In this study, data-processed averages of the congressional voting ratings of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE), and Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA) were utilized comparatively for the thirteen consecutive 1947-1972 postwar American Congresses. ADA, COPE, and ACA rating averages served as tracers to plot the 1947-1972 ideological dispositions, differentials and directions of the American Congress, congressional parties, House and Senate, geopolitical regions, demographic, and religious groupings. ADA, COPE, and ACA averages consistently corroborated 1947-1972 ideological trends.Congress experienced four ideological epicycles during 1947-1972. Following a 1947-1949 conservative reactionism, a 1949-1958 liberalizing moderation climaxed in a 1959-1966 crescendo of epic liberalism, succeeded by a 1967-1972 moderating liberalism. The 1947-1972 congressional parties manifested changing degrees of ideological polarity.The ideologically divergent postwar congressional parties converged during the 1949-1958 era of liberalizing moderation as urbanizing congressional Republicans moderated appreciably. During the 1959-1966 liberal surge, congressional Republicans fashioned a conservative pro-Southern strategy in order to achieve power. From 1967 to 1972, the parties converged ideologically; Southern congressional Democrats rapidly conservatized and social-issue conscious urban congressional Democrats ideologically moderated while suburbanizing congressional Republicans liberalized.The 1947-1972 House and Senate changed ideological positions. The House was ideologically superseded by a belatedly more urban and, therefore, more liberal post-1961 Senate. Urban liberal Senate Republicans accounted for the greater liberalism of the Senate; the urbanized House Democracy continued to exceed the liberalism of the Senate Democracy.Rural, suburban and urban groupings displayed greater degrees of liberalism from the least to the greatest density of population. Rural congressional district and state averages were conservative, and suburban and urban averages were moderate and liberal respectively. The 1969-1972 suburban and urban averages moderated. Protestant, Catholic and Jewish congressional district averages were conservative, liberal and strongly liberal respectively.The standard geopolitical regions of East, South, Midwest and West experienced dramatic 1947-1972 ideological and partisan transition. The East realigned from a congressional Republican bastion to a congressional Democratic bastion and revolved from the most conservative to the most liberal region. The South shifted from the most liberal to the most conservative region and began a rapid, pro-Republican realignment. The Midwest liberalized and realigned Democratically and the West conservatized and gravitated toward the GOP.Thus, congressional Democrats were becoming the liberal party of the North and congressional Republicans were becoming the conservative party of the Heartland. These 1947-1972 ideological and partisan transitions were apparent in the behavior of the Yankee Zone and Sun Belt geopolitical subregions. The conservative Republican Yankee Zone revolved into a bastion of liberal Democracy while the solidly Democratic Sun Belt conservatized and trended Republican.The depopulation of rural areas and cities and the population plurality of suburbia were disclosed in the 1970 census. The 1966-1972 emergence of congressional Republicans to majority control of suburban constituencies suggests the advent of a suburban political cycle of ideological moderation and Republican supremacy. The depopulation of the liberalizing and Democratizing East and Midwest and the population of the conservatizing and Republicanizing South and Sun Belt corroborate this projection.

This dissertation examines the substantive representation of ethnoracial minorities at the national level, the inter-minority dynamics of descriptive representation at the state level, and the effects of ethnoracial cues on White public opinion regarding policies that disproportionately affect minorities. Taken together, the three chapters offer evidence to support the claim that race not only shapes mass opinion, but also elites' responses to it. The expectation in a representative democracy is that the preferences of the public should influence the voting behavior of elected officials in Congress. Most scholars agree that this is indeed the case, but they have recently begun to ask whose opinions are most influential. Members of Congress seem to disproportionately represent the interests of copartisans and affluent Americans. The literature speaks less to the nature of the relationship between the political preferences of ethnoracial minorities and the voting behavior of members of Congress. Is there also a racial disparity in representation, even after accounting for partisanship and income? Are White Americans better represented in government decisions than are African Americans and Latinos? Chapter 1 explores the relationship between congressional district-level public opinion on proposed bills (estimated using multilevel regression and poststratification), broken down by racial, partisan, and income group, and the roll call votes of House members on those same bills. I find strong evidence of overresponsiveness by members of Congress to copartisan and high-income constituents, and some evidence of underresponsiveness to Blacks. In some cases, minorities' preferences are underrepresented even by representatives of their own parties, on race-targeted policies, and in majority-minority districts. Chapter 2 examines how legislators respond to coethnic and cominority constituents. I conduct an audit study of all state legislators to explore how they respond to constituents of different ethnoracial groups, and to assess whether Black and Latino state legislators in particular are as responsive to cominority constituents (i.e., non-White individuals from a different ethnic minority group) as they are to coethnics (i.e., individuals from the legislator's own ethnic group). Blacks and Latinos currently make up about one-third of the overall U.S. population, and an even larger share of some state populations. In light of this growing diversification of the American electorate, elected officials have incentives to appeal to a broad racial constituency. I conduct an experiment in which state legislators are randomly assigned to receive an email from a coethnic, cominority, or non-coethnic constituent. My findings suggest that Latino constituents are consistently disadvantaged. White and Republican legislators respond to Latino constituents the least, and Black legislators do not show any cominority solidarity toward them. Latino legislators, on the other hand, do exhibit cominority solidarity toward Black constituents by favoring them over White (non-coethnic) constituents. These results have important implications for the prospect of "black-brown" coalitions and for the descriptive representation of ethnoracial minorities. Finally, understanding the factors that shape White Americans' preferences over policies that disproportionately affect racial and linguistic minorities is increasingly important in a diversifying society. Chapter 3 focuses on the effects of racialized stereotypes on the formation of White public opinion regarding Hurricane Maria relief in Puerto Rico. Due to the ongoing fiscal crisis and the damage caused by the hurricane in 2017, the case of Puerto Rico has figured prominently in American media coverage as of late, but we know little about how the attitudes that shape U.S. policy toward Puerto Rico are formed. I conduct a nationally representative survey experiment in which I have two actors---roughly identical in all features except skin complexion---portray hurricane victims and give general information about the damage Maria caused. By varying the skin tone (light or dark) and language (Spanish or English) in the videos, I am able to assess the ways in which racial and linguistic markers shape Americans' preferences about a putatively race-neutral policy (disaster relief). I find that the Spanish language treatment decreases respondents' support for Puerto Rico, but not by much. The effects of race, on the other hand, are contingent on respondents' partisanship, race, and prior knowledge about Puerto Ricans' American citizenship.

