Protests can engender significant institutional change. Can protests also continue to shape a nation's contemporary politics outside of more formalized channels? I argue that social movements can not only beget institutional change, but also long-run, attitudinal change. Using the case of the U.S. civil rights movement, I develop a theory in which protests can shift attitudes and these attitudes can persist. Data from over 150,000 survey respondents provide evidence consistent with the theory. Whites from counties that experienced historical civil rights protests are more likely to identify as Democrats and support affirmative action, and less likely to harbor racial resentment against blacks. These individual-level results are politically meaningful-counties that experienced civil rights protests are associated with greater Democratic Party vote shares even today. This study highlights how social movements can have persistent impacts on a nation's politics.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is one of the most prominent contemporary social movements in the United States. Whether the BLM movement has led to racial attitude liberalization remains an open question. I evaluate this question using data on over 140,000 survey respondents combined with locational data on BLM protests in 2014 following the police killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Results from a difference-in-differences identification strategy provide evidence indicating that the BLM movement was successful in reducing whites’ racial prejudice. I find that these effects follow an age gradient where young whites are liberalized by protests while older whites are not. Results from this study indicate that protests can be successful drivers of attitude change.

Did the expansion of compulsory education create a national identity? In this paper, I explore this question within the context of the United States during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1930). Using the expansion of compulsory schooling laws, I leverage both regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences identification strategies combined with individual-level data on the entire population of immigrants residing in the United States in 1930 to estimate the causal effect of mass education on assimilation. The results provide evidence of a precise null effect of education on national identity formation in the United States. Further tests provide evidence that the lack of this effect resulted from mass implementation failures. These results imply a limited scope for mass schooling to explain the assimilation of the United States's diverse population in addition to highlighting the importance of understanding why states fail to build national identity.

How does the appearance of a new immigrant group affect the integration of earlier generations of migrants? We study this question in the context of the first Great Migration (1915-1930), when 1.5 million African Americans moved from the US South to northern urban centers, where 30 million Europeans had arrived since 1850. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation induced by the interaction between 1900 settlements of southern-born blacks in northern cities and state-level outmigration from the US South after 1910. Black arrivals increased both the effort exerted by immigrants to assimilate and their eventual Americanization. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity: while initially less integrated groups (i.e. Southern and Eastern Europeans) exerted more assimilation effort, assimilation success was larger for those culturally closer to native whites (i.e. Western and Northern Europeans). Labor market outcomes do not display similar heterogeneity, suggesting that these patterns cannot be entirely explained by economic forces. Our findings are instead more consistent with a framework in which changing perceptions of outgroup distance among native whites lowered the barriers to the assimilation of white immigrants.