American Politics/Bankard Speaker Series 2020-2021

This chapter documents the party-group alignment of the NRA and the GOP, detailing the constellation of factors that collectively facilitated this alignment. Building directly on chapters 3 and 4, it shows how the NRA’s cultivation of a group social identity and ideology laid a foundation for its eventual incorporation into the Republican coalition. The chapter also highlights the institutional conditions that catalyzed this process, including the changing incentives of both the NRA and GOP politicians. Finally, the chapter explores the intensification of the NRA’s relationship with the Republican Party over the past few decades, including its relationship with Donald Trump, and reflects on what the NRA case tells us about the nature of party coalitions.

White evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, producing extensive debate as to who evangelicals are, what it means to be an evangelical in the United States today, and whether the electoral results are surprising or not. This paper offers empirical clarity to this protracted discussion by asking and answering a series of questions related to Trump’s victory in general and his support from white evangelicals in particular. In doing so, the analyses show that the term “evangelical” has not become a synonym for conservative politics and that white evangelical support for Trump would be higher if public opinion scholars used a belief-centered definition of evangelicalism rather than relying on the more common classification strategies based on self-identification or religious denomination. These findings go against claims that nominal evangelicals, those who call themselves evangelicals but are not religious, make up the core of Trump’s support base. Moreover, high levels of electoral support among devout evangelicals is not unique to the 2016 election but is rather part of a broader trend of evangelical electoral behavior, even when faced with non-traditional Republican candidates. Finally, the paper explores why white evangelicals might support a candidate like Trump. The paper presents evidence that negative partisanship helps explain why devout evangelicals–despite Trump’s background and behaviors being cause for concern–coalesced around his presidential bid. Together, the findings from this paper help make sense of both the 2016 presidential election and evangelical public opinion, both separately and together.

What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting an ethnic minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We find that Japanese Americans who were interned or had family who were interned are significantly less politically engaged and that these patterns of disengagement increase with internment length. Using an identification strategy leveraging quasi-random camp assignment, we also find that camp experience matters: those who went to camps that witnessed intragroup violence or strikes experienced sharper declines, suggesting that group fragmentation is an important mechanism of disengagement. Taken together, our findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the demobilizing effects of ethnically targeted detention and expand our understanding of these forces within the U.S.