Morris Levy
Biographic Data
| ID | 3717870 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Morris Levy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Morris |
| FAMILY NAME | Levy |
| SIGNATURE | LEVY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2888-4165 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 286 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Will Constituents Simply Take Their Elected Representatives’ Word for It
Political communications research has found that elites enjoy wide latitude to shape mass opinion but also identified important constraints on opinion leadership in competitive democracies. To win over the public, political leaders must generally mobilize party loyalties, secure interest group endorsements, and make persuasive arguments to support their views. Influential research (Broockman & Butler, 2017) calls these constraints into question b…
The Realignment of Political Tolerance in the United States
Studies conducted between the 1950s and 1970s found that the principles embodied in the First Amendment constituted a “clear norm” endorsed by large majorities of community leaders and virtually all legal practitioners and scholars. This consensus has since weakened under the strain of arguments that racist slurs, epithets, and other forms of expression that demean social identities are an intolerable affront to egalitarian values. Guided by the …
Unequal values: Equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018
We analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consen…
Once Racialized, Now “Immigrationized”? Explaining the Immigration-Welfare Link in American Public Opinion
Recent research claims that American public opinion about welfare, long racialized, has become "immigrationized," or formed on the basis of people's feelings about immigration. However, the evidence to date is incapable of ruling out two alternative explanations for the immigration-welfare link. Attitudes toward immigrants and welfare recipients may instead be linked because both are shaped by the broadly ethnocentric dimension of generalized soc…
Racial Projections in Perspective: Public Reactions to Narratives about Rising Diversity
Threatened reactions to news about the approach of a racial majority-minority society have profoundly influenced Americans’ political attitudes and electoral choices. Existing research casts these reactions as responses to changing demographic context. We argue instead that they are driven in large part by the dominant majority-minority narrativeframingof most public discussion about rising racial diversity. This narrative assumes the long-run pe…
Winning cures everything? Beliefs about voter fraud, voter confidence, and the 2016 election
Immigration and the American Ethos
What do Americans want from immigration policy and why? In the rise of a polarized and acrimonious immigration debate, leading accounts see racial anxieties and disputes over the meaning of American nationhood coming to a head. The resurgence of parochial identities has breathed new life into old worries about the vulnerability of the American Creed. This book tells a different story, one in which creedal values remain hard at work in shaping ord…
American Public Opinion on Immigration: Nativist, Polarized, or Ambivalent
For Dauvergne (2016), one consequence of the “end of settler societies” is nativism, or what she calls “mean‐spirited politics”: anti‐immigrant, anti‐Muslim, anti‐Multiculturalism. This accords with the prevailing tone of public opinion literature on the subject, which links anti‐immigrant hostility in settler societies to influxes of diversity and associated racial threat. In this essay, we determine just how closely this stylized vision of anxi…
The Racial Structure of Inequality: Consequences for Welfare Policy in the United States
Objective This article explores the effect of the racial structure of inequality on redistributive policy in the states. Methods Applying measures developed in Hero and Levy (2016), we use fixed effects regressions to assess the impact of between‐race inequality on multiple measures of state welfare effort and generosity. Results We find a strong negative association between racial inequality and all measures of welfare policy. The total level of…
It’s Not Just Welfare: Racial Inequality and the Local Provision of Public Goods in the United States
Recent research shows that inequality between racial groups is a critical determinant of redistributive policy in the United States. Using various measures of local and state spending and examining multiple levels of geographical and political jurisdictions, we extend this research to government spending on local public goods. Specifically, we examine (1) whether the extent to which income inequality falls along racial lines dampens local and sta…
Racial Population Projections and Reactions to Alternative News Accounts of Growing Diversity
Projections of changes in racial demographics depend on how race is classified. The U.S. Census Bureau makes several different projections of the nation's racial demographic future, but the most publicized version projects our racial future in a way that narrows the definition of race groups to exclude people who are of mixed race or Hispanic. This definition results in projections of many fewer "whites," accelerating the impending decline of the…
Competing Norms of Free Expression and Political Tolerance
Competing Norms of Free Expression and Political Tolerance Dennis Chong (bio) and Morris Levy (bio) fifty years after iconic student protests in berkeley forced the university of California to end restrictions on campus political activism, free speech controversies are again roiling American universities. In a remarkable role reversal, however, the student protesters now demand that universities censor and cancel events featuring speakers who esp…
The Effect of Immigration from Mexico on Social Capital in the United States
Has mass migration from Mexico since the 1980s contributed to a well-documented decline in US social capital? Theories linking ethnic diversity to lower social cohesion and participation (e.g., Putnam 2007, 30, 137) would strongly predict this effect. Yet the impact of immigration in particular, rather than ethno-racial diversity generally, on US social capital has not been examined. Assessing the impact of immigration is important because some h…
The Racial Structure of Economic Inequality in the United States: Understanding Change and Continuity in an Era of “Great Divergence”
