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.
Thanks for sharing political news other than the typical tribal format. People don’t realize how consuming rage-baiting news affects their brains. We need more human interest political news.
You’re definitely welcome, but your second and third sentences make me feel a real mix of feelings.
Like, I think you’re right that being angry affects people’s brains/minds more than we want to realize, but there are a lot of things in our world today people should be enraged by, ignoring those things isn’t going to make them go away, and I think a bit rage can be a force for good in the right circumstances if it’s directed the right way.
Anger is a gift. It just needs to be directed to education and not violence. We need to be given the tools to find out why the problems developed. Just hating the “other” isn’t a solution. The answer lies in how the environment and material conditions create the space for the problems to arise in the first place. Philosophy should be taught in schools to make us understand the human condition.
While I nominally agree, the paradox of tolerance must also be considered, particularly considering the alarming resurgence of authoritarian and outright fascist ideology (very specifically including neo-Naziism).
No doubt. Once the beliefs are ingrained, it’s near impossible to educate. People died with Covid in hospitals still believing that it was a hoax. I’m not saying that we should hug fascists. I’m just saying it helps to understand what made them fascists. Punching Nazis is a necessity.
Yep, I think we’re on the same page.
Tangentially, a simultaneously fascinating and dismaying thing to explore is how the Israeli state got from “holocaust survivors” to “actively implementing an apartheid state”, the potential future trajectories their government and country could take if their fundamentalist/xenophobic tendencies aren’t controlled and reversed. There are frankly very good reasons why they were so hostile to all of their Arab neighbors for so long (reductively: they all wanted to genocide them pretty much immediately, so it was very much a frying pan -> fire situation for Israel’s formative years as a country)… but there are also some good reasons why those neighbors were hostile to Israel’s establishment - really, the location of the land they were granted - since it was a pretty direct artifact of western imperialism (“we’ve owned this land for a while, but we’ll give it to you”, disregarding the millennia of history and various factions and ethnicities in the region) (but that doesn’t excuse the pretty overtly genocidal rhetoric coming from most of their neighbors for a VERY long time, immediately on the heels of the Holocaust). I think there’s a LOT of lessons to be learned there, even absent a presently workable and equitable solution for the region, if people are willing to look at the situation from a holistic and objective viewpoint.
This sounds like fascist speak
Yep, the Allies were fascist.
The issue with the word fascism is that it only pertains to right leaning ideologies according to the dictionary definition. This provides liberal extremists a safe haven from negative labels as they feel free to force their views and silence opposition, which ironically seems to be what the definition of fascism SHOULD be, regardless of party
The issue is both sides think the other is the intolerant one
Yeah, but one side is objectively WAY off base.
Its working as designed
Interesting study, shame they could only include data from the one county but data sets like this a very hard to come by.
Here’s a surprising tidbit from the Discussion Section:
Given how widespread police stops are and their relationship to racial injustice, their political implications demand close study. What we find advances our understanding of how lower-level police contact affects political participation. We find that traffic stops reduce turnout among non-Black voters, with a smaller negative effect for Black voters.
Liberals are always thinking there’s other factors for why people vote Republican rather than people just thinking differently lol
Thinking differently is appreciated. We shouldn’t all think the same. The problem comes when that thinking lacks humanity and empathy and love.
If you truly believe people who vote Republican lack human empathy and love you might be spending too much time in liberal echo chambers for such an extremist view
The Republican version of empathy and love of indistinguishable from cruelty for the out-group. Like how they “love” women by implementing policies that kill them. And also just killing them as partners.
It’s because they love life and want to protect the baby inside the woman
How do you square the circle where lovers of life kill more women through policy relative to other, similar policies?
I think most republican voters would agree to allow abortion in cases of rape or death of the mother. It’s the republican politicians who go to the extreme to outright ban it
I’m sure that’s very comforting to the families of the people who’ve died in pregnancy and childbirth in the states where abortion is illegal because of the voting choices of Republicans. I’m sure it’s even more comforting to the victims as they bleed out.
Do they realise the woman is alive? Do they care about her life? I don’t think so.
Your assumption that they were liberal says a lot
You have no friends and I feel sorry for you.
:(
Always question your beliefs. Always choose love.
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o rly?
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Yeah fuck you fascist. ACAB
it’s a scientific study… it’s not an opinion… perhaps you don’t know the difference… it’s something you should have learned in school… maybe you didn’t pay attention very well… you probably didn’t think it was important, so now you make moronic statements like this, in public… for everyone to see…
People were saying this is probably why some states stay red is because of this study. That’s what my comment was directed to.
Insulting someone is a sign of unintelligence so thanks for the peek into your brain function
i was trying to help you… everyone can see what you said… don’t try to weasel out of it… trying to insult me will not help you…
Go to a conservative echo chamber and try and survive, it’s fun
i am barely willing to waste my time on you
It isn’t a waste of time, it’s small growth one interaction at a time.
