Document Type

Article

Department/Program

Government

Journal Title

The Journal of Politics

Pub Date

10-2022

Publisher

The University of Chicago Press

Volume

84

Issue

4

Abstract

Previous research shows that how the state conducts itself influences citizen attitudes and behaviors through direct and proximal contact; we show the actions of state agents ripple out even further. Joining bureaucratic data on a publicly observable state behavior—racial disparities in investigatory traffic stops—with survey data, this article shows that residing in a place with extreme racial disparities in traffic stops is associated with depressed confidence in the police even in the absence of more direct forms of contact. This relationship does not extend to participatory behaviors, however, in which only personal stop history and proximal contact are predictors. Racially disparate policing practices, then, may undermine law enforcement legitimacy in a community as a whole, but mobilization to change policy appears limited to individuals who more directly experience the carceral state.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1086/719274

Publisher Statement

The University of Chicago Press supports green open access across its entire portfolio of journals. Green open access refers to the ability of authors to self-archive their own work and make it freely available through institutional or disciplinary repositories. Authors may deposit either the published PDF of their article or the final accepted version of the manuscript after peer review (but not proofs of the article) in a non-commercial repository where it can be made freely available no sooner than twelve (12) months after publication of the article in the journal.

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