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Mark Peffley: Research Page
Vita (*.pdf)
Selected Recent
Publications and Papers
Abstract: Although
there exists a large and well-documented “race gap” between
whites and blacks in their support for the death penalty, we know relatively
little about the nature of these differences and how the races respond
to various arguments against the penalty. To explore such differences,
we embedded an experiment in a national survey in which respondents
are randomly assigned to one of several argument conditions. We find
that African-Americans are more responsive to appeals that are both
racial (i.e., the death penalty is unfair because most of the people
who are executed are black) and nonracial (i.e., too many innocent people
are being executed) than are whites, who are highly resistant to persuasion
and, in the case of the racial argument, actually become more
supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates
against blacks. These inter-racial differences in responsiveness to
arguments against the death penalty can be explained, in part, by the
degree to which people attribute the causes of black criminality to
either dispositional or systemic forces (i.e., the racial biases of
the criminal justice system). Abstract: We examine the huge racial divide in citizens’
general beliefs about the fairness of the criminal justice system, focusing on
the political consequences of these beliefs for shaping diverging
interpretations of police behavior. Predictably, most blacks believe the
system to be unfair and most whites believe the opposite. More importantly,
these beliefs influence the interpretation of events quite
differently. African Americans who view the system as unfair are much more
suspicious of the police in confrontations with black civilians. Fairness for
whites, however, has fewer racial connotations; they naively interpret the
confrontations disregarding civilian race. Still, whites holding antiblack stereotypes are much more sympathetic to the
police in their confrontations with black civilians. Abstract: To date, little is known about the
precise impact of racially coded words and phrases. Instead, most of
what we know about racialized messages comes
from studies focusing on pictorial racial cues (e.g., the infamous “Willie
Horton” ad) or messages with an extensive textual narrative laced
with implicit racial cues. Because in a “post-Horton” era
strategic use of racially coded words will often be far more subtle
than those explored in past studies, we investigate the power of a single
phrase believed by many to carry strong racial connotations: “inner-city.”
We do so by embedding an experiment in a national survey of whites,
where a random half of respondents was asked whether they support spending
money for prisons (versus anti-poverty programs) to lock up “violent
criminals,” while the other half was asked about “violent
inner city criminals.”
Consistent with the literature on issue framing, we find that
whites’ racial attitudes (e.g., racial stereotypes) were much
more important in shaping preferences for punitive policies when they
receive the racially-coded, inner city question. Our results demonstrate
how easy it is to continue “playing the race card” in the
post-Willie Horton era, as well as some of the limits of such framing
effects among whites with more positive racial attitudes. Abstract: Research on mass
support for democracies shows that popular support for democratic norms is at
a historic high. At the same time, research on political tolerance draws
considerably bleaker conclusions about the democratic capacity of mass
publics. We attempt to synthesize the essential lessons of these two literatures
into a general model of democratic learning which argues that exposure to the
rough-and-tumble of democratic politics should enhance political tolerance.
We provide a test of the model using multilevel data from a diverse set of 17
countries. At the macro-level, we find, consistent with our theory, that: (1)
political tolerance is greater in stable democracies that have endured over
time (the longer the better), independent of a nation’s socioeconomic
development; and (2) that federal systems increase levels of tolerance, as
well. At the micro-level, we find that democratic activism, or using civil
liberties, enhances political tolerance, independent of a host of other
individual-level predictors. We conclude with a discussion of the
implications of our findings for studies of democratization and political
tolerance. Contact
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