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INVESTMENT AND INVISIBILITY

The Racially Divergent Consequences of Political Trust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2020

Aaron Rosenthal
Aaron Rosenthal*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and International Relations, Simmons University
*
*Corresponding author: Professor Aaron Rosenthal, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Simmons University, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115. Email: aaron.rosenthal@simmons.edu.
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Abstract

Does political distrust generate a desire to engage in the political process or does it foster demobilization? Utilizing a theoretical framework rooted in government experiences and a mixed-methods research design, this article highlights the racially contingent meaning of political distrust to show that both relationships exist. For Whites, distrust is tied to a perception of tax dollars being poorly spent, leading to increased political involvement as Whites to try to gain control over “their” investment in government. For People of Color, distrust of government is grounded in a fear of the criminal justice system, and thus drives disengagement by motivating a desire for invisibility in relation to the state. Ultimately, this finding highlights a previously unseen racial heterogeneity in the political consequences of distrust. Further, it demonstrates how the state perpetuates racially patterned political inequality in a time when many of the formal laws engendering this dynamic have fallen away.

Keywords

Political TrustPolitical ParticipationRace and EthnicityPolicy FeedbackPolitical InequalityCriminal Justice SystemTaxationRacial Inequality
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Fall 2019 , pp. 511 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2020 

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