Dara Z. Strolovitch

Do Interest Groups Represent the Disadvantaged? Advocacy at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender

How well do interest groups represent the disadvantaged? I examine the policy advocacy of national organizations that represent marginalized groups, focusing on the extent to which they advocate on behalf of intersectionally disadvantaged subgroups of their membership. Combining quantitative analysis of original data from a survey of organizations with information from in-depth interviews, I find that organizations are substantially less active when it comes to issues affecting disadvantaged subgroups than they are when it comes to issues affecting more advantaged subgroups. In spite of sincere desires to represent disadvantaged members, organizations downplay the impact of such issues and frame them as narrow and particularistic in their effect, while framing issues affecting advantaged subgroups as if they affect a majority of their members and have a broad and generalized impact. Consequently, issues affecting advantaged subgroups receive considerable attention regardless of their breadth of impact, whereas issues affecting disadvantaged subgroups do not.

Measuring Gay Populations and Antigay Hate Crime

Objectives. The study of crime directed at gay and lesbian targets is hampered by two measurement problems: Police agencies provide unreliable data on hate crime, and tract-level census data contain no direct information about gay or lesbian population density. This article attempts to gauge two quantities that cannot be measured directly or unambiguously: the size of the gay and lesbian populations and the number of hate crimes directed at gay and lesbian targets. Methods. Population data for New York City were gathered from market research lists and from a special tabulation of the 1990 Census. Hate crime data were obtained from the Anti-Violence Project and the New York Police Department. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the reliability of each measure and the correlation between latent population density and hate crime. Results. Each of these measures offers a reliable means by which to assess cross-sectional differences in the population density and victimization of gay men. Census and police data prove to be inferior indicators of lesbian population density and antilesbian hate crime. For both men and women, population density is strongly correlated with the incidence of hate crime. Conclusions. Despite the fact that advocacy groups record many more antigay incidents than do the police, both sources of data are in agreement about where hate crimes occur. The strong correlation between population density and hate crime against gay men implies that Census data could be used to forecast the occurrence of hate crime in areas where no police records exist.

NEW ORLEANS IS NOT THE EXCEPTION: Re-politicizing the Study of Racial Inequality

Although political science provides many useful tools for analyzing the effects of natural and social catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the scenes of devastation and inequality in New Orleans suggest an urgent need to adjust our lenses and reorient our research in ways that will help us to uncover and unpack the roots of this national travesty. Treated merely as exceptions to the “normal” functioning of society, dramatic events such as Katrina ought instead to serve as crucial reminders to scholars and the public that the quest for racial equality is only a work in progress. New Orleans, we argue, was not exceptional; it was the product of broader and very typical elements of American democracy—its ideology, attitudes, and institutions. At the dawn of the century after “the century of the color-line,” the hurricane and its aftermath highlight salient features of inequality in the United States that demand broader inquiry and that should be incorporated into the analytic frameworks through which American politics is commonly studied and understood. To this end, we suggest several ways in which the study of racial and other forms of inequality might inform the study of U.S. politics writ large, as well as offer a few ideas about ways in which the study of race might be re-politicized. To bring race back into the study of politics, we argue for greater attention to the ways that race intersects with other forms of inequality, greater attention to political institutions as they embody and reproduce these inequalities, and a return to the study of power, particularly its role in the maintenance of ascriptive hierarchies.

Polarized Networks The Organizational Affiliations of National Party Convention Delegates

Previous research has documented that the institutional behaviors (e.g., lobbying, campaign contributions) of political organizations reflect the polarization of these organizations along party lines. However, little is known about how these groups are connected at the level of individual party activists. Using data from a survey of 738 delegates at the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions, we use network regression analysis to demonstrate that co-membership networks of national party convention delegates are highly polarized by party, even after controlling for homophily due to ideology, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, educational attainment, income, and religious participation. Among delegates belonging to the same organization, only 1.78% of these co-memberships between delegates crossed party lines, and only 2.74% of the ties between organizations sharing common delegates were bipartisan in nature. We argue that segregation of organizational ties on the basis of party adds to the difficulty of finding common political ground between the parties.

