Existing research largely ignores Black support for punitive policies that target group members, even as this support challenges expectations of in-group favoritism and group solidarity. The current research fills this gap by leveraging a familiar concept: “the politics of respectability.” Building on historical and qualitative accounts of this worldview, which focuses on the behavior of group members, I develop a social psychological framework to understand how identity-based concerns motivate Black support for punishment that targets members of their racial group. I also develop a novel measure of respectability–the Respectability Politics Scale. CONTINUED
Hakeem Jefferson (Stanford), American Political Science Review
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