When we think about how political beliefs are formed, conventional wisdom points to parents as the primary teachers—passing down party loyalties, civic values, and political knowledge to their children from an early age. But what happens when parents themselves are navigating an unfamiliar political landscape?
In his forthcoming book Information Brokers: Political Socialization in Latino Immigrant Families (University of Chicago Press, July 2026), political scientist Roberto F. Carlos upends traditional assumptions by investigating a reversal of roles that unfolds in many Latino immigrant households: It is the children who teach the parents about American politics.
When children influence political engagement
“Young children, particularly in immigrant households, often help their parents navigate life in the United States by acting as key sources of information,” writes Carlos, who rigorously provides evidence that this responsibility grants children influence over their parents’ political engagement, “with children shaping their immigrant parents’ political perspectives and decisions.”
These dynamics may be key to understanding political engagement and disengagement among Latinos, the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Two-thirds of this population are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Carlos’s previous research examined the “prolonged partisan socialization process” experienced by second-generation Americans; in his 2018 article “Late to the Party,” he demonstrated that children of immigrants often grow up without the parental partisan transmission that mainstream theories take for granted. Because many immigrant parents arrive in the United States without deep familiarity with the American party system—hindered by language barriers, economic pressures, fear of deportation, and lingering ties to the politics of their home countries—they are frequently unable to map their values onto U.S. political parties early enough to pass a partisan identity along to their children. Information Brokers asks what happens to children who lack parental political guidance, but also what happens when those children become the guides themselves.
‘Information brokers’
The book’s central argument is that children of Latino immigrants function as “information brokers”—active agents who translate, interpret, and mediate the American political world for their parents. As immigrant parents navigate unfamiliar institutions, they often turn to their U.S.-educated children for help with everything from understanding government paperwork to making sense of elections and civic engagement. This brokering role places unique responsibilities on young people, granting them an unusual degree of influence over major household decisions, including political ones. When children advocate, explain, or intervene on behalf of their parents, Carlos argues, they are engaging in politically consequential behavior that shapes the attitudes and actions of both generations.
Carlos’s research draws on six original surveys and multiple survey experiments; he also gives a descriptive account of two young Latina women brokering information in response to the imminent passage of the Texas Senate Bill 4, which targeted undocumented immigrants for deportation in 2017. Their experiences illustrate how “information, obligation, and agency, often working in tandem, can serve as catalysts for immigrant households’ participation in the political sphere.” Often, the children of immigrants step up to fill an important informational void, out of necessity.
Political Implications
Countering a narrative that portrays lower rates of partisan identification and voter turnout as signs of apathy or disengagement, Carlos’s research suggests these patterns reflect a socialization process that unfolds differently—and often more slowly—in immigrant communities. Children who broker political information for their families are not disengaged; they are learning politics through direct, high-stakes experience. This could be a valuable insight for activities, politicians, and party strategists who can direct their attention to mobilizing the second generation, says Carlos. “I believe this book provides a significant cause for optimism when it comes to engaging the Latino community.”
This book also says something about today’s political climate as it relates to immigration and the way it is enforced. As Carlos recently noted in the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) town hall roundtable on rising authoritarianism in the U.S., children– especially those with mixed-status families– are forced to learn politics because they are helping their parents manage risk. They learn how state power works because they are the ones explaining it, translating it, and sometimes trying to protect their families from it. “That is political socialization under conditions of enforcement,” said Carlos. “It is not civics as we usually imagine it. It is not learning about voting or Congress or the three branches of government in a classroom. It is learning that the state can enter your family’s life through a traffic stop, a workplace raid, a court notice, a school absence, or a rumor that ICE is nearby. It is learning that politics is not distant. It is not abstract. It is protection or vulnerability.”
Carlos provides two striking statistics citing Vox journalist Christian Paz: One out of five people living in the United States is Latino, and every 30 seconds, a member of the Latino community becomes eligible to vote. As the 2026 midterm elections loom, Carlos’s new book provides a fresh perspective on a powerful voting bloc whose engagement could play a decisive role in election outcomes.
Roberto Carlos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and an affiliate of the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. His research lies at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and politics, focusing on Latinx political behavior, immigration, and political socialization.
This post was developed by Tevah Platt, who manages communications for the Center for Political Studies.