Intersectionality in Time: Sexuality and the Shifting Boundaries of Intersectional Marginalization

“Here Come the (Stylish) Grooms,” declared the headline, which was accompanied by a 9 1/2-inch-high photograph of two smiling, dancing, and, yes, stylish grooms. The article appeared on the front page of the Thursday Styles section of the October 20, 2011 edition of the New York Times . Alluding to the New York State law passed in June of that year that gave legal recognition to same-sex marriage, it began, “As they walk down the aisle, gay couples are making new rules while keeping some old ones.”

A possessive investment in white heteropatriarchy? The 2016 election and the politics of race, gender, and sexuality

ABSTRACT The 2016 election has triggered new interest in and speculation about longstanding questions about the roles of race, gender, and sexuality in American politics. We argue that rather than anomalous and exceptional, the 2016 election represents an extension – and perhaps the beginning of a consolidation – of enduring and intersecting configurations of racialized and gendered power, marginalization, and oppression. We examine some of the ways in which these intersecting configurations structure and are structured by American politics, exploring some of the political consequences of proximity to or distance from the benefits of white heteropatriarchy.

Intertemporal Differences Among MTurk Workers: Time-Based Sample Variations and Implications for Online Data Collection:

The online labor market Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an increasingly popular source of respondents for social science research. A growing body of research has examined the demographic composition of MTurk workers as compared with that of other populations. While these comparisons have revealed the ways in which MTurk workers are and are not representative of the general population, variations among samples drawn from MTurk have received less attention. This article focuses on whether MTurk sample composition varies as a function of time. Specifically, we examine whether demographic characteristics vary by (a) time of day, (b) day of week, and serial position (i.e., earlier or later in data collection), both (c) across the entire data collection and (d) within specific batches. We find that day of week differences are minimal, but that time of day and serial position are associated with small but important variations in demographic composition. This demonstrates that MTurk samples cannot be presumed identical across different studies, potentially affecting reliability, validity, and efforts to reproduce findings.

Gender Attitudes, Gendered Partisanship: Feminism and Support for Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton among Party Activists

ABSTRACT Activists in the Democratic and Republican parties have distinct concerns about women’s place in American politics and society. These views lead them to evaluate female candidates through different ideological lenses that are conditioned, in part, on their divergent attitudes about gender. We explore the implications of these diverging lenses through an examination of the 2008 candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, using data from an original survey of Democratic and Republican National Convention delegates. We find that delegate sex did not affect their evaluations but that evaluations were influenced by the interaction of partisanship and attitudes about women’s roles.

Mobilizing Marginalized Groups among Party Elites

Abstract The Democratic Party has long used a system of caucuses and councils to reach out to marginalized groups among convention delegates. This article tests two hypotheses about how this system works within the party. First, the Parties in Service to Candidates Hypothesis holds that caucuses and councils mobilize elites from marginalized groups to increase support for the party nominee. Second, the Group Solidarity Hypothesis holds that caucuses and councils mobilize elites from marginalized groups to enhance group solidarity. Regression analysis of data drawn from an original survey of delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention provides no support to the Service Hypothesis, while the evidence supports the Solidarity Hypothesis in the case of the Women’s Caucus, which became a rallying point for women who were disappointed that Hillary Clinton was not the Democratic Party nominee. A similar survey of delegates to the 2008 Republican National Convention did not uncover a parallel system of representing marginalized groups within the Republican Party.

Guide to interest groups and lobbying in the United States

Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying in the United States offers a thematic analysis of interest groups and lobbying in American politics and over the course of American political history. It explores how interest groups have organized and articulated their support for numerous issues, and have they grown - both in numbers and range of activities - to become an integral part of the U.S. political system. Beginning with the foundations of interest groups during the late 19th Century Gilded Age, to the contemporary explosive growth of lobbying, Political Action Committees, and new forms of interest group cyberpolitics, readers are provided with multiple approaches to understanding the complex and changing interest advocacy sphere .