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This chapter describes the evolution of African-American political participation. Beginning with early findings in Black political participation, it discusses the major paradigm shifts in this research and their catalysts. The chapter concludes by providing a roadmap for future research in the field.

The United States is more racially/ethnically diverse than at any point in the country’s history as a result of immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification. The Latino and Asian populations have more than tripled in size since 1970; Latinos are now the largest racial/ethnic minority group, and Asians, the fastest growing group in the country. Also contributing to America’s new diversity is increasing intermarriage and a growing multiracial population. Intermarriage soared more than twenty-fold between 1960 and 2000, and the multiracial population is poised to account for one in five Americans by 2050, and one in three by 2100. However, this new diversity is not evenly apparent across the country. Some states—like California—reflect the new diversity, which is also evident at the metropolitan level. In other states, the new diversity is nearly invisible. The pattern of high and low diversity in the United States reflects the country’s vast heterogeneity.

The most important scholarly finding about the American state is how the politics of race and racial inequality have shaped all aspects of the state’s structure and policy outcomes. The American state performs and combines the standard functions of maintaining order, delivering public policy, monopolizing the legitimate use of violence and maintaining revenues, but always with effect on the politics of race. The American state’s embrace of the politics of racial inequality mark it out as a key case in comparative studies for researchers developing and testing arguments about democratic states with complex histories and fragmentary institutional arrangements.

This chapter discusses anthropological perspectives on superdiversity and includes reflections on why anthropology as a discipline has been reluctant to engage with the term. Superdiversity and its reception within the discipline is then compared with how semantically proximate concepts—namely migration, transnationalism, and multiculture—were received and developed. The long shadow of functionalism and its interest in stasis and bounded culture is discussed, and alternative or subliminal genealogies for superdiversity are presented, including, especially, the anthropology of the Caribbean. The discipline’s reluctance to engage with race and working-class culture is contextualized, and it is shown how this led to scholarship on multiculture developing separately from that of migration. The emergence of transnationalism in the 1990s made it possible for anthropology to reconceptualize long-held ideas around mixing, cultural fluidity, and relationships between culture and territoriality, but transnationalism was relatively weak on the understanding of interethnic relations in areas of migrant settlement. It is noted that transnationalism poses fundamental challenges to ethnographic fieldwork conventionally conceived, and that this is also the case for superdiversity. To overcome these challenges, it is proposed that collaborative, participatory, and team-based ethnographies that also seek to decolonize ethnography, offer a promising way forward. In the conclusion, proposals are made that seek to bring anthropological engagements with superdiversity into constructive dialogue with work on racism, multiculture, deportation, and intersecting inequalities.

This chapter discusses the capture of superdiversity in one particular set of official data, that is, the recent decennial censuses. First, it provides a review of how superdiversity variables are defined in the wider literature, including attempts to operationalize such variables in measurement studies. It then explores how the census captures these variables, including any advantages and drawbacks. Following a brief consideration of the evidence for growing superdiversity in the British population, the changes to the 2001 and 2011 censuses that have enhanced the capture of superdiversity are discussed. New questions have resulted in a high volume of tables that cover most of the superdiversity variables. In particular, customized census tables have yielded data on three-way contingency tables that contain at least one granular variable, providing a point of access to the intersectional nature of superdiversity. Further “Small Population” tables have provided data for groups that are excluded from standard tabulations by their small group size. How census data have been used to describe and analyze population superdiversity is illustrated by studies of particular communities of descent, attempts to develop a superdiversity index, and the mapping of superdiversity at the small-area level. Finally, the conclusion examines developments that may further enhance the utility of census data in the future for capturing superdiversity.

Contrary to a view that sees racism as an aberration within American liberalism or largely outside the broader dynamics of American politics, historical institutional scholars often emphasize the central place of racial conflict in American politics and especially in the development of the American state. Although racial conflict has been an obstacle to state-building, struggles over race also enhanced state authority in ways that defy conceptions of a weak American state. Approaching American politics through an historical institutional lens helps underscore the way efforts to confront long standing racial divisions and conflict helped to institutionalize key political and social rights.

