Essays in political science, psychology, and law

The essay "Intersectionality in the Statehouse: Race, gender, and rape law reform" employs an intersectionality approach to study the interplay of race and gender in contemporary statehouse efforts to improve the laws governing rape and sexual assault. Drawing on a newly created database of all state legislators and all rape and sexual assault bills proposed in 2007, the paper offers empirical support for the claim that gender alone cannot explain the politics of rape law reform. Race must also be accounted for. Employing logit and binomial count models, the paper finds that while female state legislators are much more likely than men to propose rape law reform bills, African-American female legislators diverge from this gender pattern. This is the result, I argue, of legislators' awareness of historical and contemporary racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Latina legislators do not exhibit similar patterns, and in fact are more supportive of some types of sex crime bills. The results of the study contribute to our understanding of intersectionality in American state politics, as well as to rape law scholarship that has too often overlooked race in its gender-based analyses of rape law reform. The essay "Racialized Retrenchment: The Politics of Crime Victim Compensation Programs in the United States" explores the politics of crime victim compensation programs. Since Pierson (1994) introduced the concept, the politics of retrenchment has been central to evaluations of the American welfare state. Crime victim compensation, since its inception in California in 1965 and through its subsequent expansion to all fifty states, has undergone unique retrenchment. While the programs were initially funded by iii general taxpayer revenues, the Reagan revolution introduced a new paradigm: maintain benefit levels to victims, but shift funding responsibility from taxpayers to convicted criminals. Because offenders are disproportionately black, I argue in this paper that victim compensation underwent "racialized retrenchment." As a result, the new politics of victim compensation presents legislators, especially minority legislators, with a tension: crime victims are disproportionately minority, and would therefore benefit from expanded victim compensation programs, but to increase program benefits requires placing additional punishments on offenders, also disproportionately minority. The paper explores this tension through an historical and contemporary empirical analysis. Using Event History Analysis and Bayesian Model Averaging approaches, I find that diffusion of compensation programs was guided by state fiscal capacity and the percentage of black residents in the state. Turning to the 2007 legislative session, I examine all compensation fund bills proposed and find that minority legislators are less likely to be sponsors. Based on these results, I suggest that the future of victim compensation, and perhaps other similar welfare policies, can best be understood through a racialized retrenchment lens.