Much of the phenomena we investigate in political science is driven by a normative prescription of equality (Dahl, 2006). As a result, many of the questions pursued in political science relate to explaining why we see inequality and seek to identify the factors that explain it. The notion that every individual is equal and deserves to have his or her preferences accounted for is central to how many think about American politics. The extent to which any group of political voices are unrepresentative of the general public represents a participatory distortion and is a direct challenge to our democratic norms (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, 1995; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, 2012). Left unchecked, these distortions have the potential to lead to unequal political outcomes. Despite these concerns, the vast majority of scholarly work that seeks to explain participatory distortion, particularly by racial and ethnic groups, have largely focused on a single act of political participation, voting. Rather than focusing our attention on the most egalitarian method of political participation, I argue that we should instead consider the act of participation where we find the most inequality and coincidentally the most potential for influence-campaign contributions. The goal of my dissertation project is to contribute to the limited understanding of how ethnoracial identity informs political participation and representation in the United States by focusing on the relationship of racial and ethnic identity and campaign contribution behavior. Our theoretical expectations of campaign contributors have largely focused on explaining the behavior of donors in the context of conventional theories of political participation and behavior. These theories emphasize the role that partisanship and ideology play in the strategic decisions that donors make. However, much of this literature fails to consider one's race or ethnicity may influence these decisions despite the fact that in other areas of scholarship, the relationship between race or ethnicity and behavior is well known. The central question which drives the focus of this dissertation is: Are donors belonging to marginalized groups different from those who do not? I answer this question by using data from both public opinion surveys and large-N administrative contribution records. I apply a novel method of estimating race/ethnicity to look at donor contribution patterns in the House of Representatives from 1980 to 2014 focusing on Asian American and Latino donors, two of the fastest growing minority groups in the United States. I find that Asian Americans and Latinos do not fit conventional expectations for donor behavior. Rather than prioritizing characteristics such as ideology or incumbency status, donors belonging to these groups appear to hold persistent preferences for candidates with whom they share a racial or ethnic background. I argue that in order to fully understand the behavior of Asian American and Latino donors we must look to models of political behavior that incorporate the potential role that race and ethnicity can play.

"Today’s Runaway Slaves" engages in long-standing debates about American federalism, slavery and immigration law, civil and immigrant rights, and racial politics. The central puzzle it addresses is how American federalism and social movements shape the development of state and local sanctuary laws that protect classes of people, who federal law considers unlawfully present inside the United States. I employ an innovative research design of documenting and comparing laws protecting runaway slaves from 1780-1860 with contemporary laws on Central American asylum seekers from 1980-1997 and undocumented immigrants from 2000-2017. From this original research, I offer analysis of what I term a "federalism conflict" between federal and state/local laws on free movement and presence, and develop the term "free presence" to make sense of how sanctuary laws accumulate to decouple states from enforcing federal law in ways that benefit the life chances of runaway slaves and undocumented immigrants.

The dissertation makes two contributions: a long-run institutional account of sanctuary policies rooted in the U.S. Constitution and federalism; a general theory accounting for the proliferation of sanctuary policies and variation in each historical period. On the long-run question, I argue that the courts institutionalize states’ semi-sovereignty and what I term a federalism conflict that has always allowed for sanctuary laws to emerge and proliferate, which I reveal through court decisions on slavery, alienage, and immigration. On the empirical question, I advance a theory of coalition building in a federalism framework to explain variation in sanctuary policies in antebellum and contemporary periods. Sanctuary policies emerge out similar fights for federal abolition and federal immigration reform. I posit that federalism’s structure shapes the timing of where and when sanctuary policies emerge: national activists commit to a federal reform strategy, and sanctuary policies gain clout only after numerous failures at the national level occur. National activists respond to repeated national failure by revising their reform strategy to include subfederal sanctuary polices; after this shift, my theory posits that state and local coalition building contexts explain the differences in the timing and scope of sanctuary policies across jurisdictions.

Sanctuary policies animate long-standing debates in American politics. Without comprehensive reform at the national level, states and localities play a critical protective role over runaway slaves and undocumented immigrants, who live in fear of re-enslavement and deportation. My dissertation explains how federalism empowers advocacy coalitions within states and localities to contest national policy, connects America’s abolitionist heritage to salient questions shaping today’s immigration debates, develops a timely framework and concepts to understand why classes of people lacking federal legal status are welcomed by states and localities, and why sanctuary policies contribute to the ongoing project of American democracy and civil rights.

With his January 29, 2013 immigration speech, President Obama made his bold and confident case for comprehensive immigration reform. Yet, the likelihood that an acceptable immigration bill passes Congress is not at all certain. Much could depend on which side is able to most effectively frame the debate and win over public opinion. What is clear is that proponents of immigration reform are making significant use of a particular emotional appeal...empathy. Will the gamble on an emotion-heavy, empathetic strategy be able to sway public opinion and thus, members of Congress? Previous research finds that inducing empathy can improve intergroup attitudes. But, little has been done on the connection between empathy and support for immigration policies. In my research, I analyze news coverage on immigration policy to see how empathetic framing varies across news sources. I also conduct experiments to test whether empathetic news coverage increases support for permissive immigration policies (i.e. path to citizenship). In short, I find empirical support for my expectations. Most striking, I find that empathetic effects increasing support for these permissive policies are substantial especially among individuals with no contact with undocumented immigrants and among those predisposed to empathize in general.

