Scholarship concerning American government visibility has focused on the state’s growing submergence, yet these accounts contrast with racial and ethnic politics research focusing on the American state’s conspicuousness in the lives of people of color. Attending to this disconnect, I ask how government visibility varies across racial groups. Combining interviews and quantitative analysis within a policy feedback framework, I argue that five public policy trends have created a racial split in the American state’s visibility. For whites, submerged state policies have grown alongside the rising visibility of racialized poverty policies and taxation. As a result, whites are less aware of how government benefits them and more aware of how government uses tax dollars to fund programs perceived as solely benefitting racial others. For people of color, the decline of civil rights legislation has contrasted with criminal legal policies that have made the criminal legal system a uniquely visible manifestation of government in their lives. To demonstrate the political importance of this racial divide, I uncover a racial heterogeneity in people’s political trust attachments, wherein white trust is connected to welfare attitudes, while trust among people of color is associated with feelings about the police.

Since the late 1990s, Congress and the states have debated how to treat electronic commerce for purposes of sales taxation. Frustrated by their limited progress at the national level, advocates of policy change attempted to generate vertical diffusion by using increasingly aggressive state-level actions to press Congress to act. The state initiatives provided national legislators with an "opportunity to learn," and a systematic analysis of congressional policymaking suggests that vertical diffusion affected the early stages of the legislative process. State policies influenced the specific options that national officials considered, the rhetoric they employed, and, less consistently, bill cosponsorship patterns. The impact of vertical diffusion receded, however, as the congressional debate continued. Its muted effect during the later stages of the legislative process implies that national officials do not necessarily learn from what occurs in the "laboratories of democracy." In addition to shedding light on the shifting politics of electronic commerce, this study illustrates the benefits both of studying the impact of vertical diffusion on individual decision-making and of conceptualizing vertical diffusion as a process rather than as an outcome to be explained.

Most Americans benefit from several policies, yet studies connecting policy receipt to political participation generally treat these interactions as isolated from each other. This article grounds itself in this reality by examining how multiple policy experiences interact to alter political participation. Focusing on policies that send conflicting messages to beneficiaries, I provide a political learning framework and set of quantitative findings that nuance conventional understandings of the relationship between the American welfare state and turnout behavior. The results demonstrate that politically mobilizing universal policies and demobilizing means‐tested policies can cancel each other out, such that individuals benefitting from both exhibit no change in their participatory behavior. Thus, the political impact of policies within each tier are shown to be contingent on one's involvement in the other tier. In a counterintuitive finding, this analysis further shows that multiple policy experiences within the means‐tested tier can combine to increase turnout rates due to the political lessons imparted by Head Start's uniquely democratic design. In advancing our understanding of the role public policies play in shaping American democracy, these findings demonstrate the importance of considering how policy feedback effects impact each other.

Racial inequality remains a painful and central feature of daily life in the United States. Yet few would deny that decades of political struggle have transformed the nation’s racial landscape. In this article, we seek to advance long-standing sociological efforts to disentangle this braiding of persistence and change. Specifically, we intervene in two ways designed to build on national studies of inequality trends for black and white Americans. First, by shifting measurement to the state level, we reveal distinctive subnational trajectories and dynamics of convergence that have been obscured by the field’s emphasis on aggregate national trends. Second, by drawing on relational theories of boundaries and positions, we develop a new empirical strategy for measuring racial inequalities over time. Identifying two key analytic dimensions (exclusion and subordination), we analyze the relative positions of whites and blacks in two domains (work and housing) across the decades from 1940 to 2010. Our results suggest that racial inequalities rooted in boundary-based dynamics of social closure (exclusion) proved far more durable than inequalities tied to inferior positions alone (subordination). Moreover, we find evidence of a significant nationalization of racial relations, with subnational units converging on a more uniform structure of racialized relations over time. We conclude that the period from 1940 to 2010 was marked by a “consolidation” of racial exclusion (i.e., convergence around relatively stable levels of inequality) paired with the comparatively greater “equalization” of racial subordination (i.e., stronger convergence around more substantial declines).