Tali Mendelberg

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Princeton University

Comparative scholarship suggests authoritarian candidates often rely on backing from the wealthy. The wealthy are also said to play an important role in American campaign finance. Studies of Donald Trump, however, found that he drew significant support from white Americans with less education and privilege. We evaluate wealthy and non-wealthy Ameri...

Few studies examine how often people of color voice their views or shape the discussion in civic or political decision-making groups. Existing studies do not link participants’ private preferences to what they say and lack data on racial inequalities in individuals’ public speech. We analyze a large sample of citizens randomized to groups tasked wi...

As disasters become more frequent and costly, understanding attitudes toward government disaster policy becomes critically important. Scholars have explored the racialized nature of specific disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. But studies of general disaster policy preferences have not attended much to race, focusing instead on dimensions like par...

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 dis...

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 ran...

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. Colleg...

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...

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...

Do women benefit from participating in women-only, “enclave” groups? Specifically, do such groups benefit their individual members? This question underlies a number of influential normative theories of inequality but remains underexplored despite the ubiquity of these groups in the organizational life of legislative, party, civic, education, and in...

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s Democracy for Realists makes a persuasive case that standard theories of democracy rest on shaky empirical ground, and that optimistically interpreted empirical findings about public competence do not save the day. However, I argue that the solution does not lie with theories of elite competition or accountabil...

Did George Bush’s use of the Willie Horton story during the1988 presidential campaign communicate most effectively when no one noticed its racial meaning? Do politicians routinely evoke racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments without voters’ awareness? This controversial, rigorously researched book argues that they do. Tali Mendelberg examines h...

Affluent Americans support more conservative economic policies than the nonaffluent, and government responds disproportionately to these views. Yet little is known about the emergence of these consequential views. We develop, test, and find support for a theory of class cultural norms: These preferences are partly traceable to socialization that oc...

Formal decision-making groups are ubiquitous, and they make decisions that govern every aspect of life, yet women are vastly underrepresented in them. How effective are women in these groups, where their numbers still lag far behind men's? We address this longstanding question, focusing on detailed measures of women's influence in natural and contr...

This article reviews the growing literature on the ways in which gender informs our understanding of political psychology and how studies of political psychology shed light on the meaning of gender in society and politics. It focuses on gender gaps in contemporary American politics, where men tend to be more conservative and to engage in more influ...

Does gender equality in public meetings improve as women's numbers grow? Research applying critical mass theory to the exercise of influence in public discussion and decision making reveals a complicated story. Women have made significant progress in education, employment, and the attainment of elected office; yet, they continue to lag behind their...

Some contemporary politicians try to mobilize racial attitudes by conveying implicit racial messages against their opponents—messages in which the racial reference is subtle but recognizable and which attack the opponent for alleged misdeeds. Although targeted politicians have tried a number of different strategies to respond to implicit racial app...

In this brief response, we take up several themes raised by the scholars who responded to our work, paying special attention to the interaction between individuals and group contexts. We argue that our study represents a productive first step in the attempt to understand how norms shape individual behavior, discursive dynamics, collective outcomes,...

Critical mass theory argues that women's numbers are a major cause of women's status and authority in a group. Applications of the theory to political settings have yielded mixed support for the theory. We unpack one mechanism that can explain when, why, and how numbers aid women. That mechanism is the norm of communication during group discussion....

This chapter examines the experiences of men and women in Londonderry, Wakefield, and many other towns and cities across the country. While the school boards data set is culled from official meeting minutes and thus has some limitations, the chapter regards the findings reviewed here as a tough test of the expectations for majority-rule meetings. N...

This chapter explores how the conditions of deliberation affect the definition of justice adopted by both individuals and groups, and how these concepts of justice influence their concrete policy decisions about income redistribution. The preferences of women and men tend to differ with respect to redistributive policies. These gender differences i...

This chapter examines how women, far more than men, prioritize the protection of vulnerable and poor populations and support government intervention on “compassion” issues. Were women to gain more equal standing and authority, deliberations in public settings may well come to reflect a different set of priorities. In the same conditions where women...

Do women participate in and influence meetings equally with men? Does gender shape how a meeting is run and whose voices are heard? This book shows how the gender composition and rules of a deliberative body dramatically affect who speaks, how the group interacts, the kinds of issues the group takes up, whose voices prevail, and what the group ulti...

This chapter explains how it is one of the best documented facts of American politics that groups with less power and authority in society are less likely to participate in politics. People typically think of these groups as defined by lines of race, ethnicity, language, income, age, or education. In modern America, observers of politics focus on t...

This chapter asks whether critics are correct that women participate less than men during deliberation and thus have less perceived influence in it. Advocates and critics of deliberative democracy posit equal meaningful participation as a necessary requirement of deliberation. Results show how far actual discussion deviates from that ideal standard...

This chapter considers how women on average tend to have lower confidence and to be more affected by that lower confidence, to dislike conflict and seek cooperation, and to seek a sense of connection to others. These differences between men and women may become consequential when individuals assemble in groups. The chapter identifies two possible r...

This chapter explores how women are the “silent sex,” in a manner of speaking. In the settings that characterize most arenas of politics and public affairs, and in many other formal discussions that take place in civic organizations, work teams, and other common venues, women are not a majority, and the norm of interaction has masculine characteris...

This chapter analyzes one more way that a person can instantiate power through speech—interruptions of other speakers and the responses to those interruptions. The way in which participants interact while speaking may enhance or undermine women's status in deliberation. Gendered roles and expectations construct women's speech as less authoritative...

