To what extent have our political institutions been damaged by the events surrounding the 2020 election? Political scientist James Gibson will assess the election’s consequences based on several surveys, beginning in July 2020. RSF funds will be used for a third nationally representative survey to be fielded in February 2021, that will assess changes in attitudes toward the president/presidency, the Supreme Court, and the Senate from prior to the election through the immediate post-election period and concluding in the post-inauguration period.
Co-funded by JPB Foundation
Political scientist Matthew Baum and his colleagues hypothesize that the COVID-19 pandemic will permanently change the trajectory of our social, economic, and political systems. They will conduct two additional monthly surveys in a series of state surveys conducted since April 2020 with previous NSF support. The January and March 2021 monthly waves will capture opinions, behaviors, and circumstances in the post-election period.
Co-funded by JPB Foundation
One way the criminal justice system contributes to systemic racial inequality is by reducing the civic engagement of people with prior criminal justice convictions, particularly for Blacks and Latinx who are more likely to have criminal records. Many individuals with prior felony convictions are formally excluded from voting, but even those who are eligible to vote have very low rates of voter registration and voting.
There are wide partisan divides in opinions among the public on COVID-19, including about the seriousness of the disease, mask and other government mandates, and the handling of the pandemic at the federal level. These differences capture political divisions in three dimensions of public opinion: factual beliefs about the pandemic, policy preferences about how best to respond, and approval of how politicians have handled the pandemic. The degree to which sources of information are associated with these divisions can help adjudicate between two models of democratic representation.
Inequalities in citizen access to the vote is tied to one’s location in our highly stratified society and differential access to the vote has been associated with voter suppression, unlawful purging of voter rolls, and strict identification requirements. Few scholars, however, have examined the impact of the routine maintenance of voter rolls, mandated by Congress as part of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, on voter access.
In New York City, where one out of ten tenants are taken to housing court each year by their landlords, displacement has come to shape the political lives of Asian immigrant communities. This project examines the democratic implications of displacement by focusing on how residents in Manhattan’s Chinatown are politically responding to evictions, landlord harassment, cultural erasure, and other forms of dispossession.
The lenses through which Americans view the politics of the Coronavirus pandemic are arguably different for individuals required to perform essential work (paid or not), and individuals working in other industries and job types. How have these lenses shaped their political views, engagement and interest in politics? This study will investigate these questions by analyzing the political attitudes and behavior of Filipina American women, using a survey with embedded experiments.