A new survey on the nature and distribution of American stereotypes about Jewish, Muslim, and Black Americans measures the nature, extent and distribution of stereotypes about each of the three groups.
The broad goals of the survey and analyses of the data are:
to map the dimensional structure of prevailing stereotypes about each group
to map the distribution of these stereotypes across important population categories
to explore the relationships between stereotypes of different religious or ethnic groups,
to test hypotheses about probable determinants of various stereotypes
The survey was designed and carried out by Mark Tessler and Francy Luna Diaz of the University of Michigan and Amnon Cavari, associate professor of Political Science at Reichman University in Israel.
A research brief including preliminary results from the survey reports findings on some of the negative stereotypes about each group that the survey examined. Results on additional questions, including positive stereotypes and questions about US foreign policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will be forthcoming.
The brief focuses on the degree of agreement with two negative stereotypes about Jewish, Muslim, and Black Americans, respectively, which is not the same for the three groups; how responses pertaining to stereotypes are associated with differing levels of education, and how agreement with stereotypes across groups are correlated.
Faculty from the University of Michigan offered their expertise on these issues at a February “teach-in” panel at Angell Hall to help students understand how recent policy changes have been made and why they matter for democracy.
So how did we get to this point? And where do electoral politics go from here?
At the February teach-in, political scientist Robert Mickey highlighted the role of America’s history of white supremacy and focused on the story of party elites, and the evolution of the Republican Party “from the mainstream, conservative party committed to democracy, into something very different.”
Republican Radicalization
Robert Mickey’s account began with the observation that US democracy is young, given its slow, historical turn to secure voting rights for all adults and the civil rights and liberties needed to make elections free and fair. Following the Civil War, efforts to build a biracial democracy were eventually turned back, with Jim Crow segregation in much of the country underwritten by state-sponsored violence. As Mickey describes in his book, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944-1972, the 11 states of the Confederacy remained enclaves of authoritarian rule, sustained by the federal democracy and the national Democratic Party, with Democrats “maintaining a stranglehold on nearly every elected office in the region for seven decades.” America’s history of racist and xenophobic appeals to white voters should make the current wave of party-led democratic backsliding less surprising, said Mickey.
The rooster icon and banner, “White Supremacy for the Right,” served as the emblem of the Alabama Democratic Party from 1904 to 1966.
The current threat to American democracy has links to the authoritarianism of the preceding century but with novel features. Focusing on the last one-half century of stable democratic rule, Mickey argued that three trends have combined in recent decades to lead us to today’s challenging moment.
The first is elite polarization. The move of culturally conservative Southern whites to the Republican Party in the 1970s widened partisan disagreement, and that party’s members of Congress have become much more extreme over time. Following their elites, growing numbers of voters have viewed the opposing party with increasing social antipathy, hatred, and distrust. And with Congress passing fewer bills every year, voters have become more tolerant of antidemocratic behavior by their own party’s politicians, Mickey said.
Second, increasing economic inequality over recent decades has motivated the rich to defend their wealth, principally through massive campaign contributions. This “wealth defense” has transformed the Republican party; its mega-donors have demanded radical cuts to the regulation of business, the decimation of popular government programs, and the nomination of judges who support these goals.
Neither of these trends alone necessarily threaten democracy, said Mickey, but they have dangerously combined with “a growing panic about the country’s ‘ownership’ among millions of white Americans.” That panic is worsened by the country’s approaching “majority minority” milestone and the “reaction of many whites to the mere fact of Obama’s presidency.”
The result: Republicans, constrained by their donors from changing their economic appeals to white voters, have opted to invoke cultural issues. The precursor to MAGA is the Tea Party revolt of grassroots conservatives more than a decade ago who “talked a good game about being upset about budget deficits and debt” but were actually much more united on and energized by the issue of immigration, said Mickey.
“These trends have combined to radicalize the Republican Party into an organization that’s no longer committed to democracy,” said Mickey. “Right now, it’s an uneasy combination of white nationalism and libertarianism.”
