Black Lives Matter and the Racialized Support for the January 6th Insurrection (with Matt Baretto, Claudia Alegre, Alexandria Davis, Joshua Ferrer, Joyce Nguy, & Christopher Palmisano)

Does support for the January 6th insurrection come mostly from concerned citizens worried over illegal voting, or from racists spurred to action by the highly visible Black Lives Matter protests and Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat? We field a survey experiment aimed at disentangling links between old and new racial grievances, anti-immigrant beliefs, Black activism, and support for the January 6th insurrection. We find that the people most likely to be supportive of the insurrection are whites who hold negative attitudes toward immigrants and subscribe to white replacement theory. Beliefs about the George Floyd protests also explain January 6th support, above and beyond demographics and other racial and political views. These results are validated by the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. We also conduct a survey vignette experiment and find that anti-BLM rhetoric spread by Trump and right-wing news sources likely soured opinions on the movement and set the stage for widespread insurrection support.

Read more at https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162241228395

Views on Men Behaving Badly: Male Public Opinion and the 2021 Capital Insurrection (working paper with Alexandria Davis, Joyce Nguy, Claudia Alegre, Samyu Comandur, and Lorrie Frasure)

While the majority of 2021 Capitol Insurrection participants were White men, the media prominently highlighted the involvement of male conservative activists of color. However, we still know little about the perspectives of men in the general public regarding this event in our nation’s history, particularly across racial/ethnic and other identity groups. This project examines what factors influence self-identified male views towards the 2021 Capitol Insurrection, relative to their female counterparts. Importantly, we also assess how these views vary between men across racial/ethnic groups. We examine the role of some long-standing measures of public opinion formation such as socio-demographics, ideology, identity salience, experience with discrimination, trust in government, and the media. Uniquely, this paper also examines the role of emotions such as anger, hope, and fear on male respondents' public opinion toward the Capitol Insurrection. We utilize the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) a cooperative, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, post-Presidential election online survey in the United States. The 2020 CMPS was the only national, post-election dataset to yield responses on the Capitol Insurrection across a large number of identity groups. The primary survey dataset included nearly 15,000 Black, White, Latino, and Asian respondents as well as oversamples of over 4,000 respondents from hard-to-reach populations including Afro-Latinos, Black immigrants, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Muslims (including Middle Eastern and North Africans (MENA)), and people who identify as LGBTQ. Using the CMPS, we hypothesize that men of color are more likely to express ambivalent attitudes toward the insurrection than their female counterparts. In addition, the salience of these views will vary greatly for men across racial groups and between men of color and their white male counterparts.