I do it because I’d like to potentially further a career in politics, and would like to attempt to create unity.
Just have to figure out how people’s minds work
I grew up in a conservative place. Frankly, those people and their opinions are a good part of why I’m now a socialist.
Thinking differently is for liberals. Conservatives think the same.
Look man…
Liberals are better than conservatives, but they’re still brainwashed fools serving the elites
Yes but one party is actively trying to kill the other’s members and when they run out of them, they’ll go for the plebs that supported them. Whataboutism like your statement is what got America (and the UK for that matter) to the dire point both countries are in.
This isn’t whataboutism. Whataboutism doesn’t acknowledge that one is better. Whataboutism says “B may be evil, but A is just as evil”.
Guess what I did? I acknowledged one was better.
I’m just saying not to be satisfied with a liberal status quo - liberalism will become conservatism when left unchallenged, just like it is already doing. I’m saying we should constantly push for more. Vote as far left as you can, of course, but don’t let yourself think that the “left choice” is actually left.
What you’re doing is the mirror image of whataboutism. Pointing out that A is marginally better than B, and thus concluding that the now-suddenly-binary choice has a clear good and evil.
Also, I didn’t mention any parties.
Mostly because they’re brought up that way, in my experience.
Sincerely,
A Former Republican Voter
Oh I’m sure some people are inherently evil like that. I didn’t used to think that way, I used to believe that all people were occasionally confused but basically good and we could all find common ground to work together. Talking to enough Republican voters changed my mind on that.
But that’s all kind of besides the point, this article isn’t about why evil people vote for Republicans, it’s about why other people don’t vote.
e; Also, I’m not a liberal, I think liberals are greedy and dumb and preventing more efficient economic systems from taking root, but I’m fully willing to work with them and vote for them if it keeps Republicans out of power.
I think it’s important to point out that liberal != leftist. Also, neoliberal is critically and meaningfully different from both of those.
I am a leftist/socialist at this point. I can play the capitalism game because that’s what I grew up and established my career in, but I try to push it in more positive directions where and when I can. I vote for Democrats in US elections because our electoral system is structured to only allow us to chose between parties that are, at the moment, either neoliberal or theocratic fascist, but I want to make it clear that while I very much do not like the vast majority of the Democratic Party, I outright revile what the GOP has mutated into, and I will never vote for any Republican, in any election, at any level, for the rest of my life, specifically due to what they’ve done as a matter of public policy since I was a child, and more specifically due to how they’ve allowed themselves to be turned from low-key regressive racists to boldly chauvinistic, xenophobic, white supremacist, theocratic authoritarians. Also, fuck Regan and Nixon.
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)).
Evil as a formal idea does not exist. Actions are considered evil. People commit evil acts because of ignorance, manipulation and indoctrination. Evil people can be changed with education. True “evil,” like serial killers, usually involves some chemical imbalance mentally. Or a combination of abuse, neglect and imbalance.
Yeah, I used to believe exactly this, but I’ve seen too many privileged and comfortable people do and argue for completely sadistic shit to hold on to that anymore. Or maybe it is true, but it just doesn’t matter to me as much as it used to when the end result is innocents getting hurt.
For what it’s worth, I like the world you’re describing a lot more than the one I feel like I’m currently living in.
They are the same world. I still slip into that world. In 2016-2019, I hated Trump with a passion. Then I realized he is just a sad, abused and neglected kid. The sycophants around him are influenced by capitalistic greed. Capitalism is the cause of most problems in our society. It seems to easy to say that, but it’s true. Marxism and socialism aren’t the answer. But they are the first step to finding the answer.
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I’m talking about education from the beginning, at an early age. Babies aren’t born evil, it is learned. I don’t disagree with you about stubbornness and hate. It’s dangerous and dehumanizing to think of them as just evil. They are victims of abuse, indoctrination and material conditions. I’m not excusing the “evil” actions, just hoping people understand they are victims of circumstances. That’s why they don’t see themselves as racist. In their world/view they are not. We have to continue to educate them. When that fails, violence becomes the only option. You can’t compromise with fascism.
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Humans aren’t inherently evil. We’re injerently adaptive, and current circumstances tend to reward some traits associated with antisocial behavior.
Psychologist disagree with this notion. Sorry if you were abused, it’s not your fault.
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I was just thinking about this the other day. Everyone who does something others might consider evil, finds a way to justify their actions so that they aren’t evil. Once you realize this, it’s hard to get mad at people when they’re only being themselves.
It’s plenty easy when “people being themselves” hurt people you care about
Fair enough in those instances
Exactly. Hitler thought he was doing the right thing. From his perspective, he was righteous. Hannah Arrendt explained this. It’s “F’ed” up, but explains so much. Religion, and propaganda from movies and tv teach us that people are inherently evil. Once you realize that’s not true, you begin the journey to find out why they believe the horrible things they do. That journey can take some time. But it is worth it.
