Lester K Spence
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 114932 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Lester K Spence |
| PRENOMES | Lester K |
| SOBRENOME | Spence |
| ASSINATURA | SPENCE L K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4483-8641 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 22 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 477 |
| OBRAS COMO AUTOR | 22 |
| OBRAS COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Race, Racism, and the Crisis of Democracy in Political Science
Over the past decade, autocratization has increased worldwide, and the United States itself has seen its own democracy erode. While political scientists have begun to study both phenomena in earnest, with exceptions, they have been unable to fully wrestle with either. We suggest that this incomplete understanding is the result of the discipline's problematic racial history. At the time of its founding in the late nineteenth century, political sci…
Bitter Fruit as Boundary Pushing and Sustaining
The Black Fantastic in International Relations
In 2016, British investigative journalist Simon Rogers created a map/timeline of Twitter hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter. The map (which no longer exists) indirectly shows both the intensity of Black Lives Matter protests and their geographic scope. Within the United States, we see not only protest activity in metropolitan areas with large black population percentages, but also protest activity in metropolitan areas with few (if any) …
Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule
Do the Right Thing in the post-post Civil Rights era
Spike Lee is one of the most important artists of his generation. He has been profoundly productive on his own – few directors have as large a body of work across films, commercials, and documentar
Live and Let Die
Thirty years ago black populations were disproportionately HIV + and far more likely to die of AIDS than other populations. Yet and still black elected officials, civil rights organizations, and black institutions ignored the problem. Now, at least in major metropolitan areas, circumstances appear to have changed—not only do civil rights organizations, black elected officials, and a range of black institutions take HIV and AIDS seriously, it is n…
Knocking the Hustle
Over the past several years scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, suggesting that the divide can be traced to the neoliberal turn. â Iâ m not a business man; Iâ m a business, man.â Perhaps no better statement gets at the heart of this turn. Increasingly weâ re being forced to think of ourselves in entrepreneurial terms, forced to take more and more responsibility for dev…
Remembering and reading the work of Richard Iton (1961–2013)
Guest Editors' Note
Heroism and the political scientist
Earlier this year, political scientists Hanes Walton, William “Nick” Nelson, and Richard Iton passed away. Their contributions to political science cannot be over-emphasized. In this essay I use literary critic Albert Murray (who also passed away this year) to argue their work can best be understood as heroic attempts to expand the contours of the discipline, attempts that attack “social science fiction” while simultaneously promoting a blues-inf…
The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics
The neoliberal turn arguably has a powerful effect on black political ideas, black political practices, and black life in general; the nature of this effect has gone under-examined. In this work I seek to rectify this gap by examining neoliberal governmentality as it appears in black communities. The result should deepen our understanding of class politics within racially subjugated communities, and should push us to consider a much wider range o…
Episodic Frames, HIV/Aids, and African American Public Opinion
How are African American political attitudes influenced by the mass media? Cathy Cohen’s theory of marginalization suggests that media narratives about African Americans influence their public opinion about HIV/AIDS, behaviors associated with it, and populations associated with it. However, this has gone untested. Using an innovative experimental design involving four hundred African American participants, I find that episodic framing of HIV/AIDS…
Context, Black Empowerment, and African American Political Participation
Activists and scholars argue that the election and presence of Black mayors increase Black political engagement; however, later research suggests that this diminishes over time. Furthermore, a body of research suggests that homogenous racial contexts and contextual poverty decrease political participation. In this article, we ask one question: How does demographic context and length of Black mayoral tenure influence Black political participation?…
Revisiting Black Incorporation and Local Political Participation
Testing the proposition that electing black mayors has a positive effect on black political participation, scholars found that black incorporation historically lead to increased black political engagement. However, the research that examines whether length of mayoral tenure influences black political participation is limited. We test this proposition using the 1993—1994 National Black Politics Study. Our findings suggest long-term political incor…
The Deaths Could Have Been Prevented
Why Do People Accept Public Policies They Oppose? Testing Legitimacy Theory with a Survey-Based Experiment
Why Do People Accept Public Policies They Oppose? Testing Legitimacy Theory with a Survey-Based Experiment
