This Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Minority Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship will support research and training on the relationships between minority group political preferences, representation and associated policy outcomes. Empirical tests and electoral outcomes consistently demonstrate that race and ethnicity are a significant cleavage in American politics. There are clear distinctions between minority and majority populations in terms of their partisanship, ideology and policy preferences. Are these distinctive racial group preferences accounted for in public policy? Statewide data will be used to analyze: 1) the spatial distance in preferences between racial group populations within the states 2) the impact of minority voters on overall state partisanship and ideology, and 3) racial group shifts in policy, partisan and ideological preferences over time. The second stage of this research will evaluate state responsiveness to group preferences. The goal is to determine degrees of convergence between state policy outcomes and differential group preferences across issue areas including education, health care, fiscal policy and criminal justice.
The postdoctoral award offers a unique opportunity to establish a line of inquiry that is largely untapped in political science. The training and accompanying research will expand the discipline's current base of knowledge and refine the researcher's quantitative skills. Results will be presented at conferences and submitted to journals. The findings will be useful to develop a benchmark to assess long term variation in racial group preferences. The proposed state level measures allow for rigorous empirical testing of important theoretical and substantive questions about racial politics, state politics, policy and representation.
