The Obligation Mosaic

Race and Social Norms in US Political Participation

Allison P. Anoll

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780226812571
  9780226812267
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226812434
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many argue that "civic duty" explains why Americans engage in politics, but what does civic duty mean, and does it mean the same thing across communities? Why are people from marginalized social groups often more likely than their more privileged counterparts to participate in high-cost political activities? 
 
In The Obligation Mosaic, Allison P. Anoll shows that the obligations that bring people into the political world—or encourage them to stay away—vary systematically by race in the United States, with broad consequences for representation. Drawing on a rich mix of interviews, surveys, and experiments with Asian, Black, Latino, and White Americans, the book uncovers two common norms that centrally define concepts of obligation: honoring ancestors and helping those in need. Whether these norms lead different groups to politics depends on distinct racial histories and continued patterns of segregation. 
 
Anoll's findings not only help to explain patterns of participation but also provide a window into opportunities for change, suggesting how activists and parties might better mobilize marginalized citizens. 

Chapter One

The Value and Meaning of Political Participation

I’m here today because of the men and because of the women who were lynched, who were humiliated, who were discriminated against, who were suppressed, who were repressed, and oppressed, for equality at the polls, and I want you to know that their blood has seeped into my DNA, and I refuse to let their sacrifices be in vain. . . .

And for anybody here who has an ancestor who didn’t have the right to vote and you are choosing not to vote, wherever you are in this state, in this country, you are dishonoring your family. You are disrespecting and disregarding their legacy, their suffering and their dreams, when you don’t vote. So, honor your legacy. Honor your legacy.—Oprah Winfrey, rally for Stacey Abrams, November 1, 2018

In fall 2018, Oprah Winfrey arrived in Marietta, Georgia. The billionaire, producer, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and host of the highest-rated talk show of its kind in history was there to support Stacey Abrams, the first-ever Black woman to receive a major party gubernatorial nomination. In a nationally televised event, the two women engaged in a town hall–style meeting that began with a nearly twenty-minute speech by Winfrey to the crowd. Her focus was on the men and women of the past who were denied and fought for the right to vote in American elections, the sacrifices they had made, and the debt we owe to them. “When I go into the polls,” Winfrey told the crowd, “I cast a vote for my grandmother, who died in 1963 before the Voting Rights Act, and never had a chance to vote. I vote for her.”

I was nearing the final stages of this book when Winfrey made her speech. In the days following the rally in Marietta, my inbox flooded with messages from friends and colleagues who had heard me talk—a lot—in recent years about the honoring ancestors norm. Through a combination of qualitative interviews, representative surveys of the nation’s four largest racial groups, and a series of experiments, I was convinced that social norms about how we honor the past and help those most in need were central to understanding the participatory choices of individuals and groups in American society. Winfrey’s message echoed what I had heard from Americans across the country: to honor your family, your people, your ancestors, you must claim the rights those in the past fought so hard for. Anything less is a travesty.

I did not start this project with the expectation that beliefs about honoring the past and helping those in need were part and parcel of political participation. Rather, the centrality of both norms emerged during the process of grounded theory development I took in the early stages of this research. Grounded theory is an inductive research method that centers the voice of everyday people in the production of theory and knowledge. It proves most useful in two scenarios: when the researcher seeks to generate new theory and when the population under study is difficult to reach or traditionally excluded from existing bodies of work (Ackerly et al., 2018; Charmaz, 2014). In the face of these challenges, the method of grounded theory provides a flexible but rigorous framework for collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing rich qualitative data into generalizable claims. My sights were trained on interviewing racial minorities in the United States to answer two intertwined questions: Why do some individuals but not others engage in politics? And why are trends in political participation so closely tied to race? These two questions, although age old, seemed insufficiently answered to me, in part because the existing literature was built on survey data collected primarily from White Americans.

