Natalie Masuoka’s research while affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles and other places

This study builds on the existing literature by considering the extent to which minority legislators offer different forms of constituency outreach during times of emergency. This case study of state legislator constituent outreach during the COVID-19 pandemic uses an analysis of Facebook posts in 2020 to track how state legislators provided outreach and communicated resources to their constituents during a public health crisis. We ask, in times of emergency, do women and minority legislators offer unique attention toward the needs of those constituencies that they descriptively represent, or do urgent issues push these legislators to focus more broadly on general concerns expressed by their entire district? We argue that legislators’ social media activity during the COVID-19 pandemic offers an important measure of their practice of constituency outreach due to the nation’s reliance on virtual communication during this period. This study finds there to be important variation by partisanship, but within party, we find important differences depending on both the race and gender of the legislator. Democratic women of all races were those legislators most actively providing information and outreach related to COVID-19 to their constituents in 2020.

Women Voters documents and explains three important phenomena implicating gender, race, and immigration. The Element contributes to a better understanding of partisan candidate choice in US presidential elections. First, women are diverse and politically heterogenous, where white women are more likely to vote Republican and women of color are majority Democratic voters. Second, due to the unequal privileges and constraints associated with race, white women have greater agency to sort by partisan preference, whereas women of color have more limited choice in their partisan support. Finally, the authors emphasize compositional change in the electorate as an important explanation of electoral outcomes.

This is a review article of Skin Color, Protest, and Politics in America by Mara Cecilia Ostfeld and Nicole Yadon, published by Russell Sage Foundation in 2022. The core premise of the book argues that skin color is another important dimension of the construction of race in America and that it can also provide insight into how individuals experience the world. This article provides an overview of the book and offers reflections on its interventions into the fields of race, ethnicity and politics, public opinion, and political psychology.

What were the indicators of voter turnout and presidential vote choice among Asian Americans in 2020? We argue that 2020 was a unique year in which race was salient for Asian Americans due to the rise of anti-Asian attitudes attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and the opportunity to elect a vice presidential candidate of Asian descent. Because of this, racial considerations played a unique role that informed Asian American political participation and attitudes in this election. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we identify the individual-level factors associated with turnout and presidential vote choice among Asian Americans. We find that stronger perceptions of racial discrimination were related to a higher likelihood of turnout and voting in support of the Democratic Party, especially among Asian immigrants relative to the native-born. This study offers new insight for when we can expect racial considerations to inform the politics of Asian Americans, who are the fastest growing racial group in the United States and therefore an increasingly important bloc of the electorate.

Today, identity expression and acceptance represent an important area of political advocacy and representation. Yet, how responsive are voters to new racial identity cues promoted by political leaders? Using candidates with interracial backgrounds as a case study, we assess whether voters are responsive to candidates who assert a mixed-race identity or if voters primarily rely on other traits, such as the candidate’s family background, in determining their support of that candidate. Using an experimental design, this study presents participants with various hypothetical candidates who vary both in their racial heritages (i.e., candidates with Asian and White interracial parents or Black and White interracial parents) and identity choices (i.e., as single-race minority, single-race White, or biracial). We then compare how the mixed-race, single-race minority, and White participants evaluate the candidate. We expect that the mixed-race participants will be most supportive of candidates who signal a common in-group identity by identifying specifically as “biracial”. On the other hand, the single-race minority and White participants should be more likely to adhere to the one-drop rule or hypodescent in their evaluations, meaning they will provide more positive evaluations of interracial candidates who identify as a single-race minority. Our study finds that the single-race minority and White participants completely overlook racial identity cues and instead focus on the description of the candidate’s family heritage along with their own assumptions about hypodescent. The mixed-race participants, on the other hand, show strong support for biracial-identified, in-group political candidates This study adds to a burgeoning literature on racial perception and on political representation.

Public airing of incidents of sexual harassment have moved abuse from the shadows to the light, spurring mass response in the form of #MeToo and “Time’s Up.” While sexual harassment holds negative valence, election outcomes suggest that not all voters punish leaders accused of harassment. We argue there is systematic variation in how voters respond to candidates accused of harassment because evaluations are made within the context of both partisanship and the gendered issue of sexual harassment. As a result, we expect to find distinct responses across four voter groups—Democratic women and men, and Republican women and men on the specific issue of harassment. We present supporting evidence from two survey experiments and a third associational study to show that Democratic women are most likely to electorally punish sexual harassers. Experimental evidence also shows that Republican men are least likely to electorally punish candidates accused of harassment.

Scholarship on women voters in the United States has focused on the gender gap, showing that, since the 1980s, women are more likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates than men. The persistence of the gender gap has nurtured the conclusion that women are Democrats. This article presents evidence upending that conventional wisdom. It analyzes data from the American National Election Study to demonstrate that white women are the only group of female voters who support Republican Party candidates for president. They have done so by a majority in all but 2 of the last 18 elections. The relevance of race for partisan choice among women voters is estimated with data collected in 2008, 2012, and 2016, and the significance of being white is identified after accounting for political party identification and other predictors.