The orthodox answer to the question posed in the title of this article is that the legitimacy of institutions has something to do with acquiescence to unwelcome public policy decisions. We investigate that conventional wisdom using an experiment embedded within a representative national sample in the United States. We test hypotheses concerning not only the effect of institutional legitimacy on acquiescence, but also the influence of partisanship…
True to Our Native Land
There have been several recent attempts to operationalize and measure empirically attitudinal support for Black nationalism. However, scholars have not yet reached a consensus as to what precisely constitutes Black nationalism and its manifestations. Our work addresses three critical questions. First, is Black nationalism a uni-dimensional or a multi-dimensional construct? Second, is Black nationalism another form of xenophobia? Third, is support…
Race and Representation in Detroit’s Community Development Coalitions
This article examines how race affects conflict between advocates of community development and neighborhood revitalization and local government led by a black mayor. The article shows that partly due to issues of racial representation in community development leadership, some activists, even white activists and leaders supportive of social change, can be ensnarled in the fissures of racialized community development politics. The article analyzes …
Measuring Attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court
It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measure…
The Supreme Court and the US Presidential Election of 2000
The conventional wisdom about the US Supreme Court and the 2000 presidential election is that the Court wounded itself by participating in such a partisan dispute. By ‘wounded’ people mean that the institution lost some of its legitimacy. Evidence from our survey, conducted in early 2001, suggests little if any diminution of the Court’s legitimacy in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, even among African Americans. We observe a relationship between ev…
The Role of Theory in Experimental Design
Some who have written about the logic of experimentation argue that random assignment of subjects to treatment conditions is an essential attribute of an experiment. Others disagree. Rather than treating this as a matter of dueling definitions, we consider experiments without randomization from a theoretical perspective. Our central contention here is that, for some research questions, theory dictatessystematic(not random) assignment of responden…
Measuring Attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court
It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measure…
The Supreme Court and the US Presidential Election of 2000
The conventional wisdom about the US Supreme Court and the 2000 presidential election is that the Court wounded itself by participating in such a partisan dispute. By ‘wounded’ people mean that the institution lost some of its legitimacy. Evidence from our survey, conducted in early 2001, suggests little if any diminution of the Court’s legitimacy in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, even among African Americans. We observe a relationship between ev…
Why Do People Accept Public Policies They Oppose? Testing Legitimacy Theory with a Survey-Based Experiment
The orthodox answer to the question posed in the title of this article is that the legitimacy of institutions has something to do with acquiescence to unwelcome public policy decisions. We investigate that conventional wisdom using an experiment embedded within a representative national sample in the United States. We test hypotheses concerning not only the effect of institutional legitimacy on acquiescence, but also the influence of partisanship…
The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics
The neoliberal turn arguably has a powerful effect on black political ideas, black political practices, and black life in general; the nature of this effect has gone under-examined. In this work I seek to rectify this gap by examining neoliberal governmentality as it appears in black communities. The result should deepen our understanding of class politics within racially subjugated communities, and should push us to consider a much wider range o…
Context, Black Empowerment, and African American Political Participation
Activists and scholars argue that the election and presence of Black mayors increase Black political engagement; however, later research suggests that this diminishes over time. Furthermore, a body of research suggests that homogenous racial contexts and contextual poverty decrease political participation. In this article, we ask one question: How does demographic context and length of Black mayoral tenure influence Black political participation?…
Revisiting Black Incorporation and Local Political Participation
Testing the proposition that electing black mayors has a positive effect on black political participation, scholars found that black incorporation historically lead to increased black political engagement. However, the research that examines whether length of mayoral tenure influences black political participation is limited. We test this proposition using the 1993—1994 National Black Politics Study. Our findings suggest long-term political incor…
The Role of Theory in Experimental Design
Some who have written about the logic of experimentation argue that random assignment of subjects to treatment conditions is an essential attribute of an experiment. Others disagree. Rather than treating this as a matter of dueling definitions, we consider experiments without randomization from a theoretical perspective. Our central contention here is that, for some research questions, theory dictatessystematic(not random) assignment of responden…
Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule
Episodic Frames, HIV/Aids, and African American Public Opinion
How are African American political attitudes influenced by the mass media? Cathy Cohen’s theory of marginalization suggests that media narratives about African Americans influence their public opinion about HIV/AIDS, behaviors associated with it, and populations associated with it. However, this has gone untested. Using an innovative experimental design involving four hundred African American participants, I find that episodic framing of HIV/AIDS…
True to Our Native Land
There have been several recent attempts to operationalize and measure empirically attitudinal support for Black nationalism. However, scholars have not yet reached a consensus as to what precisely constitutes Black nationalism and its manifestations. Our work addresses three critical questions. First, is Black nationalism a uni-dimensional or a multi-dimensional construct? Second, is Black nationalism another form of xenophobia? Third, is support…
Remembering and reading the work of Richard Iton (1961–2013)
Race and Representation in Detroit’s Community Development Coalitions
This article examines how race affects conflict between advocates of community development and neighborhood revitalization and local government led by a black mayor. The article shows that partly due to issues of racial representation in community development leadership, some activists, even white activists and leaders supportive of social change, can be ensnarled in the fissures of racialized community development politics. The article analyzes …
Bitter Fruit as Boundary Pushing and Sustaining
Race, Racism, and the Crisis of Democracy in Political Science
Over the past decade, autocratization has increased worldwide, and the United States itself has seen its own democracy erode. While political scientists have begun to study both phenomena in earnest, with exceptions, they have been unable to fully wrestle with either. We suggest that this incomplete understanding is the result of the discipline's problematic racial history. At the time of its founding in the late nineteenth century, political sci…
The Black Fantastic in International Relations
In 2016, British investigative journalist Simon Rogers created a map/timeline of Twitter hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter. The map (which no longer exists) indirectly shows both the intensity of Black Lives Matter protests and their geographic scope. Within the United States, we see not only protest activity in metropolitan areas with large black population percentages, but also protest activity in metropolitan areas with few (if any) …
Heroism and the political scientist
Earlier this year, political scientists Hanes Walton, William “Nick” Nelson, and Richard Iton passed away. Their contributions to political science cannot be over-emphasized. In this essay I use literary critic Albert Murray (who also passed away this year) to argue their work can best be understood as heroic attempts to expand the contours of the discipline, attempts that attack “social science fiction” while simultaneously promoting a blues-inf…
The Role of Theory in Experimental Design
Some who have written about the logic of experimentation argue that random assignment of subjects to treatment conditions is an essential attribute of an experiment. Others disagree. Rather than treating this as a matter of dueling definitions, we consider experiments without randomization from a theoretical perspective. Our central contention here is that, for some research questions, theory dictatessystematic(not random) assignment of responden…
Measuring Attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court
It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measure…
The Supreme Court and the US Presidential Election of 2000
The conventional wisdom about the US Supreme Court and the 2000 presidential election is that the Court wounded itself by participating in such a partisan dispute. By ‘wounded’ people mean that the institution lost some of its legitimacy. Evidence from our survey, conducted in early 2001, suggests little if any diminution of the Court’s legitimacy in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, even among African Americans. We observe a relationship between ev…
Race and Representation in Detroit’s Community Development Coalitions
This article examines how race affects conflict between advocates of community development and neighborhood revitalization and local government led by a black mayor. The article shows that partly due to issues of racial representation in community development leadership, some activists, even white activists and leaders supportive of social change, can be ensnarled in the fissures of racialized community development politics. The article analyzes …
The Deaths Could Have Been Prevented
Why Do People Accept Public Policies They Oppose? Testing Legitimacy Theory with a Survey-Based Experiment
Why Do People Accept Public Policies They Oppose? Testing Legitimacy Theory with a Survey-Based Experiment
The orthodox answer to the question posed in the title of this article is that the legitimacy of institutions has something to do with acquiescence to unwelcome public policy decisions. We investigate that conventional wisdom using an experiment embedded within a representative national sample in the United States. We test hypotheses concerning not only the effect of institutional legitimacy on acquiescence, but also the influence of partisanship…