Historically, scholars have focused on the inherent costs involved in the participatory process when trying to explain and rectify inequities in engagement. Participation is costly, the argument goes, and individuals with fewer resources have less capacity to overcome those costs (Leighley and Vedlitz, 1999; Nie, Powell and Prewitt, 1969; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, 1995; Wolfinger and Rosenstone, 1980). Race is one demographic category where large variations in cost-lowering resources exist. Census data continually show a chasm in both income and education between White and Asian Americans on one hand and Latino and Black Americans on the other (Ryan and Bauman, 2016; Semega et al., 2019). At the most basic level, the theory of resource mobilization anticipates consistently lower political participation among Black Americans and Latinos who, on average, lack resources and higher political involvement among White and Asian Americans who are resource rich.

Yet, across a spectrum of participatory behaviors, this is decidedly not the case. Black Americans regularly overcome barriers to participation, turning out at rates close to or exceeding those of White Americans, while Latinos and Asian Americans often trail behind. The 2012 presidential election of Barack Obama to his second term provides a case in point. The election marked a historic year for Black turnout, with proportionally more of the Black community showing up at the polls than any other racial group in the United States.1 Two-thirds—or 66%—of Black Americans turned out to elect the next president of the United States, compared to 64% of White Americans, 48% of Latinos, and 47% of Asian Americans (File, 2013). The result was a nearly twenty-point gap between Black and Asian Americans’ turnout, the two groups most different from each other in average socioeconomic resources. But rather than the high-resourced group dominating the polls, it was the low-resourced group that showed up, helping usher President Barack Obama into his second term.

An analysis of turnout over time controlling for both socioeconomic resources and naturalization hammers home this point: resources alone do not explain participation levels across racial groups in America.2 Rather, resources are a consistently weaker predictor of political participation among minority Americans than they are for Whites (Abrajano and Alvarez, 2010; Tam Cho, 1999; Lien et al., 2001; Wong et al., 2011). Figure 1.1 shows predicted turnout in presidential elections between 2000 and 2008 using Current Population Survey data for each racial group and holding constant naturalization status, education, and income.3 The data demonstrate that regardless of election year, predicted turnout is consistently higher among White and Black Americans than among Latinos and Asian Americans. Furthermore, Black Americans regularly outperform the other groups, while Asian Americans are often the least likely to vote. The result is a gap between these two most different groups that is quite large, ranging from 23% to 28% depending on the year.4

Figure 1.1 Predicted likelihood of turning out, controlling for resources

Notes: Turnout estimated for each group separately, controlling for income, education, and nativity status. Plotted point estimates represent predicted probabilities with education set at a high school degree, family income held at $40,000–49,999 a year, and nativity status set at US born. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are plotted with vertical lines, but because of the large sample, many points are very precisely estimated, and confidence intervals are not visible.

Why is it that seemingly underresourced groups sometimes manage to overcome the odds of structural disadvantage to engage in politics, while others, even those with plenty of resources, remain inactive? More specifically, why is it that, for decades, Black Americans have participated in politics at rates far exceeding their resource levels, while Asian Americans have consistently remained the least active racial group despite rapidly rising resources?

Social norms, or the unspoken rules and habits of a group, provide a possible answer. A relatively new literature suggests that norms are a central part of the participatory story (e.g., Gerber, Green, and Larimer, 2008; McClendon, 2014; McKenzie, 2004; Sinclair, 2012). Humans look to each other for cues about how to act—even in the political world—and they seek social rewards from members of their community (Cialdini and Trost, 1998; Tankard and Paluck, 2015). When individuals are embedded in networks that are politically active, they become more involved as well (McKenzie, 2004; Sinclair, 2012), and messages that leverage norms can change political outcomes (Gerber and Rogers, 2009; McClendon, 2014; White, Laird, and Allen, 2014). Across the array of traditional and contentious forms of political behavior, scholars have shown that social information and observation can increase participation, presenting an alternative theory of involvement compared to the resource model.