We now see evidence that the party is backing away from democracy in several ways: Since 2000, state-level Republicans have worked to make it harder to vote, Mickey said. Second, a large majority of House Republicans refused to certify Biden’s election, even after the invasion of the Capitol. Third, Republicans now in Congress have refused to conduct oversight of the executive when their own party leader occupies the White House.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Looking ahead, Mickey closed on the point that an organizationally “hollow” Democratic party – in his view, a “feckless gerontocracy” that failed to strengthen even modestly the Voting Rights Act in 2022 – can’t save U.S. democracy. Even more important, in a two-party system, both parties have to be committed to democratic rule. As political scientist Adam Przeworski tells us, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” For Przeworski, democracies remain stable only when its major parties accept the results of elections, content to pursue office another day.
“Republican [candidates] who lose their races are increasingly likely not to concede,” said Mickey. “Thus, the Republican party has to remake itself for American democracy to be safe.”
“That will probably require multiple defeats to reset their incentives,” said Mickey. A party committed to democracy must be strong enough internally “to push out their extremists: The Nazis, the Kanyes, the Jewish-space-laser believers, and they need to take their oversight responsibility seriously…. Democracy-loving conservatives don’t have the party home that they deserve, and they need to rebuild one immediately.”
Robert Mickey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor in Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies. Both are affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
This post is part of a series that focuses on the 2025 teach-in held at Angell Hall that also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965. Recordings of the talks are available on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Robert Mickey. The second of two complimentary posts on this topic, Vincent Hutchings shared the key insight in Pt. 1 that U.S. election outcomes often hinge on attitudes toward salient social groups, and, especially, Black Americans.
Faculty from the University of Michigan offered their expertise on these issues at a “teach-in” panel at Angell Hall this month. The aim was to help students understand how recent policy changes have been made and, in the words of organizer Josh Pasek, “why those processes matter for whether or not we remain a democracy.”
So how did we get to this point?
This is the first of two posts that will answer this question.
Teach-in presentations by political scientists Vincent Hutchings and Robert Mickey gave complimentary accounts: Speaking on American public opinion, Hutchings shared the key insight that U.S. election outcomes often hinge on attitudes toward salient social groups, and, especially, Black Americans.
Mickey’s talk, the subject of our forthcoming post (Part 2), focused on the story of party elites, and the evolution of the Republican Party “from the mainstream, conservative party committed to democracy, into something different.”
The Racial Divide
Decades of research on American public opinion may help us to understand the results of this election and others, Hutchings said, by correcting a common assumption that Americans pay attention to politics and cast votes based on ideology and policies.
“American voters are woefully uninformed about politics,” Hutchings said. Only about 20% of voters are familiar with the ideological terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and a significant minority – maybe even a majority, depending on how you count– don’t know which party is the more conservative party. “You might think that is hyperbole,” said Hutchings. “I assure you, it is not.”
The perspective they do employ, said Hutchings, is one that focuses on “salient social groups.”
(Of note, the American National Election Studies, which has surveyed voters in every election since 1948, is a leading source of what we know about the U.S. electorate; Hutchings was a former principal investigator on the project.)
Politicians play to grievances, fears, and stereotypes, leveraging divisions based on race, religion, gender, and sexuality to build coalitions.
“Perhaps the most salient social group– certainly the most persistent and consistent in terms of its political impact– has been racial groups: In particular, attitudes about Black Americans,” said Hutchings. “It is, after all, the issue around which we had the bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War. It’s the group around which we had the largest social movement in the 20th century: The Civil Rights Movement. And it’s the issue around which we had the largest social movement of the 21st century: Black Lives Matter.”
“The racial divide is the biggest divide in American politics,” said Hutchings. It is the foundation of our current party system that, since the 1960s, has pitted one party that was “mostly the champion of civil rights, sometimes reluctantly,” against the party that was not.
“I’m not here to make a moral claim,” said Hutchings, “but I am here to make a factual claim that race is the chief dividing point in American politics. …If we want to get a sense of how we arrived at this point we’re at now in our political collective lives, we can’t ignore race.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
To win future elections, Democrats would need to mobilize non-white voters without alienating white voters, while Republicans will confront the “diminishing number of angry white men,” said Hutchings. We can expect politicians to continue to prey on social divisions in the electorate: “They’re going to keep doing it as long as you keep responding to it,” he said.
Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor in Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies. Robert Mickey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mickey, Hutchings, and Pasek are all affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
This post is part of a series that focuses on the 2025 teach-in held at Angell Hall that also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965. Recordings of the talks are available on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Vincent Hutchings and Robert Mickey.
