Task Force Report
The Double Bind: The Politics of Racial & Class Inequalities in the Americas
The main goal of the task force, under the leadership of APSA President Rodney Hero, was to investigate the relationship between race and class in producing material, political, and social inequalities in the nations of the Americas. The task force also examined how the political systems in these countries work to foment and/or ameliorate inequalities that track with ethnic and racial identities and socioeconomic status.
The work of the task force unfolded in a period in which political science has begun to pay greater attention to the causes and consequences of various forms of inequality. To some extent, political science has lagged behind cognate fields of history, economics, and sociology in terms of scholarly attentiveness to inequality. The recent literature on inequality in political science, however, has focused almost exclusively on rising income inequality and how it affects political representation. The long-standing gaps in the life chances of whites and communities of color in the nations of the Americas have been largely unexplored. At the same time, in Latin America, which had long denied the existence of a relationship between race and ethnicity and class disparities, there has been an explosion in data-gathering on race and ethnicity and in particular on the relationship between race and inequality.
The task force members have explicitly sought to grapple with both the problem of rising socioeconomic inequality and the multifaceted racial gaps that exist throughout the Americas. Moreover, they examined the ways in which race and class inequalities are epiphenomena of politics. Thus, their work was organized around several core concepts and theoretical insights that animate research programs in political science—e.g., the role of institutions, the mobilizing power of group memberships, party politics, and social movements. They find that ethnoracial minorities, even in countries in which they represent a large percentage of the population and participate actively in elections, are hampered in translating their demographic potential and civic participation into meaningful socioeconomic gains by their low socioeconomic status and the incentives of the party system.
- Read more about the report and members of the task force.
- Listen to the podcast on “Race and Class Inequality in Local Politics.”
Read the Executive Summary. | Read the Full Report. |
View the complete task force report by individual chapters below:
- Executive Summary
Juliet Hooker, University of Texas, Austin
Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Northwestern University - Foreword
Rodney Hero, University of California, Berkeley
- Chapter 1: The Mexican Color Hierarchy: How Race and Skin Tone Still Define Life Chances 200 Years after Independence
Guillermo Trejo, University of Notre Dame
Melina Altamirano, Duke University - Chapter 2: Black Blues: The Persistence of Racialized Economic Inequality in Black Communities
Michael C. Dawson, University of Chicago
Megan Ming Francis, University of Washington - Chapter 3: Asians in the Americas
Jane Junn, University of Southern California
Taeku Lee, University of California, Berkeley - Chapter 4: Emergence of an Organized Politics of Race in Latin America
Mala Htun, University of New Mexico - Chapter 5: New Data, New Knowledge, New Politics: Race, Color, and Class Inequality in Latin America
Mara Loveman, University of California, Berkeley - Chapter 6: Beyond Race or Class: Entangled Inequalities in Latin America
Tianna S. Paschel, University of California, Berkeley - Chapter 7: Learning from Ferguson: Welfare, Criminal Justice, and the Political Science of Race and Class
Joe Soss, University of Minnesota
Vesla Weaver, Yale University - Chapter 8: The Puzzling Persistence of Racial Inequality in Canada
Keith Banting, Queen’s University
Debra Thompson, Northwestern University - Chapter 9: Inequality in Black and White: Public Opinion and Inequality in the United States
Vincent Hutchings, University of Michigan - Chapter 10: Experiencing Inequality but Not Seeing Class: An Examination of Latino Political Attitudes
Michael Jones-Correa, University of Pennsylvania
Sophia Jordán Wallace, University of Washington - Chapter 11: Race and Class Inequality in Local Politics
Zoltan L. Hajnal, University of California, San Diego
Jessica L. Trounstine, University of California, Merced - Chapter 12: Indigenous Voters and the Rise of the Left in Latin America
Raúl Madrid, University of Texas at Austin - Chapter 13: Race, Partisanship, and the Rise of Income Inequality in the United States
Paul Pierson, University of California, Berkeley