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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 Info
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