Abstract People of color (PoC) will soon become a demographic majority in the U.S., but this overlooks major differences in how various PoC are treated by American society and the political priorities they hold. We build a theory that explainswhenandwhysome PoC express more unified political views. Despite variation in their social positions, people of color share common sources of marginalization. For example, although Asian Americans are stereotyped as amodel minorityand Latinos aslow-status, both are deemedperpetual foreigners. We claim that shared marginalization sparks solidarity between PoC, which strengthens their support for policies that do not implicate their ingroup, thus forging interminority unity. Using survey data, Study 1 (N = 2400) shows that Asian adults report weaker solidarity with PoC than do Latinos, plus less support for policies that accommodate unauthorized immigrants, which implicate Latinos. Studies 2 and 3 randomly assign Asian (N = 641) and Latino (N = 624) adults to read about a racial outgroup marginalized asforeign(vs. control article). This heightens solidarity with PoC, which then boosts Asian support for flexible policies toward undocumented immigrants (which implicate Latinos) and Latino support for generous policies toward high-skill immigrants (which implicate Asians). We discuss how our results clarify the opportunities and limits of political unity among PoC.

There is growing interest in the study of expressive responding in public opinion surveys, with scholars seeking to determine whether partisan differences in response to survey items attest to genuine differences in perceptions or to insincere responses meant to signal in-party approval or out-party disapproval. This study focuses on partisan gaps in evaluations of the inappropriateness of politicians’ transgressions and tests the effectiveness of a technique designed to reduce expressive responding. This “response decoupling” technique gives respondents the opportunity to separate their evaluations of a politician’s performance from their evaluations of a transgression committed by the politician, thereby allowing partisans to both disapprove of the transgression and signal support for the politician. The technique was experimentally tested in a study in Israel (N = 906) and in two pre-registered studies in the US (total N = 3,172), as these studies presented respondents with a real-life transgression of an actual politician. Overall, the technique had a weak effect, as only in the Israeli study was the effect statistically significant. On the whole, these results suggest that while partisan gaps in evaluations of politicians’ transgressions may reflect genuine perceptual differences, it may also be the case that allowing respondents to decouple their responses is not a sufficiently powerful method to reduce expressive responding. The paper concludes by discussing the implications and limitations of these findings.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09796-0.

Existing empirical research on voters’ responses to individual politicians’ moral transgressions pays limited attention to moral emotions, although moral emotions are an integral part of voters’ moral judgment. This study looks at U.S. voters’ discrete moral emotional responses to politician’s moral violations and examines how these discrete moral emotional responses are dependent on voters’ own moral principles and the extent to which they identify with a political party. We report on a 5 × 3 between-subjects experiment where 2026 U.S. respondents reacted to politicians’ violations of one of five moral foundations defined by Moral Foundations Theory. We randomly vary which moral foundation is violated and the partisanship of the politician. While voters’ own moral principles somewhat condition moral emotional responses, we find that voters’ moral emotional responses mostly depend on partisan identification. When voters share party identity with a politician committing a moral violation, they respond with less anger, contempt, disgust and shame than when they do not share party identity. The effect is greater among strong partisans. However, we find limited evidence that specific moral emotions are activated by violations of particular moral foundations, thereby challenging Moral Foundations Theory.