About

Ashley Jardina’s research focuses on racial attitudes, racial conflict, and the way in which group identities influence political preferences in the United States. Her research and commentary has been widely featured in outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Vox, 538, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and more.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Law
• Social psychology
• Political economy
• Philosophy
• Religious studies

Selected publications

• What's Happened to the Gender Gap in Political Activity?

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-03-13 · 8 citations

  bookOpen access

  This Element considers recent changes to the long-standing pattern in US politics that women are less politically active than men. The authors find the explanation of these trends to be rooted not in politics but in social structure. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• White Racial Polarization Before and After the Election of Donald Trump

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Trickle-down racism: Trump's effect on whites’ racist dehumanizing attitudes

  Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology · 2023-01-01 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Reported hate crimes against Black people surged following Trump's election. While only a relatively small fraction of Americans committed these abhorrent actions, we show that Trump's victory had broader effects on the attitudes of the larger white public. Specifically, Trump altered the extent to which white survey respondents describe Black people in dehumanizing ways. We report findings from a two-wave national survey in which white respondents rated Black people on a dehumanizing attitudes scale on two separate occasions: before and after the 2016 presidential election. Trump supporters rated Black people as “less evolved” in the post-election wave than they had rated Black people in the pre-election wave, while Trump opponents did the reverse. These findings suggest Trump's victory had a polarizing effect on whites' expression of dehumanizing views of Black people, with important implications for scholars' understanding of the sociopolitical factors that can affect dehumanizing attitudes and the normalization of racism in the U.S. today.

  PublisherDOI

• The Limits of Educational Attainment in Mitigating Occupational Segregation between Black and White Workers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Limits of Educational Attainment in Mitigating Occupational Segregation Between Black and White Workers

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-08-01 · 6 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Past work has documented significant occupational segregation between Black and white workers in the U.S. labor force. Little work, however, has examined racial occupational segregation in recent years or by levels of education and then at the intersection of education and race. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by calculating a dissimilarity index to examine racial occupational segregation between 1980 and 2019, comparing Black and white workers with and without bachelor’s degrees and by developing a Monte Carlo simulation, where we compare the observed levels of segregation to predicted levels of racial occupational segregation by education under race-neutral conditions. First, we find that considerable racial occupation segregation in the labor market persists today regardless of educational attainment and that observed segregation is substantially higher than would be expected at random, conditional on educational attainment, gender, and geography. We compare the types of occupations in which Black and white workers are disproportionately situated, and we show that this segregation has significant consequences for wage inequality between Black and white workers with and without four-year degrees. Overall, our results show that racial occupational desegregation has stalled in the past two decades despite rising educational attainment amongst Black workers.

  PublisherDOI

• The Asymmetric Polarization of Immigration Opinion in the United States

  Public Opinion Quarterly · 2023-12-01 · 17 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract In this paper, we analyze trends in Americans’ immigration attitudes and policy preferences nationally and across partisan and racial/ethnic groups. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans shared similarly negative attitudes toward immigrants and high levels of support for restrictionist immigration policies. Beginning in the 2010s and continuing through the early 2020s, however, Democrats’ aggregate immigration opinions liberalized considerably. We observed increasingly liberal immigration preferences among Democrats of all racial and ethnic backgrounds after 2016, but this trend was especially pronounced among white Democrats. Among Republicans, opinion on immigration remained mostly stable over this period, although in some cases it became more conservative (e.g., border security) and more liberal on others (e.g., amnesty). The marked liberalization in immigration opinion among Democrats has left partisans more divided on immigration than at any point since national surveys began consistently measuring immigration opinion in the late twentieth century.

  PublisherDOI

• The Politics of Racist Dehumanization in the United States

  Annual Review of Political Science · 2023-06-15 · 33 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The concept of racist dehumanization is essential for political scientists who seek to understand the nature, scope, and consequences of white racial prejudice in the United States today. Racist dehumanization consists of a variety of processes that construct, refashion, and maintain race by coding some people as white and therefore fully human and others as other than white and therefore less than fully human. In this review, we focus on the racist dehumanization of Indigenous people and Black people, arguing that processes of dehumanization have long been implicated in both the practice of race-making and concurrent efforts to exploit and dominate racialized groups. We posit that contemporary white racial prejudice can be understood, in part, as the residue of these processes, and we conclude by describing how accounting for racist dehumanization can transform the study of white racial prejudice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• White Racial Solidarity and Opposition to American Democracy

  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · 2022 · 63 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Political observers have expressed concern about the failure of some Americans to uphold democratic principles. We argue that support for antidemocratic authoritarian governance is associated with some whites’ psychological attachment to their racial group and a desire to maintain their group’s power and status in the face of multiracial democracy. Drawing on historical work, we posit that whites’ efforts to restrict democracy are deeply rooted in America’s past; and we present empirical analysis demonstrating that today, whites with higher levels of racial solidarity are notably more supportive of authoritarian leadership than whites who do not possess a racial group consciousness.

  PublisherDOI

• Inequality and Misperceptions of Group Concerns Threaten the Integrity and Societal Impact of Science

  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · 2022-03-01 · 8 citations

  article

  Racial and ethnic minority and lower-income groups are disproportionately affected by environmental hazards and suffer worse health outcomes than other groups in the United States. Relative to whites and higher-income groups, racial-ethnic minority and lower-income Americans also frequently express greater concern about high-profile global environmental threats like climate change, but they are widely misperceived as being less concerned about these issues than white and higher-income Americans. We use new survey research to explore public perceptions of COVID-19—another global threat marked by substantial racial, ethnic, and class disparities—finding a distinct pattern of misperceptions regarding groups’ concerns. We then discuss how these misperceptions represent a unique form of social misinformation that may pose a threat to science and undermine the cooperation and trust needed to address collective problems.

  PublisherDOI

• When Rising Tides Don’t Lift All Boats Equally: Racial Inequality in Health Insurance after the Affordable Care Act

  Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy · 2022-02-10 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In the United States, decentralization of policy implementation is often touted as a benefit of federalism. But in this study, we argue that granting states leeway when it comes to policy implementation can result in systematic and marked inequalities across different populations. We use health care policy implementation as a case study of how state discretion can lead to persistent racial inequalities in insurance coverage. Using a triple difference approach, we examine the effects of different state choices in implementation of the Affordable Care Act on subsequent insurance rates for White, Black, and Latinx people. States were given a menu of implementation choices under the ACA, and we found that regardless of their decisions, the passage of the ACA did indeed improve insurance rates for working age adults in each of the three groups. Different implementation strategies, however, had notably different effects on rates across the three groups. Whites generally disproportionately benefitted from each decision relative to Blacks and Latinx individuals, and the biggest gains for all groups were in states that adopted early policy innovations or chose a state-run health exchange coupled with a Medicaid expansion.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Spencer Piston

  Boston University

  5 shared

• Nancy Burns

  Carnegie Corporation of New York

  5 shared

• Ted Brader

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• Nicholas A. Valentino

  4 shared

• Peter K. Enns

  3 shared

• Robert Mickey

  2 shared

• Pamela J. Clouser McCann

  University of Southern California

  2 shared

• Michael W. Traugott

  State Street (United States)

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• 2020 winner of the American Political Science Association’s…
• 2021, received the American Political Science Association El…