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Research using symbolic racism has provided evidence that racial bias has widespread social and political impact in the United States, influencing phenomena such as opposition to policies designed to help blacks, disapproval of Barack Obama, and membership in the Tea Party. However, symbolic racism has a racial component and a conservative component, so many researchers have attempted to isolate the racial component of symbolic racism with statistical control; however, the literature lacks guidelines about the effectiveness of such statistical control. To address this shortcoming, I report results from two studies using the 2012 ANES Time Series Study. Study 1 provides guidelines for the effect size necessary to support an inference that variation in a dependent variable is influenced by the racial component of symbolic racism. The nature of this racial component has been inconsistently described in the literature, so Study 2 reports evidence that symbolic racism sometimes predicts black opposition to policies designed to help blacks, which suggests that the characterization of the residual effect of symbolic racism as racial animosity is stronger than warranted by the data. Together, these studies can help researchers better identify when racial bias is an influence and better understand what this influence represents.

AbstractPolitical science graduate students need to develop strong skills in drafting empirical research manuscripts. Yet, many graduate student manuscripts contain similar shortcomings, which require student peers, faculty advisors, and journal referees to produce the same comments for multiple manuscripts. This article lists common comments on empirical research manuscripts, as a reference to help students revise their manuscripts before presentation to others for review, so that reviewers can focus on the more substantive elements of a manuscript, thus producing better manuscripts that are more likely to be published and thus contribute to knowledge about political phenomena.

AbstractDespite the extensive literature on global slavery and servitude, human bondage in Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been largely neglected. Here bondage did not discriminate between ethnic, racial or religious groups and fulfilled a wide range of social, economic, and political functions, reflecting both the region's geographical position at the edge of Central Asia and its political position—first as a dependency and then as a province of Qing China. This paper discusses the nature of the forms of bondage that emerged in this unique geopolitical setting and suggests that the emancipation of Xinjiang's 'British' slaves at the end of the nineteenth century and the gradual decline of bondage resulted from a convergence of local, regional, and global forces.

AbstractMany political science publications advance knowledge using previously collected data and an innovation or two in theory or methods. To encourage students embarking on a seminar paper project, I review some of these publications to illustrate that the understanding of political phenomena often advances in incremental steps.

Objective. List experiment respondents may misreport the number of list items that they associate with in order to associate themselves with a socially desirable test item or to disassociate themselves from a socially undesirable test item. Tests for such misreporting were conducted.Methods. List experiments from the 1991 National Race and Politics Survey, the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project were analyzed or reviewed.Results. Evidence suggested that some respondents deflated their report more than necessary to avoid association with a socially undesirable test item.Conclusions. List experiments may provide inaccurate estimates of the percentage of the population to which the test item applies, but the direction of bias is predictable.