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 Forthcoming ( 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 the influence of racialized anger and racial efficacy on self-identified male views towards the 2021 Capitol insurrection across racial/ethnic groups. We utilize the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), which was the only national, post-election dataset to yield responses on the Capitol insurrection across a large number of identity groups like men of color. Using the CMPS, we hypothesize that the level of racialized anger and racial efficacy will impact attitudes towards the 2021 Capitol insurrection for men across racial groups comparing men of color and their white male counterparts. We find racial anger has a negative effect on political attitudes about the 2021 Capitol insurrection across all groups of men, while racial efficacy has varied effects on certain men of color groups in comparison to white men. This paper underscores the importance of intersectionality in the study of public opinion formation and the effect of political attitudes like racial efficacy and racialized anger on non-traditional political engagement.

Read more at https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2025.8