Claudine Gay’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

For decades, scholars have attributed Black Americans' unified political and policy views, despite growing internal class and status differences, to a strong perception of linked fate. In recent years, the concept has been measured in other racial and ethnic groups and with regard to gender, but not applied to social statuses such as class or religion. Without broad comparisons across groups and different statuses, however, one cannot determine the appropriate empirical test or most distinctive correlates of this canonical construct. Using a new national survey, we examine Americans' views of linked fate by race or ethnicity, and also by gender, class, or religion. We find expressions of linked fate to be similar across racial or ethnic groups, robust to experimental manipulation, and as strong for class as for racial or ethnic identity. Intra-individual correlations on linked fate items are very high, while a sense of linked fate is rarely associated with political views or political participation. Expressions of linked fate are not always closely related to feelings of closeness to one's group or perceptions of discrimination against that group. We speculate on the broader meaning of responses to this standard item, and conclude that the enormously fruitful theory of racial linked fate is due for further conceptual development and empirical experimentation.

Millions of Americans live in communities without an adequate supply of affordable housing. The governmental response to the crisis has focused on subsidies to private developers who build below-market housing, with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) at the center of this effort. Although federally funded, the LIHTC program grants states wide latitude in distributing billions of dollars of tax credits annually. Do state officials exploit this discretion to channel housing subsidies to geographic constituencies for political ends? Drawing on 20 years of LIHTC administrative data, I test whether electoral support for the state’s governing party predicts the level of tax credit investment directed to an area. The analysis reveals a modest relationship between partisan loyalty and housing investment, conditional on the partisan and institutional contexts. Democratic governors steer tax credits to areas of core support, but only where the governor exercises a high level of control over the state’s LIHTC-allocating agency.

Black Americans are a core Democratic constituency, a preference typically attributed to the salience of racial issues and concerns about racial inequality among Black Americans. But what I ask in this paper is whether part of what sustains these Democratic commitments is low information - namely, many Black Americans may be unaware of the extent to which their policy views put them in conflict with their party and unsure about how to reconcile their views with their partisan choice. Using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study, this paper examines how political knowledge mediates the relationship between issue cross-pressures and partisanship among Black Americans. I demonstrate that the extent to which Democratic allegiance persists despite non-racial policy disagreements depends on whether blacks are sufficiently knowledgeable to act on their policy views, and not simply on the importance that blacks assign to their racial commitments. It is only among politically knowledgeable Black Americans that policy cross-pressures are politically consequential; for those with low levels of political knowledge, strong partisan support persists despite non-racial policy disagreements.

In 1994, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program (MTO), a lottery that offered poor families vouchers to move out of public housing into private apartments. Drawing on recently collected vote history data, this study reveals that MTO has had the unintended consequence of reducing voter turnout among participating adults. The low turnout may be due to the loss of social ties that accompanied mobility. The findings suggest that residential mobility, a popular tool in the fight against poverty, may strain poor Americans' weak ties to the political system.

How do conceptions of linked fate operate among Americans? The extant literature offers few answers; what we know about the prevalence and salience of linked fate comes primarily, though not exclusively, from the study of black Americans. Mostly absent from the literature are comparisons of linked fate perceptions across different demographic groups and for non-racial social commonalities such as gender, class, or religion. We analyze a new survey experiment in order examine four features of linked fate perceptions – their salience, robustness, correlations with each other and with social status, and relationship to political attitudes and behavior. Perceptions of linked fate are widespread, extending beyond African Americans and women and focused on identities other than just race and gender; class linked fate is particularly salient. Linked fate perceptions are real, and not easily manipulated by survey context. Beliefs in linked fate cohere in distinctive patterns reflecting an individual’s propensity to adopt either a group-centered or individualistic view of life chances. Views associated with intersectionality occur sometimes, but not consistently and not in a clear pattern. Finally, with few exceptions, linked fate perceptions are neither consistently nor highly politicized.

Abstract will be provided by author.