Still, there is abundant evidence to suggest that encampments represent much more than just riled up college students chanting provocative slogans. Beyond tents and sleeping areas, many encampments feature Liberation Libraries, communal art-making, and worship spaces for Jewish and Muslim participants. At the University of Michigan, students from the TAHRIR coalition have organized daily programming including teach-ins, external speaker events, documentary screenings, and broader community education initiatives.
Starting and maintaining encampments is costly activism, requiring time, resources, and a willingness to endure bodily harm and legal repercussions. All of these costs should in principle reduce the likelihood of activism. But activists remain steadfast to their demands and actions, despite what we may expect. How can we better understand this wave of committed activism for Palestine?
Many Americans, I argue, are driven to political action by what can be called their prosocial politics, or their disposition to help groups in need. In what follows, I show the prevalence of prosocial politics as a driver of participation and how partisanship conditions the types of groups that Americans consider “in need.”
The Politics of Helping Others
Studying what mobilizes citizens to participate in politics is a foundational question to social scientists. Traditionally, this research analyzes citizens at the level of the individual. According to the “economic model,” individuals are essentially self-interested actors, and how they understand the costs and benefits of action determines whether they will participate. In the civic voluntarism model, an individual’s level of education, money, and time also make participation more likely.
However, more recent research shows the importance of group participation norms in determining likelihood of participation. Individuals who hold a norm of helping those in need are more likely to participate in higher-cost political participation. Psychology research on prosociality echoes the importance of helping as a cultural value, and an innate human behavior. If helping others is so important to human societies, how can we incorporate the desire to help into our models of political participation?
To answer this question, I offer a new theory called the “prosocial politics model.” In this model, citizens’ participation in politics is driven by how much they see helping others as a political value. The influence of this value is particularly strengthened by clarity around which groups are in need, and which groups are in power. As such, in the prosocial politics model, when citizens encounter a political situation they make automatic appraisals about three things:
Whether helping others through politics matters to them
Whether the group in question needs help, and
Whether to take political action to help a group.
To establish evidence of the model in action, I created a measurement of prosocial political preferences in the form of six survey questions. I asked about civic prosocial norms and how helping is tied to politics in questions like, “In elections, how important do you think it is to vote in order to help others?” and “How much do you think politicians should focus on helping groups who are usually ignored?”
I fielded the prosocial political preferences questions in three separate national surveys of Americans, totaling 4,555 interviews. Across these surveys, I find that Americans on average have moderate to high scores on the scale (0.6 out of a 0-1). Additionally, I find that these political preferences are distinct from existing similar measures, such as group empathy, humanitarianism and egalitarianism, and generalized beliefs about helping others. Using a regression analysis, I find that prosocial political preferences outpace other common predictors, such as an individual’s age, their education, and their level of partisan identity strength.
Palestinians as a Group in Need
Another element of the prosocial politics model is social perception. Americans should be more responsive to a specific group, such as Palestinians, if they perceive that group to be in need– also known as the normative altruism model. Perceptions about need are not created in a vacuum. People rely on social groups to learn norms of helping obligation: the type of groups who should receive help, what the helping should look like, and the social stakes of helping. Public policy, such as welfare, also influences how we perceive the power and deservingness of groups.
In the United States, political parties heavily shape and are shaped by the social identities of their members. As a result, I expect that partisanship modifies how Americans come to perceive which groups are in need, and which groups are not. To test this part of my theory, I piloted another novel measure called the “Circles of Power and Need,” or CPN for short. The CPN measure solicits a total of 12 text answers from each survey participant, six in Power and six in Need. With a team of undergraduates, I created a coding scheme to capture the breadth and nuance in how Americans describe stratification. We used 23 characteristic categories, and assigned binary values to organize text answers from respondents.
Through this analysis, we find that Americans use multiple dimensions to discuss Power and Need. Three characteristics are the most salient across the CPN measure: Class, Race and Ethnicity, and Institutions. Americans think about power in terms of institutions, parties and ideology groups, corporations, and class. When Americans think about need, they think in terms of class, employment status and racial/ethnic groups.
How Does Partisanship Shape Perceptions?