This chapter looks at how there is no shortage of commentary about women's presence in decision-making groups. Part of the challenge of answering the lingering questions about women's voice and authority is methodological. For example, many of the studies that take up the question of gender do not disentangle group gender composition from individua...

This chapter talks about how American women, like their counterparts in other advanced economies, have narrowed or even reversed the gap in important resources that form the prerequisites of political participation. Women have become reliable voters and civic activists; in other words, they are the foot soldiers of democracy. However, women have no...

This concluding chapter discusses how scholars have established the utility of different types of representation for disadvantaged groups. Descriptive representation refers to the physical presence of a social group in the setting of decision making. Substantive representation occurs when the concerns, values, sensibilities, or interests of that gr...

Do women participate in and influence meetings equally with men? Does gender shape how a meeting is run and whose voices are heard? The Silent Sex shows how the gender composition and rules of a deliberative body dramatically affect who speaks, how the group interacts, the kinds of issues the group takes up, whose voices prevail, and what the group...

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 impo...

Does low descriptive representation inhibit substantive representation for women in deliberating groups? We address this question and go beyond to ask if the effects of descriptive representation also depend on decision rule. We conducted an experiment on distributive decisions, randomizing the group's gender composition and decision rule, includin...

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...

Laboratory experiments, survey experiments and field experiments occupy a central and growing place in the discipline of political science. The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science is the first text to provide a comprehensive overview of how experimental research is transforming the field. Some chapters explain and define core conce...

A growing body of work suggests that exposure to subtle racial cues prompts white voters to penalize black candidates, and that the effects of these cues may influence outcomes indirectly via perceptions of candidate ideology. We test hypotheses related to these ideas using two experiments based on national samples. In one experiment, we manipulate...

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 o...

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 La...

We present a group-based approach to the study of deliberation. Deliberation occurs in groups, yet many studies of deliberation do not take the group as a unit of analysis. We argue that group composition and the attendant social dynamics to which they give rise are an important aspect of deliberation. We offer several examples of ways to study the...

In recent years, theorists, observers and policy makers have increasingly promoted citizen deliberation. Yet little is known about how people deliberate about matters of politics. In this paper we ask how people deliberate about distributive justice, and in particular, about a guaranteed minimum income to the poor. If the proponents of deliberation...

Can stereotypes of ethnic groups have an indirect impact on voters' judgments even if voters reject them? We examine the case of Jewish leaders and hypothesize that acceptable political stereotypes (Jews are liberal) are linked in voters' minds to unacceptable social stereotypes (Jews are shady); consequently, a cue to the candidate's shadiness wor...

Can stereotypes of ethnic groups have an indirect impact on voters' judgments even if voters reject them? We examine the case of Jewish leaders and hypothesize that acceptable political stereotypes (Jews are liberal) are linked in voters' minds to unacceptable social stereotypes (Jews are shady); consequently, a cue to the candidate's shadiness wor...

How should we understand and explain individual acts of racism? Despite extensive debate about the broader place and importance of racism in America, there is surprisingly little theoretical or empirical analysis of what leads individuals to commit racist acts. In contrast to most political scientists who understand racism as an individual psycholo...

5/9/20051 Erik H. Erikson, after whom the Early Career Award is named, was a distin- guished psychologist who made many contributions to the study of the individ- ual. His fame comes in part from his contribution to the idea that the individual develops in context. The course of human development is shaped by historical, social, and cultural forces...

Should citizens be encouraged to deliberate about matters of politics? A review of several literatures about group discussion yields a mixed prognosis for citizen deliberation. Group discussion sometimes meets the expectations of deliberative theorists, other times falls short. Deliberators can, as theorists wish, conduct themselves with empathy fo...

Most research on the environmental determinants of whites' racial attitudes focuses on the "threat" hypothesis, i.e., that white racism increases with the competition posed by a larger black population. We argue that in the segregated United States, contextual effects are more complicated than this, involving both race and socio-economic status. Cr...

Although deliberation has a central place in democratic theory, scholars know little about how it actually works. Most deliberative theorists emphasize the many good consequences of deliberation. By contrast, Mansbridge suggests that deliberation in certain circumstances may exacerbate conflict. Scholarship on racial politics sug- gests that each h...

L'A. etudie la place des crimes raciaux dans la campagne presidentielle de 1988 aux Etats-Unis. Il souligne que dans sa campagne, G. Bush a souvent fait reference a W. Horton un jeune criminel noir, recidiviste, qui avait beneficie d'une liberation anticipee. L'A. analyse l'impact de ce type de campagne et se demande si les references a caractere r...

Despite the heroic efforts and real achievements provided by the Civil Rights movement, the United States remains today a profoundly segregated society. Here we investigate whether racial isolation affects the extent to which prejudice becomes insinuated into the opinions white Americans express on matters of racial policy. Analyzing national surve...

This thesis details the consequences of political campaign rhetoric for white public opinion on race. It argues that contemporary egalitarian norms and African American enfranchisement coexist uneasily with continuing racial conflict. The result of this tension is racial ambivalence among white voters, an electoral dilemma for elites, and a politic...

In this paper, we use an experimental approach to examine how the content of group discussion about income redistribution changes as other group-level features, including the group’s decision rule and gender composition, change. In previous studies, we reported that these group-level features affect the level of participation by men and women. In t...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Full and equal participation by all deliberators is a key element of deliberative theory. This study presents an experimental approach to the verbal behavior of participants in deliberating groups. We find that while men are generally more talkative than women, speaking longer and for a greater percentage of the conversation, the magnitude of the d...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.