And yet the current canon on social norms has remained agnostic about how these mechanisms might produce across-group differences in political involvement. Selecting a single group or network and using lab or field experiments to examine the effect of norms-based interventions on individual participatory choices, this scholarship focuses on the micro mechanisms of social pressure. This approach reflects the broader psychological tradition that this work takes its inspiration from and where the concepts were first tested experimentally (Asch, 1955; Cialdini and Trost, 1998; Sherif, 1936). But it remains unclear from its findings if social norms can help explain broader group-based variation in political participation like the trends in voting we observe across race.

Can social norms, so central to shaping the participation of individuals, also explain group-level differences in turnout and other forms of political activism? This is the question that brought me to a picnic bench on a community college campus nestled in the hills of the San Francisco Bay Area in spring 2014. I was there talking with Aisha, a first-generation Asian American living in San Francisco, who had agreed to chat with me before her 9:00 a.m. class.5 Aisha and her family had immigrated to the United States twenty years earlier and settled in California. I asked Aisha how she would describe herself to someone who does not know her—my opening question in many interviews—and she told me a story about her grandfather:

My grandfather—he’s a musician. . . . He plays classical, south Indian music. . . . And he’s been trained from his father, so my great-grandfather. It’s been in our family for four or five generations. . . . I started learning from [my grandfather], continued here [in the United States] with a couple other teachers and, even when he was in India, my sister and I, we both started learning from him again through the phone. . . . I’m very honored to be part of that, just, you know, live up to my tradition and keep up the tradition in my family.

As I sat for a few hours the next day coding each passage of this interview, I did not think much of Aisha’s opening comments. At the time, her discussion of tradition, ancestral lineage, and pride in continuing a family custom seemed to my naive ear devoid of politics, irrelevant in my search for the variables that shaped engagement in the political sphere. But four months later, I interviewed Martin, a man of similar age and education to Aisha who lived across the country in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Martin, who is Black, also talked about the influence of a grandparent on his life and the way it shaped his perspective of the world.

[My grandmother] is ninety-six years old, so she grew up in an era where she experienced so much hate. . . . She actually was involved in the [civil rights] movement. Actively involved. . . . She marched on Washington, and she did things locally in her community. . . . My grandmother, you know, she was my light. When I was at the lowest parts of my life I could call my grandmother. . . . I thought about the struggles that she had to go through. And then I was almost like, how dare me even complain? You know, look what she had to endure. Could I have made it if I had to endure the things that she did? I don’t know.

I went on to ask Martin whether his grandmother votes, and he responded, “Absolutely. That’s not even a question. Absolutely. She votes. . . . Because there was a time where she couldn’t.”

Slowly, from these interviews, I began to build a grounded theory of norm divergence in the United States. Martin, like Aisha, extolled the virtues of honoring the sacrifices and traditions of those in the past but the two Americans, embedded in different racial groups and histories, connected different behaviors to their acts of honoring. Aisha emphasized her cultural heritage through music, honoring the past through continuing to learn and perform traditional South Asian songs; Martin coupled political participation with honoring, giving me a synopsis of Oprah Winfrey’s headline-catching speech on the franchise four years before the celebrity took the stage with Stacey Abrams. I discovered that while many Americans told me that honoring their forebears, continuing tradition, and looking to the past were core tenets of their identities and centrally defined their sense of obligation, the behaviors that followed from these expectations diverged remarkably by race and reflected each group’s unique composition, history, and experiences.

In this book, I advance a novel theory of norm divergence in the United States. I argue that two norms—the honoring ancestors and helping hands norms—appear in cultures across the world and traverse the boundaries of race in America. However, how one honors the past or helps those in need is highly context dependent. Experiences in the past and status in the present shape the content of group-based social norms, producing variation in the behavioral expressions of compliance. When these norms are coupled with political participation, as Martin and Winfrey model, they become potent forces of mobilization, helping some groups overcome resource constraints to engage politically, while others remain inactive even with resources.