True to Our Native Land
There have been several recent attempts to operationalize and measure empirically attitudinal support for Black nationalism. However, scholars have not yet reached a consensus as to what precisely constitutes Black nationalism and its manifestations. Our work addresses three critical questions. First, is Black nationalism a uni-dimensional or a multi-dimensional construct? Second, is Black nationalism another form of xenophobia? Third, is support…
Revisiting Black Incorporation and Local Political Participation
Testing the proposition that electing black mayors has a positive effect on black political participation, scholars found that black incorporation historically lead to increased black political engagement. However, the research that examines whether length of mayoral tenure influences black political participation is limited. We test this proposition using the 1993—1994 National Black Politics Study. Our findings suggest long-term political incor…
Episodic Frames, HIV/Aids, and African American Public Opinion
How are African American political attitudes influenced by the mass media? Cathy Cohen’s theory of marginalization suggests that media narratives about African Americans influence their public opinion about HIV/AIDS, behaviors associated with it, and populations associated with it. However, this has gone untested. Using an innovative experimental design involving four hundred African American participants, I find that episodic framing of HIV/AIDS…
Context, Black Empowerment, and African American Political Participation
Activists and scholars argue that the election and presence of Black mayors increase Black political engagement; however, later research suggests that this diminishes over time. Furthermore, a body of research suggests that homogenous racial contexts and contextual poverty decrease political participation. In this article, we ask one question: How does demographic context and length of Black mayoral tenure influence Black political participation?…
The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics
The neoliberal turn arguably has a powerful effect on black political ideas, black political practices, and black life in general; the nature of this effect has gone under-examined. In this work I seek to rectify this gap by examining neoliberal governmentality as it appears in black communities. The result should deepen our understanding of class politics within racially subjugated communities, and should push us to consider a much wider range o…
Heroism and the political scientist
Earlier this year, political scientists Hanes Walton, William “Nick” Nelson, and Richard Iton passed away. Their contributions to political science cannot be over-emphasized. In this essay I use literary critic Albert Murray (who also passed away this year) to argue their work can best be understood as heroic attempts to expand the contours of the discipline, attempts that attack “social science fiction” while simultaneously promoting a blues-inf…
Guest Editors' Note
Remembering and reading the work of Richard Iton (1961–2013)
Knocking the Hustle
Over the past several years scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, suggesting that the divide can be traced to the neoliberal turn. â Iâ m not a business man; Iâ m a business, man.â Perhaps no better statement gets at the heart of this turn. Increasingly weâ re being forced to think of ourselves in entrepreneurial terms, forced to take more and more responsibility for dev…
Do the Right Thing in the post-post Civil Rights era
Spike Lee is one of the most important artists of his generation. He has been profoundly productive on his own – few directors have as large a body of work across films, commercials, and documentar
Live and Let Die
Thirty years ago black populations were disproportionately HIV + and far more likely to die of AIDS than other populations. Yet and still black elected officials, civil rights organizations, and black institutions ignored the problem. Now, at least in major metropolitan areas, circumstances appear to have changed—not only do civil rights organizations, black elected officials, and a range of black institutions take HIV and AIDS seriously, it is n…
Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule
The Black Fantastic in International Relations
In 2016, British investigative journalist Simon Rogers created a map/timeline of Twitter hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter. The map (which no longer exists) indirectly shows both the intensity of Black Lives Matter protests and their geographic scope. Within the United States, we see not only protest activity in metropolitan areas with large black population percentages, but also protest activity in metropolitan areas with few (if any) …
Bitter Fruit as Boundary Pushing and Sustaining
Race, Racism, and the Crisis of Democracy in Political Science
Over the past decade, autocratization has increased worldwide, and the United States itself has seen its own democracy erode. While political scientists have begun to study both phenomena in earnest, with exceptions, they have been unable to fully wrestle with either. We suggest that this incomplete understanding is the result of the discipline's problematic racial history. At the time of its founding in the late nineteenth century, political sci…
Political science (22 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Sociology (18 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Gender Studies (9 obras) · Gender Studies (6 obras) · History (6 obras) · Race, History, and American Society (6 obras) · Economics (5 obras)