This chapter investigates citizenship and statelessness through the lens of superdiversity. Earlier scholarly literature defined citizenship as a legal status, which is a predisposition for individuals to possess certain rights. By contrast, statelessness was understood as a legal status lacking these rights. Later works have argued that not all citizens have equal access to citizenship rights, and that not all populations are equally vulnerable to statelessness. Several policy papers have connected this specifically to ethnic discrimination, since certain ethnic minorities have a hindered access to citizenship rights or to citizenship status altogether and end up as stateless. While not diminishing the importance of ethnic discrimination, this chapter argues that other factors should be considered when contemplating the connection between citizenship and rights, and between statelessness and rightlessness, most notably, how these factors are intertwined in dynamic power relations. The chapter applies a superdiversity approach to examine the factors that accompany ethnic inequalities and contribute to the dissociation of citizenship from rights. It also shows that statelessness entails different degrees of access to rights rather than simply being a state of rightlessness.

This chapter offers a critical survey of extant scholarship on the civil rights movement. It highlights topics, organizations, and specific figures and campaigns that have been extensively studied, while also calling attention to other aspects of, or persons or groups in, the movement that have received much less scholarly attention. The piece ends with an extended section on what the author terms “silences, holes, and biases” in the literature on this most important of American social movements. More specifically the author calls for a temporal and geographic broadening of research on the African American freedom struggle, more attention to black activism within a host of institutions (e.g. schools, workplaces, cultural institutions), and increased research on the dynamics of white resistance to collective political action by African Americans.

This article examines the ways in which scholars of American political development (APD) have encountered the color line through their research, and the strides they have made in bringing race back into the field of political science in general and the study of the state in particular. Three core questions about race and APD are considered: How is race defined? When does race matter? In what direction does race matter? Two approaches relating to race and American politics are discussed: the race relations approach and the racial politics (or minority politics) approach. It then explores five challenges that must be addressed in order to overcome the persistent connections between APD and the discipline’s racial anomalism. It also analyzes the role of race in the establishment of the early American welfare state and concludes by reflecting on the persistence of racial inequality and prospects for APD in the twenty-first century.

Despite a long history of colonialism, slavery, immigration, and ethnic conflict in Europe, issues of racism and discrimination have only recently gained the attention of policy makers in many European countries. In this chapter, I will examine how the issue of race has been dealt with in the literature related to European politics and discuss the development of “race relations” or antidiscrimination policy, particularly the situation in France, Britain, and Germany. I will focus on the development of antidiscrimination prior to harmonization under the EU’s racial equality directive (RED) as an example of the public policy implications of immigration and race in Europe.

Deliberative democracy is widely associated with a public sphere that is more inclusive of cultural and religious minority groups than that established by a model of politics as interest aggregation. But it has also been criticized for stipulating unjust terms for this political inclusion, and for being insufficiently responsive to identity group-based claims. Such challenges have prompted much internal debate about the validity and the practical consequences of different norms and mechanisms of deliberative democracy. This chapter argues that models of public deliberation less beholden to Habermasian discourse ethics are able to offer a more promising response to these multicultural challenges.

In the scheme of history, most political deliberation has taken place outside the modern West. But the study of deliberation, however extensive it has become, has largely ignored this wider world. Examining how deliberation manifests across different societies has considerable promise for both explanatory and normative political theory. To explain why people deliberate—which should be among the first questions deliberative democrats ponder—it is first necessary to examine how people deliberate, and why this varies. Doing so with a comparative and historical perspective, even in the preliminary fashion presented here, reveals how social and political ideals can motivate and shape deliberative practice. And there are normative stakes in this agenda. If collective deliberation is to prevail in global governance, we must fashion political ideals which motivate diverse peoples to come together in discourse, rather than confront their problems, or compound them, by less desirable means.