I call this theory of political participation the racialized norms model (RNM). In a nutshell: social norms about the value and meaning of political participation vary by race due to both racial segregation and distinct group histories. These norms, I find, have enormous consequence on the landscape of political participation in the present moment, deciding who participates in politics, who stays home, and which groups are able to overcome the inherent costs and barriers of political participation. But the honoring ancestors and helping hands norms also generate pathways for change, providing opportunities to mobilize traditionally marginalized Americans. I show that strong participatory norms in Black communities help members of this group confront an array of barriers in the political arena. If Asian American and Latino elites or community members are similarly able to couple these two norms, already widespread but apolitical in these communities, to political involvement, the rewards would likely be immense.

Defining Key Concepts

Over the course of this book, I engage with three big concepts: social norms, race, and political participation. As a first-order concern, I will determine if social norms related to political participation exist in the United States; then, test whether they diverge by race; and finally, determine if their existence and divergence affects involvement in politics at the individual and group levels. Because of the enormity of these concepts, it is worth spending some time up front establishing what I mean by each, especially given the abundance of scholarship developed over many years on the three topics individually.

What Are Social Norms?

The power of social norms features prominently in a diverse body of literatures ranging from behavioral economics to normative theory (e.g., Durkheim, 2014; Elster, 1989; Foucault, 2012). I gather my insight primarily from social psychology, a subdiscipline that has spent the better part of the past half century defining and studying the influence of norms (Asch, 1955; Cialdini and Trost, 1998). Borrowing from Tankard and Paluck (2015), I define social norms as the unwritten rules and standards that describe typical or desirable behavior within a context or group. Norms are not formalized rules or institutional law; rather, they more closely mirror habits and customs that are consciously or subconsciously adopted. In simpler terms, social norms define—without formally defining—what is typical, acceptable, desirable.

Social psychologists delineate three types of norms, each distinct in the pathway through which they influence action (see Cialdini and Trost 1998 for a review). Social norms that affect individuals by providing information about what others do, devoid of any moral or prescriptive claims, are called descriptive norms. These norms motivate behavior simply by providing individuals with information about possible routes of effective or common action (e.g., Goldstein, Cialdini, and Griskevicius, 2008; Perkins, Craig, and Perkins, 2011). Injunctive norms, on the other hand, prescribe behavior. They define what is good and moral within the boundaries of a group and influence human action through the promise of social rewards for compliance or sanctions for deviance (e.g., Gerber, Green, and Larimer, 2008; Panagopoulos, 2010). Over time, external injunctive norms are integrated into one’s sense of identity and morality. These personal norms motivate action by evoking concepts of obligation and eliciting cognitive or affective considerations like guilt, self-esteem, and values (Schwartz, 1977; Thøgersen, 2006).

Reams of evidence demonstrate that collectively, social information, pressure, and self-esteem powerfully shape human behavior. Norms can make people conform to illogical standards (Asch, 1955), engage in behavior they blatantly oppose (Westphal and Bednar, 2005), and even encourage life-threatening choices (Crandall, 1988). But social norms also motivate important prosocial behavior, helping to lubricate social relations and address collective action problems (Cialdini and Trost, 1998; Paluck and Green, 2009). These social needs are nowhere more abundant than in the world of politics, where recent scholarship confirms that norms influence everything from policy positions to political participation (e.g., Chong, 1994; Gerber, Green, and Larimer, 2008; Janus, 2010; McClendon, 2018; White and Laird, 2020). To name just a few persuasive examples, the randomized presentation of descriptive information about turnout changes commitment to voting (Gerber and Rogers, 2009) and the application of social observation can alter the direction and magnitude of campaign giving (Sinclair, 2012; White, Laird, and Allen, 2014).

This robust literature confirms that social norms matter in the political arena, but we can push this l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1.  The Value and Meaning of Political Participation
• 2.  The Racialized Norms Model
• 3.  Which Norms?
• 4.  Finding Purpose in the Past
• 5.  Taking Care of Those in Need
• 6.  Norms and National Turnout
• 7.  Norms and High-Cost Participation
• 8.  The Present and Future of Participatory Social Norms
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A. Participatory Social Norms Survey Instrumentation
• Appendix B. Supplemental Material for Qualitative Interviews
• Appendix C. Supplemental Empirical Analyses
• Notes
• References
• Index