Social Movements and political participation
Mclaren’s research on social movement’s explores how Americans’ perceptions of social movements associated with racial minorities influences overall outcomes for movements and political participation. Mclaren’s work in this area is also interested in how social movements “work” in advancing policies targeted at resolving racial inequalities in the American political system. Mclaren’s co-authored work in this area has gain attention from media sources, and can be seen profiled in Duke Today.
The Incorporation of Southern Black Americans into the Political System
“The Incorporation of Southern Black Americans into the Political System” With John Aldrich, Jared Clemmons, and Jasmine Carrera Smith. Working Paper
The political heart of the Jim Crow South was the ability of southern whites to deny Black Americans access to the voting booth. Our purpose in this paper is to show just how right King and Johnson were in at least one critical dimension; “giving them the vote.” In this paper, we compare Black Americans in the south to southern whites, and non-southern Blacks and whites in three domains. One is the ability of the respondent to relate to the beliefs of party identification (specifically the percentage coded as “apolitical” and coded as Democrats) and senses of political efficacy. A second domain is registration and (self-reported) turnout. Finally, we predict participating in the standard battery of types of campaign participation probed by the ANES, thus giving us a third (in this case battery of questions) about self-reported behavior from 1952-1972. We find that the culmination of the Civil Rights Era policies significantly improved participation in the traditional dimensions of registration and turnout, but also the psychological dimensions of political efficacy, as well as transitions away from “apolitical” status. We conclude with suggestions and avenues for future research.
By Any Means Necessary? how Black And White Americans evaluate protest tactic in response to a police killing
“By Any Means Necessary? How Black and White Americans Evaluate Protest Tactics in Response to a Police Killing.” With Zoe Walker. 2024. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics.
The majority of protests in support of racial justice are peaceful. However, there is debate about how and when violent and disruptive protest activities can shift public opinion in favor of a social movement. Using the Black Lives Matter movement as a lens, we design a survey experiment to test the casual effects of different protest tactics on support for protestors and the movement itself. We manipulate the level of disruption in each condition, ranging from a simple march to a protest in which participants set fire to an empty police headquarters, all in response to police killing an unarmed Black man. We use OLS regressions to estimate average treatment effects. Overall, we find that Black and White participants have similar emotional reactions to protestors, but differ in their approval and perceived effectiveness of protest tactics. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the broader literature on social movements and public opinion.
Profiled in Duke Today: Mclaren’s Research Explores Black Opinions on Black Lives Matter
Checkout my CV for more working papers on Social Movements and Political Behaivor