Contemporary Studies of Race & Ethnicity Workshop presentation by Michael Rodriguez-Muñiz, Assistant Pofessor of Sociology and Latina/Latino Studies, Northwestern University.

Register for the virtual sessions

Research on political trust has uncovered a “trust gap” among ethnoracial populations, with some populations having stronger levels of trust in government and other populations having stronger levels of political distrust. Yet, to date, scholars have been hard-pressed to explain the role of race and racialization. On the one hand, leading political theories tend to overlook or minimize these issues. On the other hand, empirical research has largely assumed a direct relationship between racialization and political trust. Drawing on a dataset of 71 interviews with Latino/a/x residents in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area collected during 2019-2020, this talk will present an alternative and more sociologically grounded account. We argue that understanding and explaining the sources and scopes of political (dis)trust demands an account of the interpretive frameworks—or racial state frames—through which social actors variously interpret and ascribe racialized meaning to government officials and state bureaucracies. As part of a broader theoretical model, this concept can help scholars begin to better address within and across population variation in political trust.