This dissertation examines how polities are being transformed by, and are responding to, increased global migration focusing on the immigration control policies of advanced industrialized democracies. It argues that increased global migration has reaffirmed and entrenched the exclusionary prerogatives of immigration control, meaning the sovereign right of states to "keep out the other." This has led to a tightening of citizenship and a narrowing of the boundaries of political and societal inclusion. I provide evidence of this using a mixed methods multi-level analysis that focuses on the nexus between emergent human rights norms, global migratory trends, and state policies directed towards irregular (i.e., undocumented/illegal) migrants. In weaving together this nexus, this dissertation bridges central debates about globalization and human rights in international relations with new research on immigration control in comparative politics.

At the international level, in an analysis of 160 countries from 1990 to 2008, I find that human rights treaties that require states to extend fundamental rights to noncitizens are among the most poorly ratified treaties. But more than that, as immigration into a country increases even liberal democracies become less likely to ratify, as doing so may encourage more immigration. I then move to a comparative analysis of immigration control across Western democracies, focusing on deportation and immigration detention. This dissertation is among the first to analyze contemporary trends in these critical indicators of immigration control across countries and over time. I find that economic and migration factors only partially explain trends in deportation and detention. Rather, it is the legislative representation of the far right that significantly increases the restrictiveness of immigration control. In examining how the far right "matters," I find that the political opportunities created by electoral rules explain the impact of the far right more so than public demand for more restrictive policies. Moreover, while there is no clear evidence that more immigration control means less immigration, there is some evidence to suggest that it does result in less asylum inflows. Lastly, I examine the microfoundations of immigration control using in-depth interviews with immigration enforcement officials and irregular migrants. I introduce a theory of selective immigration control that views immigration enforcement as a suboptimal outcome that is constrained by institutional and individual-level factors that make certain categories of migrants more or less deportable. As a result, those who are "easiest" to remove become disproportionately the targets of immigration enforcement; these are often the most vulnerable migrants.

Situational contexts vary substantially across the country. This variation provides conditions

where a subset of the American public may be exposed to situations that others are

not. How do contexts affect the politics of minority groups? In this dissertation, I examine

how the politics of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people are situated by differing contexts

across the United States. I examine how LGB presence aects and conditions the approval

of the mass public. I examine the mechanism this influence bears on representative behavior in Congress. I finally examine how varying contexts uniquely affects some LGBs over others. In total, I find that varying contexts situate the political positions of LGB people

differently. This results in unique conditions where LGB people are politically in

influentialand cohesive.

Since 2010, Chinese Americans have been actively engaged in policy issues such as affirmative action organized through an ethnic social media called WeChat. Many scholarly works would predict that an immigrant with less than ten years of residence in the US, who speaks limited English and lives in a neighborhood with a small co-ethnic population, is less likely to be politically active. However, it is the very group described above that passionately joined many offline protests and demonstrations in the past decade. Many social movements start with online activities, but some failed to make a substantive impact in the offline world. How does this netizen movement transform into impactful political engagement as citizens? This study will ask the following research questions to find out. Who are those Chinese activists? What motivates them to act? And to what extent is their level of political engagement? This study will use survey data, campaign contribution data, and ethnic social media chat group messages to answer these three questions. First, I will use the National Asian American Survey to explore the demographic characteristics of Chinese activists and answer the question “who are the Chinese activists?”. Second, this study will examine how WeChat and mainstream media news influence WeChat chat group members. Third, I will test whether Chinese voters living in the “majority Chinese” zip code are more likely to make a political contribution. For the first research question, this study found that Chinese Americans who use social media for political information may become more confident in their ability to influence policy outcomes, which motivates them to join offline protests. Moreover, when mainstream media and WeChat show opposing sentiments towards the same issue, Chinese “Netizens” are more likely to debate with strong emotions. Using campaign contribution data, this project also found that Chinese Americans living in a neighborhood with less Chinese population are more likely to make a political contribution, which is constant with political movements on popular press led by suburban Chinese parents. This project aims to shed light for future research on this area that collectively breaks the monolithic view of Asian Americans.

Political scientists frequently invoke the term “party brand” as relates to partisanship, party breakdown, and heuristic voting, but scant attention is dedicated to brand as a meaningful construct in and of itself. Of the more recent studies that do expressly incorporate party brand, most treat the concept as manifestly inherent or employ it as a means to an end.

This project joins business-marketing with the extant body of research on political parties and conceptualizes party brand as a standalone unit of inquiry that provides novel insight into long- and short-term processes behind strategic party decisions, while still allowing for analysis of the ultimate action. Party brand is a powerful explanatory concept, which links elite and mass stories and begets theoretical insight as to how and why parties develop overtime and which actors lead changes to the party’s brand. As well, party brand complements existing narratives by systematically joining the study of parties-as-organizations, parties-in-government, and parties-in-electorate.

Chapter 2 reviews relevant business marketing literature before introducing the party brand framework. It is argued each party sub-group actor contributes to the creation, perpetuation, and evolution of the national party’s brand through different means and to various effect. Specifically, the national party committee operates as the central governing body and is the repository of the party’s core brand identity, while the party’s elected officials operate as franchise extensions. Chapter 2 further elaborates this framework with an emphasis on the relationship between the national committee, its elected officials, and the voting age population.

Chapters 3 and 4 use machine-based learning to analyze party texts for the period of 1976-2012. Using various methods of computational text analysis a descriptive picture of both major parties’ brand identities is presented, the evolution of both parties’ brand identities across time and between actors are traced, and patterns emerge as to which actors lead changes to each party’s brand.

Chapter 5 adds a layer of description through elite interviews, which allows for further analysis of the role of party leadership – the driver of brand identity – with respect to its franchise extensions (members) in Congress.