Democrats are overwhelmingly more likely to discuss groups in need in terms of race, ethnicity, and immigration status, while Republicans more frequently associate need with children, the disabled, and veterans. Republicans and Democrats both associate power and need with class, but Democrats reference ethnoracial and minority groups, such as Black people, White people, Hispanics, immigrants, and LGBTQ+.
The Political Consequences of Prosocial Politics
Images of Palestinian civilians killed as a result of Israeli military aggression have sparked protest, voting campaigns, and political activism. As of early May, 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s military campaign in the past six months, including 17,000 children. Millions in Palestine are at risk of starvation as a result of alleged war crimes. Several legal experts refer to Israel’s actions as a genocide, increasing global urgency about assisting civilians at risk.
Public disagreements about the justification of Israel’s actions may not change the mobilizing effect of a steady stream of images of civilians dying, especially groups that are publicly considered more in need. Children, women, healthcare workers, foreign aid workers, educators, emergency responders, and journalists are all categories of people that are usually seen by the public as more deserving of help than other categories of people (e.g., soldiers, elected officials).
Americans protesting for the plight of Palestinians connect their cause to global justice problems like climate change, violence against indigenous populations, racism and policing. The breadth of these causes likely influences prosocial norms for Palestine, especially among youth who may have participated in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in their adolescence.
Prosocial politics may shed some light on why pro-Palestinian activism is so prevalent among young students, who are more likely to align themselves with the Democratic party, but have higher disapproval rates for Biden’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in compared to their older copartisans (81% among 18-34 year olds, compared to 53% among all Democrats). In my dissertation, I also investigate how the absence of prosocial political preferences makes a difference in mobilization among individuals with different political attitudes, or issue positions. Additionally, I qualitatively study the prevalence of helping narratives in how Americans describe their own protest participation in 2020-2021.
Student activists likely have consolidated clear ideas about Palestinians as a group in need of help, and feel morally compelled to assist them in any way they can. According to recent polling from Gall Sigler and Daniel Hopkins, younger Americans express greater sympathy for Palestinians than older Americans. This is one of many political generational divides.
For college students, demanding financial divestment from companies sustaining military action is a tactic with historical precedence. Young student activists are not alone in this conviction. Understanding solidarity activism through the lens of prosocial politics clarifies the puzzle of why so many Americans are overcoming the costs of engaging in political action– especially since protest can be an effective means of recourse for disadvantaged groups to enact political change.
Pro-Palestine activism around the world has brought the suffering of Gazans to the attention of mainstream media, setting an agenda for the upcoming presidential election. Even if campus encampments are dispersed by police, counter-protestors, or administrators, U.S. military support for Israel will likely be a salient issue for many young Americans. Future research should consider how helping others as a political value challenges common understandings of what drives political participation.
Key Takeaways:
The prosocial politics model offers a new way to understand why people decide to engage in political action.
Prosocial political preferences, or the extent to which people see helping others as a political value, is a powerful predictor of political action.
Exploring the nuance in how people conceptualize others in need can clarify situations where people may or may not be driven to action.
Partisan cues and social norms affect whom we see as people in need. Although class signifies need across parties, Democrats bring up race and ethnicity more than Republicans, who typically mention age groups, such as children or the elderly.
Through the lens of prosocial politics, we can understand the recent wave of committed activism as motivated by a desire to help Palestinians suffering in Gaza. U.S. military aid to Israel will be a salient issue for Americans in the 2024 presidential election.
Eugenia Quintanilla is an American Politics doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and the recipient of the Garth Taylor Dissertation Award for Public Opinion– an ISR Next Generation award granted by the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. She broadly studies political psychology, race and ethnic politics, and public opinion. Her current scholarship investigates questions about how politics and the desire to help others intersect to influence political behavior. She also studies American attitudes about wealth inequality, Latino political socialization, and racial attitudes.
Tevah Platt, communications specialist for the Center for Political Studies, contributed to the development of this post. Photos from William Lopez and Tevah Platt.
Information about the wealth gap between Blacks and whites increases Americans’ awareness of disparity, but does little to increase their support for affirmative action, reparations
But despite widespread knowledge that racial inequality exists, even among liberal, white Americans, the public is radically uninformed about the depths of one of the most profound racial disparities: the racial wealth gap.
