The Political Correlates of Hate Project

• In Event: Violence, Extremism, and White Identity

Abstract

To what extent do white nationalist movements impact congressional election outcomes in the United States? Although ethnocentrism, out-group prejudice, and racial threats are well-established predictors of political attitudes and voter behavior, rarely considered is how movements predicated on these beliefs shape the contemporary political landscape. Given the very public rise of the Alt-Right and increased mainstreaming of ethnocentrism and racial hostility in conservative politics, the political implications of white nationalists’ increasing prominence on the national stage demands scholarly attention. This project does so by analyzing how white nationalist group mobilization at the Congressional district level contributes to the radicalization and polarization of American racial politics, in a manner non-reducible to background demographics, socioeconomic conditions, or out-group hostilities theorized to explain their rise. In doing so, it employs an innovative dataset that geocodes all white nationalist groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center from 2005 to 2020 to the Congressional districts in which they are active. This is paired with an original ideal-point estimate of racial conservatism based upon civil rights roll call votes identified by the Comparative Agendas Project in the same time period.

Author

• Ariel Zellman, Bar Ilan University