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Since the early 1990s, the federal role in education-exemplified by the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)-has expanded dramatically. Yet states and localities have retained a central role in education policy, leading to a growing struggle for control over the direction of the nation's schools.In An Education in Politics, Jesse H. Rhodes explains the uneven development of federal involvement in education. While supporters of expanded federal involvement enjoyed some success in bringing new ideas to the federal policy agenda, Rhodes argues, they also encountered stiff resistance from proponents of local control. Built atop existing decentralized policies, new federal reforms raised difficult questions about which level of government bore ultimate responsibility for improving schools. Rhodes's argument focuses on the role played by civil rights activists, business leaders, and education experts in promoting the reforms that would be enacted with federal policies such as NCLB. It also underscores the constraints on federal involvement imposed by existing education policies, hostile interest groups, and, above all, the nation's federal system. Indeed, the federal system, which left specific policy formation and implementation to the states and localities, repeatedly frustrated efforts to effect changes: national reforms lost their force as policies passed through iterations at the state, county, and municipal levels. Ironically, state and local resistance only encouraged civil rights activists, business leaders, and their political allies to advocate even more stringent reforms that imposed heavier burdens on state and local governments. Through it all, the nation's education system made only incremental steps toward the goal of providing a quality education for every child.

There is mounting evidence that increased voting and political participation are associated with improved public health, and the erection of barriers to voting can have deleterious public health consequences.1,2 Yet over the past two decades, access to the ballot has become a contentious issue with strong partisan and racial overtones. Claiming (without evidence) that US elections are marred by widespread voter fraud, many Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, call for \"election security\" measures, such as voter ID laws, that make registration and voting more difficult.3 Meanwhile, many Democrats contend that such measures alm to suppress the legitimate votes of people of color and advocate instead for policies like same-day registration and all-mail voting that expand ballot access.4 This ideological divide has manifested at the state level, with Republican-controlled states imposing new barriers to voting and Democrat-controlled states adopting policies that enhance access to the ballot.5 Recent research suggests that state partisan polarization in ballot accessibility may have contributed to interstate inequalities in public health outcomes in critical areas such as COVID-19 case and mortality rates.6Partisan and geographic polarization in ballot access has been exacerbated by a conservative retrenchment in voting rights jurisprudence on the US Supreme Court. Since the 1970s, and accelerating between the 2000s and 2020s, the court's decisions have gradually eroded the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the most important federal voting rights law.7 In Its landmark decision in Shelby County v Holder (2013), the court invalidated a crucial provision requiringjurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination in voting to seek federal approval for proposed changes in their election laws.8 The elimination of this preclearance requirement has made it easier for Republican governments in previously covered states to erect new barriers to voting that may disproportionately burden voters of color.9Scholars are just beginning to grapple with the public health implications of the erosion of the federal government's capacity to enforce voting rights for communities of color. In this issue of AJPH, Rushovich et al. (p.300) shed light on this matter by appraising the historical impact of preclearance on infant mortality among African Americans and White Americans. Using data from 1959 to 1980, they applied differencein-difference methods to examine preto post-VRA changes in deaths both in counties that were required to submit proposed changes in election laws and in comparable counties that were not subject to this requirement. What difference did preclearance have on infant mortality?According to the authors, preclearance made the difference between life and death for thousands of African American infants between 1965 and 1980. African American infant deaths in preclearance-exposed counties decreased by 11.2 additional deaths per 1000 population of individuals younger than one year beyond the decrease experienced by unexposed counties between the pre-VRA period (1959-1965) and the immediate post-VRA period (1966-1970). This translates to 17.3% fewer African American infant deaths during this period than would have occurred in the absence of the federal preclearance requirement. The authors also reveal the longer-term impacts of preclearance by showing that African American infant deaths per 1000 population younger than one year in preclearance-exposed counties continued to decrease more swiftly relative to unexposed counties between 1971 and 1980. Notably, the beneficial effect of preclearance on infant survival was concentrated among African American infants, with no significant differences among Whites or the total population.

During a period of rising partisan and racial polarization, how do partisanship, ideology, and racial antagonism influence attitudes toward reparations policies directed at the descendants of slaves? In this article, we use a wealth of public opinion data to examine trends in attitudes toward reparations and analyze the correlates of opposition to reparations proposals. We hypothesize that, given the ascendance over the past decade of a powerful racial justice movement and ensuing conservative backlash, racial attitudes should be particularly powerful in determining attitudes toward reparations. Using four original, nationally representative surveys, we show that negative racial attitudes play a central role in determining opposition to reparations, with effects that typically rival or exceed those of Republican partisanship or conservative ideology.

