Scholars have studied the carceral state extensively. However, little is known about the ‘shadow’ carceral state, coercive institutions lacking even the limited safeguards of the carceral state. Pretrial incarceration is one such institution. It often lasts months and causes large resource losses. Yet it is imposed in rushed hearings, with wide discretion for bail judges. These circumstances facilitate quick, heuristic judgments relying on racial stereotypes of marginalized populations. We merge court records from Miami-Dade with voter records to estimate the effect of this ‘shadow’ institution on turnout. We find that quasi-randomly assigned harsher bail judges depress voting by Black and Hispanic defendants. Consistent with heuristic processing, these racial disparities result only from inexperienced judges. Unlike judge experience, judge race does not matter; minority judges are as likely to impose detention and reduce turnout. The ‘shadow’ carceral state undermines democratic participation, exacerbating racial inequality.

Socioeconomic disadvantage is a major correlate of low political participation. This association is among the most robust findings in political science. However, it is based largely on observational data. The causal effects of early-life disadvantage in particular are even less understood, because long-term data on the political consequences of randomized early-life anti-poverty interventions is nearly nonexistent. We leverage the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to test the long-term effect of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods—and thus out of deep poverty—on turnout. MTO is one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments ever implemented in the United States. Although MTO ameliorated children’s poverty long term, we find that, contrary to expectations, the intervention did not increase children’s likelihood of voting later in life. Additional tests show the program did not ameliorate their poverty enough to affect turnout. These findings speak to the complex relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and low political participation.

College is a key pathway to political participation, and lower-income individuals especially stand to benefit from it given their lower political participation. However, rising inequality makes college disproportionately more accessible to high-income students. One consequence of inequality is a prevalence of predominantly affluent campuses. Colleges are thus not insulated from the growing concentration of affluence in American social spaces. We ask how affluent campus spaces affect college’s ability to equalize political participation. Predominantly affluent campuses may create participatory norms that especially elevate low-income students’ participation. Alternatively, they may create affluence-centered social norms that marginalize these students, depressing their participation. A third possibility is equal effects, leaving the initial gap unchanged. Using a large panel survey (201,011 students), controls on many characteristics, and tests for selection bias, we find that predominantly affluent campuses increase political participation to a similar extent for all income groups, thus leaving the gap unchanged. We test psychological, academic, social, political, financial, and institutional mechanisms for the effects. The results carry implications for the self-reinforcing link between inequality and civic institutions.

Women earn approximately half of all bachelor’s degrees in political science but they comprise only 22% of full professors. Scholars have offered various likely explanations and proposed many interventions to improve women’s advancement. This article reviews existing research regarding the effectiveness of these interventions. We find that many of the proposed interventions have yet to be fully evaluated. Furthermore, some of the policies that have been evaluated turn out to be ineffective. Women’s mentoring and networking workshops are the most promising of the fully tested interventions. The potential for failure underscores the need for additional evaluation of any proposed intervention before widespread implementation.

A key question in the study of minority representation is whether descriptive representatives provide superior substantive representation. Neglected in this literature is the distinction between two forms of substantive representation: rhetoric versus policy. We provide a systematic comparison of presidential minority representation along these two dimensions. Barack Obama was the first African American president, yet his substantive representation of African Americans has not been fully evaluated. Using speech and budget data, we find that relative to comparable presidents, Obama offered weaker rhetorical representation, but stronger policy representation, on race and poverty. While we cannot rule out non-racial explanations, Obama’s policy proposals are consistent with minority representation. His actions also suggest that descriptive representatives may provide relatively better policy representation but worse rhetorical representation, at least when the constituency is a numerical minority. We thus highlight an understudied tension between rhetoric and policy in theories of minority representation.

When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of interruptions when speaking, and these women then lose influence in their own eyes and in others’. But when the group is assigned to unanimous rule, or when women are many, women experience a positive balance of interruptions, mitigating the deleterious effect of small numbers. Men do not experience this pattern. We draw implications for a type of representation that we call authoritative representation, and for democratic deliberation.

Can men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing women's descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the group's gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alternatives, using experimental data with many groups and links between individuals’ attitudes and speech. We find a substantial gender gap in voice and authority, but as hypothesized, it disappears under unanimous rule and few women, or under majority rule and many women. Deliberative design can avoid inequality by fitting institutional procedure to the social context of the situation.

In a critique of Huber and Lapinski (in this volume) I argued that their 2006 study failed to find evidence of racial priming and that this failure stands out in the recent accumulation of studies that do find racial priming. I argued further that this failure to replicate is the result of deficiencies in Huber and Lapinski's research. Huber and Lapinski (in this volume) respond by claiming that they did find evidence of racial priming among a subgroup, that their research is sound, that my research is flawed, and that the relevant literature does not comment on the differences between implicit and explicit messages . I show that 1) Huber and Lapinski's results demonstrate that their study produced null findings, 2) these null findings are caused by flaws in their study, 3) my research withstands their criticism, and 4) the relevant literature is in fact relevant and highlights the extent to which their null results are anomalous. There are, however, several points of agreement: 1) racial predispositions shape policy views, 2) these predispositions can be primed by cues and messages, and 3) these predispositions are primed by implicit racial messages. What remains at issue is the impact of explicit racial messages.

This comment addresses the growing controversy over the effects of implicit racial messages in politics. Many scholars find evidence that these implicit messages work and that they have racializing effects. However, the biggest study to date finds that racial messages—implicit or explicit—have no effects. In this paper I conduct a thorough review of several relevant literatures in order to adjudicate between these competing claims. I find that the large study's null findings conflict with 17 public opinion experiments involving over 5,000 subjects, 2 aggregate studies, and a large social psychology literature. Using different methods, samples, and settings, these studies show that racial cues do in fact racialize opinion. I explain the large study's null results by noting that its participants perceived only small differences across messages, that racial predispositions were measured just before exposure to the ad, thereby neutralizing the effect of the ad's racial cue, and that WebTV studies such as this one have failed to provide many subjects with their assigned ad. Thus, the weight of the evidence heavily favors the racial effect of racial cues and messages. I offer several directions for future research on racial communication and politics.Tali Mendelberg is Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University (talim@princeton.edu). She is the author of The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton University Press, 2001). She wishes to thank Oleg Bespalov and Dan Cassino for research assistance, Adam Berinsky, Claudine Gay, Martin Gilens, Vince Hutchings, Jon Krosnick, Shawn Rosenberg, and Nick Valentino for helpful feedback, and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for research support.

Nothing energizes a field of study more than a revolution. The explosion of new forms of mass communication is just such a revolution for the field of political communication, to judge by this volume. As its 22 chapters demonstrate, profound changes in the technology and institutions of mass media have prompted a wide-ranging and stimulating effort to document, interpret, and theorize.