The “great divergence” of America's rich from its middle class and poor has led some observers to see a country increasingly stratified by income and wealth, more so than by race. In this article, the first in a two‐part series, we argue that this conclusion overlooks the persistent importance of the racial “structure” of inequality. A decomposition of income inequality between 1980 and 2010 using the Theil Index shows that inequality between rac…
Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making
Mass Opinion and Immigration Policy in the United States: Re-Assessing Clientelist and Elitist Perspectives
We argue that widely accepted elitist and “clientelist” models of immigration policy in the United States unduly minimize popular pressure on policy-making. These models portray majority opinion in ways that fail to recognize divergence between the public’s abstract goals for immigration policy and its support for the concrete policy changes needed to achieve them. As a result, they obscure many important instances in which immigration policy acc…
Americans Fill Out President Obama's Census Form: What is His Race
Objective We use nationally representative survey experiments to assess public opinion about how President Obama should have identified himself racially on the 2010 Census. Methods Respondents were randomly assigned to three conditions—a control, a treatment that described the president's biracial ancestry, and a treatment that combined the biracial ancestry information with a statement that Obama had in fact classified himself as black only. All…
Multicultural Policy and Political Support in European Democracies
In response to growing demographic diversity, European countries have selectively implemented political multiculturalism, a set of policies that seek to redefine prevailing conceptions of national identity. We explore the consequences of such policies for mass political support. Applying multi-level modeling to the 2002 and 2010 waves of the European Social Survey and analyzing multiple dependent variables including trust in regime institutions a…
"A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (review)
Reviewed by: "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry Morris S. Levy "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry. By Charles K. Wolfe. (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Pp. xv + 312, preface, 47 illustrations, two appendices, notes, discography, index.) At the 1999 American Library Association conference in New Orleans, I was approached by a salesman for a new online used bo…
A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry
Book Review| January 01 2001 "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry, Charles K. Wolfe. Morris S. Levy Morris S. Levy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2001) 114 (451): 121–122. https://doi.org/10.2307/3592408 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Face…
Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making
Multicultural Policy and Political Support in European Democracies
In response to growing demographic diversity, European countries have selectively implemented political multiculturalism, a set of policies that seek to redefine prevailing conceptions of national identity. We explore the consequences of such policies for mass political support. Applying multi-level modeling to the 2002 and 2010 waves of the European Social Survey and analyzing multiple dependent variables including trust in regime institutions a…
Winning cures everything? Beliefs about voter fraud, voter confidence, and the 2016 election
It’s Not Just Welfare: Racial Inequality and the Local Provision of Public Goods in the United States
Recent research shows that inequality between racial groups is a critical determinant of redistributive policy in the United States. Using various measures of local and state spending and examining multiple levels of geographical and political jurisdictions, we extend this research to government spending on local public goods. Specifically, we examine (1) whether the extent to which income inequality falls along racial lines dampens local and sta…
The Realignment of Political Tolerance in the United States
Studies conducted between the 1950s and 1970s found that the principles embodied in the First Amendment constituted a “clear norm” endorsed by large majorities of community leaders and virtually all legal practitioners and scholars. This consensus has since weakened under the strain of arguments that racist slurs, epithets, and other forms of expression that demean social identities are an intolerable affront to egalitarian values. Guided by the …
Racial Population Projections and Reactions to Alternative News Accounts of Growing Diversity
Projections of changes in racial demographics depend on how race is classified. The U.S. Census Bureau makes several different projections of the nation's racial demographic future, but the most publicized version projects our racial future in a way that narrows the definition of race groups to exclude people who are of mixed race or Hispanic. This definition results in projections of many fewer "whites," accelerating the impending decline of the…
Mass Opinion and Immigration Policy in the United States: Re-Assessing Clientelist and Elitist Perspectives
We argue that widely accepted elitist and “clientelist” models of immigration policy in the United States unduly minimize popular pressure on policy-making. These models portray majority opinion in ways that fail to recognize divergence between the public’s abstract goals for immigration policy and its support for the concrete policy changes needed to achieve them. As a result, they obscure many important instances in which immigration policy acc…
Americans Fill Out President Obama's Census Form: What is His Race
Objective We use nationally representative survey experiments to assess public opinion about how President Obama should have identified himself racially on the 2010 Census. Methods Respondents were randomly assigned to three conditions—a control, a treatment that described the president's biracial ancestry, and a treatment that combined the biracial ancestry information with a statement that Obama had in fact classified himself as black only. All…
Racial Projections in Perspective: Public Reactions to Narratives about Rising Diversity
