of influential normative theories of inequality but remains underexplored despite the ubiquity of these groups in the organizational life of legislative, party, civic, education, and interest-group settings. This article develops multiple objective and subjective dimensions of individual empowerment that such groups may produce, specifies the institutional conditions that facilitate these benefits, and conducts a comparison with men’s groups. To address selection effects, we use a controlled experiment randomizing gender composition and other group characteristics. We find that female enclaves benefit their members, but only under unanimous rule and for most, but not all, forms of empowerment. Men-only groups do not help men, suggesting that enclaves work because they empower the powerless

Replication Data for: "The Rich are Different from You and Me": College Socialization and the Economic Views of Affluent Americans

Affluent Americans support more conservative economic policies than the non-affluent, and government responds disproportionately to these views. Yet little is known about the emergence of these consequential views. We develop, test and find support for a theory of class cultural norms: these preferences are partly traceable to socialization that occurs on predominately affluent college campuses, especially those with norms of financial gain, and especially among socially embedded students. The economic views of the student’s cohort also matter, in part independently of affluence. We use a large panel dataset with a high response rate and more rigorous causal inference strategies than previous socialization studies. The affluent campus effect holds with matching, among students with limited school choice, and in a natural experiment, and passes placebo tests. College socialization partly explains why affluent Americans support economically conservative policies

"i'm Not the President of Black America": Rhetorical versus Policy Representation

Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019. A key question in the study of minority representation is whether descriptive representatives provide superior substantive representation. Neglected in this literature is the distinction between two forms of substantive representation: rhetoric versus policy. We provide a systematic comparison of presidential minority representation along these two dimensions. Barack Obama was the first African American president, yet his substantive representation of African Americans has not been fully evaluated. Using speech and budget data, we find that relative to comparable presidents, Obama offered weaker rhetorical representation, but stronger policy representation, on race and poverty. While we cannot rule out non-racial explanations, Obama's policy proposals are consistent with minority representation. His actions also suggest that descriptive representatives may provide relatively better policy representation but worse rhetorical representation, at least when the constituency is a numerical minority. We thus highlight an understudied tension between rhetoric and policy in theories of minority representation

Gender inequality in deliberation: Unpacking the black box of interaction

When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of interruptions when speaking, and these women then lose influence in their own eyes and in others'. But when the group is assigned to unanimous rule, or when women are many, women experience a positive balance of interruptions, mitigating the deleterious effect of small numbers. Men do not experience this pattern. We draw implications for a type of representation that we call authoritative representation, and for democratic deliberation. © 2014 American Political Science Association