The number of women seeking congressional office in the United States has dramatically increased since 1980. Previous research on women candidates explores why women run, but new research on candidate emergence shows that women face different challenges and advantages based on their race and ethnicity. We investigate these differences by disaggregating data on women’s candidate emergence by race and ethnicity to examine how these theories work when explicitly considering race and ethnicity. We focus our examination on women running in House primaries between 1980 and 2012. We argue that theories of candidate emergence are conditional to the racial and/or ethnic identification of the candidate. We employ a cross-sectional time series analysis with the intuition that examining congressional elections over time will allow us to make general comments about the participation of women in congressional elections. We find that many of the conditions thought necessary for women’s emergence as candidates are contextual and temporally specific. Moreover, conditions that encourage women to run do not necessarily apply to women of color.

Given the continued revelation of police abuses of racial-ethnic minorities in America, it is of the utmost importance for scholars to focus on questions of how police conduct is related to minority political behavior, in particular their trust in local government. In this paper, we find evidence that both egotropic and sociotropic insecurity and experiences with police have a significant correlation with confidence in local government. The effects of both victimization and negative interactions with police have a substantive association with the ways that communities of color perceive their local government. Combining data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) and contextual data from the U.S. Census Bureau, FBI crime statistics, and “Mapping Police Violence” project, we use maximum likelihood to examine how police conduct, personal experiences with the police, and neighborhood conditions correlate with individuals' trust in local government.

U.S. immigration policy over the last 100 years has changed the onus of political acculturation from public programs to private groups like churches. After this significant policy change, how do religion, social capital, and nativity intersect in the political mobilization of racial minorities? Furthermore, after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the country of origin of immigrants shifted from European countries to Latin America and Asia. Scholars have theorized that churches play a pivotal role in the socialization of immigrants by providing a place of belonging and a community willing to teach newcomers about the goings-on of American political society. How have these acculturation policies worked under new immigration populations? Previous scholarly work has connected social capital with churches, though their relationship to political participation has been minimal. We hypothesize that social capital and religious tradition have a multiplicative effect on the participation rates of believers, but that race mitigates that effect. The positioning of racial groups in broader society impacts the significance and role of churches within these communities. We use Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) 2016 data to examine the connection between social capital, religion, and political behavior in a novel attempt to systematically identify the unique role of churches in the mobilization of racial minority communities. We use these results to suggest that the current policies of privatizing political acculturation have had less success with more recent waves of immigrants.