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Recent years have witnessed a slow but persistent erosion of the democratic governing of the U.S. Political scientists have identified several severe threats against the American democracy, including the spread of misinformation, the impact of negative partisanship, and the lack of political belonging for marginalized groups. While research on these threats abounds at the macro level, what remains under researched are the conduct of ordinary people as they navigate these issues and exercise civic rights.From the micro-analytic perspective of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis, this dissertation examines the practices that ordinary citizens and U.S. Members of Congress (MOCs) use to navigate these issues. 50 recordings of town hall meetings were collected from social media pages of the MOCs’ offices from 24 US States with the majority being House Representatives and several Senators. The dissertation addresses, on the one hand, how citizens navigate the following issues: introducing misinformation as part of one’s town hall contribution, (re)producing negative partisanship, and (re)producing exclusionary stances towards minoritized groups; and on the other, how MOCs respond to these issues. First, citizens assert epistemic superiority or appeal to rationality when bringing in factually unfounded information to town hall contributions. MOCs may choose to endorse, sidestep, or refute the misinformation when responding. Secondly, citizens present irreconcilable alternatives, presuppose a zero-sum game, or ascribe categories of threats to the opposing party. MOCs can choose to neutralize or upgrade the negative partisanship and even initiate it on their own. Finally, citizens assign categories of immorality against minoritized groups or establish their own religious superiority for maintaining exclusionary stances. MOCs may disalign with such stances by offering contesting categories, redirecting the focus of discussion, or disaffiliating with the citizens’ exclusionary stance via a telling. With the perspective of “motivated looking,” this dissertation is a continued effort in critically informed EMCA research and can be used to strengthen research on participatory democracy by its inherently emic approach. More importantly, findings from this dissertation can be adapted by organizations, teachers, and individuals to hold or facilitate more productive conversations around civic topics.

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The purpose of this study is a critical examination of this Committee with emphasis on its methods, procedure, and worth.

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter examines the impact of judicial discretion and left-digit bias on criminal sentencing outcomes. Judicial discretion allows judges to make nuanced decisions, taking into account details of legal cases that are not directly covered by law. However, judicial discretion can also expose behavioral biases and lead to irrational decision-making. I test for the existence of a particular behavioral bias: age-based left-digit bias. Specifically, I use a regression discontinuity design to test for changes in sentencing decisions occurring on an offender's 20th birthday using data on sentencing decisions from the state of Pennsylvania. I find that an offender sentenced just after his/her 20th birthday is 3.5 percentage points more likely to be sentenced to incarceration than an offender sentenced just before his/her 20th birthday. I test for evidence of conscious mechanisms underlying this effect and find no such evidence, leaving an unconscious bias as the best available explanation. Chapter two examines the impact of highly publicized police killings of black individuals on the racial gap in birth outcomes. Police killings of Black Americans are increasingly being met with significant media coverage and public response, including civil unrest. Given the frequency with which these events occur, it is vital to understand both their direct and indirect impacts. Using national birth certificate data and an event study design, I test for the impact of high-profile police-involved killings of Black Americans on racial disparities in maternal stress levels and birth outcomes. I find a large, statistically significant, and persistent increase in gestational hypertension of Black mothers relative to White mothers, strongly indicating an increase in the racial gap in maternal stress following these high-profile killings. I find limited evidence of an accompanying effect on the racial gap in birth outcomes. However, many existing papers similarly find no impacts of maternal stress on birth outcomes while simultaneously finding significant impacts on later-life outcomes, leaving room for additional future work based on these findings. How does the content of public communication by elected representatives change in response to highly salient, politically polarizing events? In Chapter 3, I examine this question using the text of tweets from members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, an n-gram text regression model and sentiment analysis alogorithms, and an event study design focused on mass shootings in the U.S. Observable effects on communication are concentrated on the day of and the day following a mass shooting. Republican members of Congress exhibit a reduced tweet frequency relative to Democratic members of Congress in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, while Democratic members of Congress speak with a more clearly differentiated Democratic vocabulary. Members from both parties speak with a more negative vocabulary. With Republicans collectively disengaging and Democrats collectively highlighting their partisan identification, this may suggest that Democrats are taking advantage of an opportunity for a political and/or policy win while Republicans in the same period are choosing to avoid additional political and/or policy losses.