Tag Archives: American-politics

Red and Blue Immigrants: Political (Mis)Alignment, Immigration Attitudes, and the Boundaries of American National Inclusion

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Okura, Keitaro. 2026. “Red and Blue Immigrants: Political (Mis)Alignment, Immigration Attitudes, and the Boundaries of American National Inclusion.” American Journal of Sociology 131(4):729-772.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/739568

Conventional theories of attitudes toward immigrants emphasize either conflict between civic and ethnocultural conceptions of national identity or a consensus favoring highly skilled, culturally assimilable immigrants. This article advances an alternative paradigm: natives’ immigration attitudes are contingent on their perceived (mis)alignment with newcomers’ politics. Drawing on six descriptive and experimental studies across two surveys, I first document that Americans view immigrants as future Democrats who are culturally right-wing and economically left-wing. I then demonstrate that Americans’ receptiveness to immigrants, as well as judgments about their legal status and deservingness, are highly sensitive to whether newcomers are potential partisan allies or adversaries. Notably, the influence of perceived political (mis)alignment eclipses classic predictors of immigration attitudes. Contemporary debates over immigration further underscore the salience and potency of these political motivations. These findings offer a novel lens for understanding the modern foundations of immigration attitudes and the boundaries of national membership.

Race, Reform, and Recalls: The Movement Against “Progressive” Prosecutors

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Goldberg, A. (2025). Race, Reform, and Recalls: The Movement Against “Progressive” Prosecutors. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 1–36. doi:10.1017/rep.2025.10043

Local prosecutors in the United States have significant discretion in the criminal legal system and have traditionally wielded their power in a way that contributes to mass incarceration. Since 2016, however, “progressive” prosecutors have been elected in growing numbers on pledges to mitigate the racialized harms of mass incarceration. While scholars tie progressive prosecutors’ elections to the Movement for Black Lives (BLM), less is known about countermovement efforts—including recalls, impeachments, and suspensions, examples of extra-electoral challenges—opposing these prosecutors. To address this gap, I constructed an original database of all local prosecutors in 2012 and/or 2022 in the country’s 300 most populous jurisdictions. Findings reveal that extra-electoral challenges disproportionately target women of color, disproportionately occur in Republican-controlled states, and have nearly tripled over the last decade. I argue that extra-electoral challenges constitute a novel movement repertoire used by the political right to challenge racial justice efforts following BLM.

The fortunes of radicalization: How the party environment determined the fate of radical movements in the late 20th-century United States

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Grumbach, M. (2026). The fortunes of radicalization: How the party environment determined the fate of radical movements in the late 20th-century United States. Critical Sociology, 0(0).

Radicalization during the 1960s and 1970s is often cited as a cause in the decline of American New Left movements, but right-wing movements also radicalized during this period and did not suffer the same consequences. This comparative-historical study traces the trajectories of four sectarian radicals who led conservative Christian and ultra-left movements that emerged in the United States in 1965. Bridging social movement literature with Gramscian theory, I argue that the variation in the fortunes of radicalization stems from the divergence between the formal party blocs. Radicalization on the left resulted in isolation and implosion because the Democratic Party bloc lacked resources and its interest-group configuration was inhospitable to radicalism. On the right, the Republican Party bloc was in an ascendant phase of organizational growth and fused the hitherto dispersed ideological currents of social conservatism and market fundamentalism. The availability of resources in tandem with the hegemonic configuration of the Republican Party bloc enabled Christian radicals to exert ideological influence. My findings demonstrate how parties shape the trajectories and outcomes of radicalization and underscore the importance of comparative analysis of left and right movements to explain their political legacies.

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Democracy Under Siege: The Demise of Successful United States Federal Campaign Finance Reform

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Stryker R, Neff O. Democracy Under Siege: The Demise of Successful United States Federal Campaign Finance Reform. Studies in American Political Development (2026): 1–24. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S0898588X25100308

Private funding of U.S. federal elections is at record levels, with most money contributed by a few very wealthy individuals and organizations. Cross-partisan majorities of the American public consistently express concern, and proposed campaign finance reforms are introduced as frequently in Congress recently as earlier in time. Despite these facts, and that successful twentieth century reforms often were preceded by corruption scandal, that these continue today, that there remain political entrepreneurs for reform, that reformers continue to use corruption framing, and that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision left some reform strategies open, no proposed campaign finance reforms to curb moneyed interests’ influence have been enacted since the 2002 BCRA. We address this puzzle through comparative process tracing of forty reform efforts receiving consideration in a congressional committee from 1907 to 2024. We identify three ideal-type reform trajectories—scandal as agenda-setter, the Supreme Court as agenda-setter, and a multiple legislative trajectories type—through which campaign finance reforms through 2002 sometimes were successful. We then show how and why a combination of changes in the political, media, and legal environments doomed reform efforts post-2002 and especially post-2010 to almost certain failure. We draw implications for federal political discourse and policy-making more generally.

Why Don’t South Asians in the U.S. Count As “Asian”?: Global and Local Factors Shaping Anti-South Asian Racism in the United States*

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Kurien, P. and Purkayastha, B. (2024), Why Don’t South Asians in the U.S. Count As “Asian”?: Global and Local Factors Shaping Anti-South Asian Racism in the United States*. Sociol Inq, 94: 351-368. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12592

In a 2020 U.S. survey, more Asian Indians than Chinese indicated that they were worried about post-Covid-19 hate crimes. Yet, post-Covid violence against people of Asian background has been viewed as being directed against “Chinese-looking” individuals. This is just one example of how South Asians are overlooked in discourses about Asian Americans. This theoretical paper provides an expansion of the racial formation framework to explain this exclusion. We demonstrate how global factors, including the foreign engagements of the United States shaped the development of the Asian American group and category, and why, even though Asian Americans can be brown, yellow, white, or black, an East Asian phenotype is viewed as denoting an “Asian” body in the United States. We also discuss how the racialization of religion shapes anti-South Asian racism, a factor largely ignored in the literature on racial formation and Asian Americans. We end by calling for the inclusion of South Asians in Asian American literature to challenge many of the reigning paradigms regarding Asian America and anti-Asian racism.

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