According to the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, which collects nationally representative data on American households, the median white family has about 8 times more wealth (that is, total assets minus total debts) than the median Black family. And, despite popular perceptions of education as the vehicle for eliminating racial disparities, education does little to diminish the gap between Blacks and whites. The median white family where the household head did not finish high school has virtually the same wealth as the median Black family where the household head earned a bachelor’s degree. In other words, a Black American has to graduate from college to access the same level of wealth as a white high school dropout.
If you find these numbers startling and even difficult to believe, you are not alone.
Since 2020, my research team, which includes Vincent Hutchings, Kamri Hudgins, and Sydney Carr, has been learning what happens when we correct misperceptions of the racial wealth gap. Does informing people about the size of the racial wealth gap influence opinions about policies to address the gap? How does the public react to information about the racial wealth gap?
Using a novel survey experiment fielded on three nationally diverse samples, we found that exposing both Black and white Americans to information about the size of the racial wealth gap increases their awareness of this disparity– but exposure to this information does little to increase their support for race-targeted social and economic policies like affirmative action and reparations.
For example, among white participants, exposure to our racial wealth gap information treatment increased awareness of the size and severity of the racial wealth gap by, on average, 7 to 18% across the two studies. However, exposure to the same information did not significantly increase support for race-targeted policy changes to reduce the racial wealth gap among white or Black participants.
In contrast, our treatments did increase support for race-neutral equity policies like baby bonds, a program that would fund a trust for every newborn child to establish a baseline level of wealth for all Americans. When informed that Black college graduates have the same level of wealth as white high school dropouts, both liberal and conservative white Americans’ support for baby bonds increased significantly. For conservatives, support increased by 12% moving from a baseline of .41 (indicating weak opposition) to .53 (indicating weak support). For liberals, support increased by 11% moving from .71 (strong support) to .82 (very strong support).
But economists argue that race-neutral programs like baby bonds or canceling student loan debt would not be nearly enough to close the racial wealth gap. For example, Duke University economist William Darity, Jr. proposes that only a comprehensive reparations program requiring “the full resources of the federal government” to redistribute wealth to Black Americans would be sufficient for closing the gap.
Those who believe legislative action on reparations is urgently needed will find the political momentum behind it at the federal level to be insufficient. President Joe Biden made the most progress on this issue of any president in history when he proposed a commission to study whether or not reparations should be paid to Black descendants of the enslaved. But the bill has effectively died in committee and there have been no votes on the House floor regarding the commission or any other reparations policies. While several states and localities have made more progress toward providing reparations to Black residents and, in some instances, (like Evanston, Illinois) have even begun issuing payments, these programs will not resolve the Black wealth crisis nationwide.
As this project develops, we hope to probe public opinion on other racial disparities, including the racial gap in rates of maternal mortality, and increase scholarly and public understanding of what it takes to move the public towards action on racial inequality.
This post was written by Zoe Walker. Tevah Platt contributed to its development.
Zoe Walker is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Her dissertation research, supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, considers how beliefs about economic opportunity influence perceptions of racial inequality and support for racially redistributive policies among Black Americans. Sydney Carr, Kamri Hudgins, and Zoe Walker are all Next Generation scholars of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and were consecutive recipients of the Hanes Walton, Jr. Endowment for Graduate Study in Racial and Ethnic Politics at the Center for Political Studies.
Hanes Walton, Jr. of the Center for Political Studies transformed the study of Black politics and helped establish it as a subfield of political science. The 2024 Hanes Walton Jr. Lecture at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research will be presented by Christian Davenport on Feb. 1.
Roberto Carlos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and an affiliate of the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. His research lies at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and politics, focusing on Latinx political behavior, immigration, and political socialization.
Still, there is abundant evidence to suggest that encampments represent much more than just riled up college students chanting 
Prosocial politics may shed some light on why pro-Palestinian activism is so prevalent among young students, who are more likely to align themselves with the Democratic party, but have 
Eugenia Quintanilla is an American Politics doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and the recipient of the Garth Taylor Dissertation Award for Public Opinion– an ISR Next Generation award granted by the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. She broadly studies political psychology, race and ethnic politics, and public opinion. Her current scholarship investigates questions about how politics and the desire to help others intersect to influence political behavior. She also studies American attitudes about wealth inequality, Latino political socialization, and racial attitudes. 
This post was written by Zoe Walker. Tevah Platt contributed to its development.