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Mark Peffley: Research Page
Vita
(*.pdf)
Selected Recent Publications and Papers
The Impact of Persistent Terrorism on
Political Tolerance: Israel, 1980 to 2011, (with Marc
Hutchison and Michal Shamir), forthcoming in American Political Science Review. How do persistent terrorist attacks influence political tolerance, a willingness to extend basic liberties to one’s enemies? Studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have produced a number of valuable insights into how citizens respond to singular, massive attacks like 9/11. But they are less useful for evaluating how chronic and persistent terrorist attacks erode support for democratic values over the long haul. Our study focuses on political tolerance levels in Israel across a turbulent thirty-year period, from 1980 to 2011, which allows us to distinguish the short-term impact of hundreds of terrorist attacks from the long-term influence of democratic longevity on political tolerance. We find that the corrosive influence of terrorism on political tolerance is much more powerful among Israelis who identify with the Right, who have also become much more sensitive to terrorism over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for other democracies under threat from terrorism. The Vicarious Bases of Perceived Injustice (Mondak, Hurwitz, Peffley) Justice in America: The
Separate Realities of Blacks and Whites, (with Jon
Hurwitz). Cambridge University Press, 2010. Abstract: Although there exists a
large and well-documented “race gap” between whites and blacks in
their support for the death penalty, we know relatively little about the
nature of these differences and how the races respond to various arguments
against the penalty. To explore such differences, we embedded an experiment
in a national survey in which respondents are randomly assigned to one of
several argument conditions. We find that
African-Americans are more responsive to appeals that are both racial (i.e.,
the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are
black) and nonracial (i.e., too many innocent people are being executed) than
are whites, who are highly resistant to persuasion and, in the case of the
racial argument, actually become more
supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against
blacks. These inter-racial differences in responsiveness to arguments against
the death penalty can be explained, in part, by the degree to which people
attribute the causes of black criminality to either dispositional or systemic
forces (i.e., the racial biases of the criminal justice system). Abstract: We examine the huge
racial divide in citizens’ general beliefs about the fairness of the
criminal justice system, focusing on the political consequences of
these beliefs for shaping diverging interpretations of police behavior.
Predictably, most blacks believe the system to be unfair and most whites
believe the opposite. More importantly, these beliefs influence the interpretation
of events quite differently. African Americans who view the system as unfair
are much more suspicious of the police in confrontations with black
civilians. Fairness for whites, however, has fewer racial connotations; they
naively interpret the confrontations disregarding civilian race. Still,
whites holding antiblack stereotypes are much more
sympathetic to the police in their confrontations with black civilians. Abstract: To date, little is known about the precise impact of
racially coded words and phrases. Instead, most of what we know about
racialized messages comes from studies focusing on pictorial racial cues
(e.g., the infamous “Willie Horton” ad) or messages with an
extensive textual narrative laced with implicit racial cues. Because in a “post-Horton”
era strategic use of racially coded words will often be far more subtle than
those explored in past studies, we investigate the power of a single phrase
believed by many to carry strong racial connotations:
“inner-city.” We do so by embedding an experiment in a national
survey of whites, where a random half of respondents was asked whether they
support spending money for prisons (versus anti-poverty programs) to lock up
“violent criminals,” while the other half was asked about
“violent inner city
criminals.” Consistent with
the literature on issue framing, we find that whites’ racial attitudes
(e.g., racial stereotypes) were much more important in shaping preferences
for punitive policies when they receive the racially-coded, inner city
question. Our results demonstrate how easy it is to continue “playing
the race card” in the post-Willie Horton era, as well as some of the
limits of such framing effects among whites with more positive racial
attitudes. Abstract: Research on mass support for democracies
shows that popular support for democratic norms is at a historic high. At the
same time, research on political tolerance draws considerably bleaker
conclusions about the democratic capacity of mass publics. We attempt to
synthesize the essential lessons of these two literatures into a general
model of democratic learning which argues that exposure to the rough-and-tumble
of democratic politics should enhance political tolerance. We provide a test
of the model using multilevel data from a diverse set of 17 countries. At the
macro-level, we find, consistent with our theory, that: (1) political
tolerance is greater in stable democracies that have endured over time (the
longer the better), independent of a nation’s socioeconomic
development; and (2) that federal systems increase levels of tolerance, as
well. At the micro-level, we find that democratic activism, or using civil
liberties, enhances political tolerance, independent of a host of other
individual-level predictors. We conclude with a discussion of the
implications of our findings for studies of democratization and political
tolerance. Contact Info
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