pUBLICATIONs

Gillion, Daniel and Posey, Patricia. 2019. “Minority Protest and the Early Stages of Governmental Responsiveness in the Electoral Process”in Can America Govern Itself? ed. Nolan McCarty and Frances Lee. Cambridge University Press. 144-161

Does minority political protest lead to governmental responsiveness? Although minority protest has played a large role in conveying minority grievances to government since the civil rights era, little is known of how marginalized voices navigate a majoritarian political system to influence the behavior of political officials. Using protest data that spans across several decades into a post-civil rights era, we show that minority protests have a large effect on the early stages of governmental responsiveness, but the influence of minority protest actions are heavily linked to the party system. Placing protests on an ideological scale, we find that protests that express liberal issues increases vote share for Democratic candidates, while protests that espouse conservative issues offer Republican candidates a greater share of the two-party vote. However, minority protests, which often express liberal concerns, uniquely lead to a greater percentage of the two-party vote share for Democratic candidates. In addition, this study shows that minority protest produces a “vulnerability effect,” in that it underscores an incumbent politician’s failure to address constituent concerns, which leads quality candidates to enter subsequent races to challenge incumbents. 

Other publications 

Alvarez, Linda, Posey, Patricia, & Silva, Andrea et al. “The One They've Been Waiting for: White Fear and the Rise of Donald Trump” The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics -- Politics of Color. November 27, 2016. 

Liu, Sara, Posey, Patricia, & Reuning, Kevin. “Who were the protesters at the Democratic National Convention this week?” The Washington Post -- Monkey Cage. July 29, 2016. 

Liu, Sara, Posey, Patricia, & Reuning, Kevin. “Three surprising facts about the protesters at the Republican National Convention” The Washington Post -- Monkey Cage. July 24, 2016.                                                                                                                                                      Project covered in The Chronicle of Higher Education and USA Today