Threatened reactions to news about the approach of a racial majority-minority society have profoundly influenced Americans’ political attitudes and electoral choices. Existing research casts these reactions as responses to changing demographic context. We argue instead that they are driven in large part by the dominant majority-minority narrativeframingof most public discussion about rising racial diversity. This narrative assumes the long-run pe…
The Racial Structure of Economic Inequality in the United States: Understanding Change and Continuity in an Era of “Great Divergence”
The “great divergence” of America's rich from its middle class and poor has led some observers to see a country increasingly stratified by income and wealth, more so than by race. In this article, the first in a two‐part series, we argue that this conclusion overlooks the persistent importance of the racial “structure” of inequality. A decomposition of income inequality between 1980 and 2010 using the Theil Index shows that inequality between rac…
Competing Norms of Free Expression and Political Tolerance
Competing Norms of Free Expression and Political Tolerance Dennis Chong (bio) and Morris Levy (bio) fifty years after iconic student protests in berkeley forced the university of California to end restrictions on campus political activism, free speech controversies are again roiling American universities. In a remarkable role reversal, however, the student protesters now demand that universities censor and cancel events featuring speakers who esp…
American Public Opinion on Immigration: Nativist, Polarized, or Ambivalent
For Dauvergne (2016), one consequence of the “end of settler societies” is nativism, or what she calls “mean‐spirited politics”: anti‐immigrant, anti‐Muslim, anti‐Multiculturalism. This accords with the prevailing tone of public opinion literature on the subject, which links anti‐immigrant hostility in settler societies to influxes of diversity and associated racial threat. In this essay, we determine just how closely this stylized vision of anxi…
Once Racialized, Now “Immigrationized”? Explaining the Immigration-Welfare Link in American Public Opinion
Recent research claims that American public opinion about welfare, long racialized, has become "immigrationized," or formed on the basis of people's feelings about immigration. However, the evidence to date is incapable of ruling out two alternative explanations for the immigration-welfare link. Attitudes toward immigrants and welfare recipients may instead be linked because both are shaped by the broadly ethnocentric dimension of generalized soc…
The Racial Structure of Inequality: Consequences for Welfare Policy in the United States
Objective This article explores the effect of the racial structure of inequality on redistributive policy in the states. Methods Applying measures developed in Hero and Levy (2016), we use fixed effects regressions to assess the impact of between‐race inequality on multiple measures of state welfare effort and generosity. Results We find a strong negative association between racial inequality and all measures of welfare policy. The total level of…
The Effect of Immigration from Mexico on Social Capital in the United States
Has mass migration from Mexico since the 1980s contributed to a well-documented decline in US social capital? Theories linking ethnic diversity to lower social cohesion and participation (e.g., Putnam 2007, 30, 137) would strongly predict this effect. Yet the impact of immigration in particular, rather than ethno-racial diversity generally, on US social capital has not been examined. Assessing the impact of immigration is important because some h…
"A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (review)
Reviewed by: "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry Morris S. Levy "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry. By Charles K. Wolfe. (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Pp. xv + 312, preface, 47 illustrations, two appendices, notes, discography, index.) At the 1999 American Library Association conference in New Orleans, I was approached by a salesman for a new online used bo…
A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry
Book Review| January 01 2001 "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry "A Good-Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry, Charles K. Wolfe. Morris S. Levy Morris S. Levy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2001) 114 (451): 121–122. https://doi.org/10.2307/3592408 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Face…
Americans Fill Out President Obama's Census Form: What is His Race
Objective We use nationally representative survey experiments to assess public opinion about how President Obama should have identified himself racially on the 2010 Census. Methods Respondents were randomly assigned to three conditions—a control, a treatment that described the president's biracial ancestry, and a treatment that combined the biracial ancestry information with a statement that Obama had in fact classified himself as black only. All…
Multicultural Policy and Political Support in European Democracies
In response to growing demographic diversity, European countries have selectively implemented political multiculturalism, a set of policies that seek to redefine prevailing conceptions of national identity. We explore the consequences of such policies for mass political support. Applying multi-level modeling to the 2002 and 2010 waves of the European Social Survey and analyzing multiple dependent variables including trust in regime institutions a…
The Racial Structure of Economic Inequality in the United States: Understanding Change and Continuity in an Era of “Great Divergence”
The “great divergence” of America's rich from its middle class and poor has led some observers to see a country increasingly stratified by income and wealth, more so than by race. In this article, the first in a two‐part series, we argue that this conclusion overlooks the persistent importance of the racial “structure” of inequality. A decomposition of income inequality between 1980 and 2010 using the Theil Index shows that inequality between rac…
Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making
Mass Opinion and Immigration Policy in the United States: Re-Assessing Clientelist and Elitist Perspectives