The chapter posits urban popular economy as a multidimensional process that identifies and assembles diverse facets of the urban environment—laws, policies, buildings, spatial uses, material resources, social compositions, styles of governance, and so forth in order to create territories of operation for poor, working class, and lower-middle-class residents whose lives are increasingly unsettled in precarious forms of livelihood. As residents circulate through more provisional emplacements in work and home, forms of livelihood and care are more dispersed across disparate urban geographies. This necessitates new forms of collaboration and political struggle, increasingly based on diversifying points of contact across the urban system.

Every democratic process short of unanimity produces opinion minorities. Political divisions along anchored demographic characteristics like language, religion, race, or ethnicity challenge pluralist models of governance by threatening to entrench the exclusion of minority groups from political power. Especially when attuned to ethnic geography, electoral engineering through manipulation of the electoral system and other rules governing the electoral process, such as boundary delimitation, reserved seats, ballot-access requirements, and ethnic party bans, can help promote either inclusion or exclusion of minorities. Ensuring long-term interethnic peace has proved more difficult. Scholars continue to grapple with how to ensure minority inclusion without freezing existing divisions.

Due to its wide-ranging implications for social cohesion in diversifying Western countries, the question of the potential negative consequences of ethnic diversity for social trust is arguably the most contentious question in the literature on social trust. In this chapter we critically review the empirical evidence for a negative relationship between contextual ethnic diversity (measured locally within countries) and social trust. We cautiously conclude that there are indications of a negative relationship, although with important variations across study characteristics including national setting, context unit analyzed, and conditioning on moderating influences. Building on the review, we highlight a number of paths for theoretical and methodological advances, which we argue would advance the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust.

This article studies ethnic mobilization and ethnic violence. It reviews some of the salient empirical patterns that concern cross-national and temporal variation in the politicization of ethnicity and ethnic violence. It also tries to explain the prevalence and variation of politicized ethnicity, and then arguments proposing to explain the occurrence of ethnic violence.

This article focuses on ethnic conflict and ethnic identity. It begins by differentiating these from nationalism, national identity, and civil wars. It presents a survey of the explanations provided in four traditions of enquiry, and also provides an analysis of the inadequacies or merits of arguments within each tradition. The article also reviews the evolution of arguments related to this field.

This chapter considers how ethnic diversity affects state transformations in the Global South. It focuses on the impact of ethnicity on changes in state borders, decentralization, consociationalism, the militarization of states, state capacity, and the communalization of state power. As part of the analysis, the chapter also compares the region with the core OECD. While consociationalism and decentralization are most relevant to the core OECD, and while much attention has been paid to how ethnic movements can transform state borders, all three are relatively rare in the Global South. Alternatively, ethnic mobilization and conflict have had much greater effects on the militarization of states, state capacity, and the communalization of state power.

Ethnic and nationalist movements display a wide variety of demands, activities, and goals but they all involve the state. States and governments are pressed to develop policies that stretch from cultural recognition and territorial autonomy to special rights and public goods provision for the relevant community. Mobilization centered on identity politics is often peaceful but there are also instances where the politicization of grievances may lead to violence such as riots, terrorism or civil wars. This chapter explains the repertoire of actions available to ethno-nationalist movements and concentrates on the importance of structural conditions in making salient ethnic and national cleavages. The focus is on movements operating in democratic settings and the impact of macro–social changes on indigenous movements in Latin America.

This chapter discusses the historical emergence of ethnographies of superdiversity and the kinds of methods such ethnographies use. It provides an overview of social scientific scholarship concerned with the effects of globalization on the local level and illustrates how current ethnographies of superdiversity draw on long-standing research traditions of urban neighborhood research. The chapter discusses the political background of these types of ethnographies—namely, the backlash against multiculturalism and the ensuing local turn, which highlighted the need to move beyond the study of ethnic groups in urban contexts characterized by immigration and focus on social relations between groups and individuals differentiated along multiple categories. The second part of the chapter discusses different sites where ethnographies of superdiversity take place, from the neighborhood level and the public spaces within neighborhoods to semipublic spaces of regular encounters to workplaces, institutions, and the home. Lastly, the chapter presents a selection of the methods used as part of such ethnographies, some of which go beyond more conventional ethnographic methods. The chapter concludes by addressing some of the challenges of ethnographic research on superdiversity.