Although racial bias in the law is widely recognized, it remains unclear how these biases are in entrenched in the language of the law, judicial opinions. In this article, we build on recent research introducing an approach to measuring the presence of implicit racial bias in large-scale corpora. Utilizing an original dataset of more than one million appellate court opinions from US state and federal courts, we estimate word embeddings for the more than 400,000 most common words found in legal opinions. In a series of analyses, we find strong and consistent evidence of implicit racial bias, as African-American names are more frequently associated with unpleasant or negative concepts, whereas European-American names are more frequently associated with pleasant or positive concepts. The results have stark implications for work on the neutrality of the legal system as well as for our understanding of the entrenchment of bias through the law.

Scholars have long questioned whether and how courts influence society. We contribute to this debate by investigating the ability of judicial decisions to shape issue attention and affect toward courts in media serving the LGBTQ+ community. To do so, we compiled an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases over an extended period covering major decisions, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003), and Lofton v. Secretary of Department of Children & Family Services (2004). We argue these cases influence the volume and tone of LGBTQ+ media coverage. Combining computational social science techniques with qualitative analysis, we find increased attention to same-sex marriage after the decisions in Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton, and the coalescence of discussions of courts around same-sex marriage after Lawrence. We also show how LGBTQ+ media informed readers about the political and legal implications of struggles over marriage equality.

The emergence and dissemination of new legal ideas can play an important role in sparking change in the way activists in marginalized communities understand their rights and pursue their objectives. How and why do the legal beliefs of such communities evolve? We argue that the vigorous advocacy of new legal ideas by entrepreneurs and the harnessing of specialized media to help disseminate those ideas are important mechanisms in this evolution. We use the rise of marriage equality as a central legal priority in the mainstream American LGBTQ+ rights movement as a case study to illustrate this phenomenon. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Evan Wolfson’s legal advocacy and an examination of The Advocate , we investigate how Wolfson developed and disseminated legal ideas about same-sex marriage. We show how this advocacy eventually dominated discussion of the issue among elite LGBTQ+ legal actors and the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ publication. However, Wolfson’s advocacy tended to emphasize LGBTQ+ integration into “mainstream” American culture and prioritized the interests and values of relatively privileged subgroups within the LGBTQ+ community. Our research informs our understanding of the interplay between legal advocacy and media reporting in the development of LGBTQ+ rights claims and the strategies adopted to achieve them.

Over the past three decades, the states have adopted a suite of reforms to their education systems in an effort to improve school performance. While scholars have speculated about the political consequences of these policies, to date there has been no empirical research investigating how these reforms affect the practice of American democracy. Combining data from an original survey of public school parents with information on state education standards, testing, and accountability policies, I examine how design features of these policies influence parents' attitudes about government, participation in politics, and involvement in their children's education. My research shows that parents residing in states with more developed assessment systems express more negative attitudes about government and education, and are less likely to become engaged in some forms of involvement in their children's education, than are parents who live in states with less developed assessment systems.

Throughout her 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton crafted messages intended to appeal to fathers of daughters and to highlight the implications of her historic nomination for American girls and women. Clinton reminded voters that her election could mean that “fathers will be able to say to their daughters, you, too, can grow up to be president” (Frizell, Time, http://time.com/3920332/transcript-full-text-hillary-clinton-campaign-launch/ , 2015 ). But did these appeals succeed in mobilizing fathers of daughters to support Clinton? Using original cross sectional and experimental survey data from the 2016 CCES, we ask two questions. First, were men who fathered daughters (a life event which we operationalize, for important methodological and theoretical reasons detailed herein, as men who fathered a daughter as their first child) more likely to support, and vote for, Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election than were those who fathered sons as their first child? Second, were Clinton’s direct appeals to fathers of daughters effective in increasing her electoral support? We find that fathers who have daughters as their first child are more likely to prefer and vote for Clinton, and are more likely to support a fictional female congressional candidate using a “Clintonesque” appeal that emphasizes expanding opportunities for “our daughters.” These results suggest that entry into fatherhood with a daughter (as opposed to with a son) is a formative experience for men that has consequences for their political choices in later life. Our conclusions inform the growing literature on the implications of fathering daughters on men’s political behavior.

Conventional wisdom holds that Democrats have abandoned the language of class populism. Using a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of hundreds of Democratic presidential campaign speeches over the 1932–2012 period, we revisit the received view. We provide evidence that Democratic presidential candidates have made increasingly frequent references to the wealthy; have employed a consistently adversarial tone in statements referring to the affluent; have made increasingly frequent criticisms of Republicans’ alleged favoritism toward the rich; and have increasingly linked references to the wealthy to promises to assist less fortunate Americans through programmatic reforms. Our findings indicate that class populism is alive and well in Democratic presidential campaign rhetoric.