We argue that widely accepted elitist and “clientelist” models of immigration policy in the United States unduly minimize popular pressure on policy-making. These models portray majority opinion in ways that fail to recognize divergence between the public’s abstract goals for immigration policy and its support for the concrete policy changes needed to achieve them. As a result, they obscure many important instances in which immigration policy acc…
The Effect of Immigration from Mexico on Social Capital in the United States
Has mass migration from Mexico since the 1980s contributed to a well-documented decline in US social capital? Theories linking ethnic diversity to lower social cohesion and participation (e.g., Putnam 2007, 30, 137) would strongly predict this effect. Yet the impact of immigration in particular, rather than ethno-racial diversity generally, on US social capital has not been examined. Assessing the impact of immigration is important because some h…
The Racial Structure of Inequality: Consequences for Welfare Policy in the United States
Objective This article explores the effect of the racial structure of inequality on redistributive policy in the states. Methods Applying measures developed in Hero and Levy (2016), we use fixed effects regressions to assess the impact of between‐race inequality on multiple measures of state welfare effort and generosity. Results We find a strong negative association between racial inequality and all measures of welfare policy. The total level of…
It’s Not Just Welfare: Racial Inequality and the Local Provision of Public Goods in the United States
Recent research shows that inequality between racial groups is a critical determinant of redistributive policy in the United States. Using various measures of local and state spending and examining multiple levels of geographical and political jurisdictions, we extend this research to government spending on local public goods. Specifically, we examine (1) whether the extent to which income inequality falls along racial lines dampens local and sta…
Racial Population Projections and Reactions to Alternative News Accounts of Growing Diversity
Projections of changes in racial demographics depend on how race is classified. The U.S. Census Bureau makes several different projections of the nation's racial demographic future, but the most publicized version projects our racial future in a way that narrows the definition of race groups to exclude people who are of mixed race or Hispanic. This definition results in projections of many fewer "whites," accelerating the impending decline of the…
Competing Norms of Free Expression and Political Tolerance
Competing Norms of Free Expression and Political Tolerance Dennis Chong (bio) and Morris Levy (bio) fifty years after iconic student protests in berkeley forced the university of California to end restrictions on campus political activism, free speech controversies are again roiling American universities. In a remarkable role reversal, however, the student protesters now demand that universities censor and cancel events featuring speakers who esp…
American Public Opinion on Immigration: Nativist, Polarized, or Ambivalent
For Dauvergne (2016), one consequence of the “end of settler societies” is nativism, or what she calls “mean‐spirited politics”: anti‐immigrant, anti‐Muslim, anti‐Multiculturalism. This accords with the prevailing tone of public opinion literature on the subject, which links anti‐immigrant hostility in settler societies to influxes of diversity and associated racial threat. In this essay, we determine just how closely this stylized vision of anxi…
Immigration and the American Ethos
What do Americans want from immigration policy and why? In the rise of a polarized and acrimonious immigration debate, leading accounts see racial anxieties and disputes over the meaning of American nationhood coming to a head. The resurgence of parochial identities has breathed new life into old worries about the vulnerability of the American Creed. This book tells a different story, one in which creedal values remain hard at work in shaping ord…
Unequal values: Equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018
We analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consen…
Once Racialized, Now “Immigrationized”? Explaining the Immigration-Welfare Link in American Public Opinion
Recent research claims that American public opinion about welfare, long racialized, has become "immigrationized," or formed on the basis of people's feelings about immigration. However, the evidence to date is incapable of ruling out two alternative explanations for the immigration-welfare link. Attitudes toward immigrants and welfare recipients may instead be linked because both are shaped by the broadly ethnocentric dimension of generalized soc…
Racial Projections in Perspective: Public Reactions to Narratives about Rising Diversity
Threatened reactions to news about the approach of a racial majority-minority society have profoundly influenced Americans’ political attitudes and electoral choices. Existing research casts these reactions as responses to changing demographic context. We argue instead that they are driven in large part by the dominant majority-minority narrativeframingof most public discussion about rising racial diversity. This narrative assumes the long-run pe…
Winning cures everything? Beliefs about voter fraud, voter confidence, and the 2016 election
The Realignment of Political Tolerance in the United States
Studies conducted between the 1950s and 1970s found that the principles embodied in the First Amendment constituted a “clear norm” endorsed by large majorities of community leaders and virtually all legal practitioners and scholars. This consensus has since weakened under the strain of arguments that racist slurs, epithets, and other forms of expression that demean social identities are an intolerable affront to egalitarian values. Guided by the …
Will Constituents Simply Take Their Elected Representatives’ Word for It
Political communications research has found that elites enjoy wide latitude to shape mass opinion but also identified important constraints on opinion leadership in competitive democracies. To win over the public, political leaders must generally mobilize party loyalties, secure interest group endorsements, and make persuasive arguments to support their views. Influential research (Broockman & Butler, 2017) calls these constraints into question b…
Political science (17 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Immigration (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (7 works)