This article is a few months old now, but I think it’s an incredibly important area of research and something that explains a lot of why America is like it is and how red states stay red.
Excerpt,
A study I co-authored with fellow researcher Kevin Morris, published in December in the American Political Science Review, finds that traffic stops by police stops in Hillsborough County reduced voter turnout in 2014, 2016, and 2018 federal elections.
Our study compared the voter turnout of Hillsborough motorists who were stopped by police shortly before and after each election. Drawing on information about each person’s turnout in past cycles, we found that these stops reduced the likelihood that a stopped individual turned out to vote by 1.8 percentage points on average. The effect held when accounting for characteristics like race, gender, party affiliation, past turnout, and prior traffic stops to improve our comparisons. The discouraging effect of stops was slightly higher in 2014 and 2018.
These results make clear that the collateral consequences of policing—including worsening outcomes for economic security, educational attainment, and health—also extend to political participation. If the communities who are most frequently subjected to policing are also discouraged from voting as a result, it could create a vicious feedback loop of political withdrawal.
Why would traffic stops make people less likely to show up to the polls? Past research has already established that the most disruptive forms of criminal legal contact, like arrest and incarceration, discourage people from voting. Our study shows that low-level police contact matters in the same way. If a traffic stop makes a motorist fear that the government will harm them, it can prompt a withdrawal from civic life that political scientists call “strategic retreat.” Motorists might worry that a routine traffic stop could escalate into police violence, a more common outcome for Black people in particular. Beyond justified fears of violent victimization, voters might also bristle at the perception of being targeted to raise revenue through excessive ticketing. Accordingly, if incarceration ‘teaches’ would-be voters that their government is an alienating and harmful force in their lives, traffic stops could catalyze a similar form of ‘learning.’
Full study is available here, and here’s an archived thread from a dumb website where one of the research study authors answered questions.
Bingo, I’m a democratic socialist who aligns with liberals to thwart conservatives (who I think are wrong about most everything but deserve a seat at the table) and fight fascists (who I do not think deserve a seat at the table because they’re inherently violent and dangerous).
I like liberalism’s commitment to civil rights and protecting minority populations, but I think it’s too individualistic and basically just unwilling/unable to grapple with the consequences of the industrial revolution and urbanization (let alone climate change). I think capitalist markets have their place for certain things (e.g. culture, entertainment, luxury goods, etc.), but vitally important things (i.e. housing, food, clean water, healthcare, education, legal advocacy, and transportation) should be equally available to everyone and provided through democratically accountable taxpayer funded institutions. Also, I think the government should only partner with private businesses in exceptional circumstances and should generally try to do things for itself with a workforce that’s like at least five times the size of what we have now. Also, private schools and home schooling should be abolished and billionaires kids and poor people’s kids should be socialized and educated together.
I expect I’d struggle to get more than 5% of the vote with those positions in basically any American election, but I’m committed to democracy regardless anyway because a) I think there’s always going to be disagreements among people and giving them a venue to fight over those disagreements with words and votes discourages them from utilizing more destructive and destabilizing things, b) it’s just really fundamental basic fairness to me, which is kind my whole overriding thing when it comes to political or economic questions (like, one of my principle problems with capitalism (beyond the fact that it’s just inherently self destructive) is it’s totally undemocratic)).