My current work engages a range of qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how the systemic marginalization of Black people in Latin America affects their political behavior, both through group-conscious political participation and through structural differences in how Black political subjects are treated.

Ahmed, Ali T., Marcus Johnson & Mateo Vásquez-Cortés. (Forthcoming). Slavery, Elections and Political Affiliations in Colombia. Journal of Historical Political Economy.

Johnson, Marcus. (2020). Electoral Discrimination: The Relationship between Skin Color and Vote Buying in Latin America. World Politics, Vol. 72, Issue. 1, p. 80. doi:10.1017/S0043887119000145

Johnson, Marcus. (2020). Fluidity, Phenotype and Afro-Latin Group Consciousness. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Vol. 5, Issue. 2, p. 356. doi:10.1017/rep.2019.49

Johnson, Marcus. (2017). From Racial Democracy to Racial-ized Democracy in Latin America. The Organized Section in Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association, Vol. 27, Issue. 2, p. 37.

Under what conditions is race salient to political behavior in Latin America? What unifies the study of identity salience is the general claim that identity is a motivation for group-based political behavior. I refer to this framework for identity politics as discursive salience. Race and ethnicity are discursively salient when elite and/or mass political behavior is explicitly motivated by or framed through the lens of ethnic or racial identity. We can juxtapose discursive salience to structural salience. Race and ethnicity are structurally salient when elite and/or mass political behavior is explicitly motivated by ostensibly non-racial dimensions of a social or political system that are encoded within a society’s racial structure. This pathway to identity salience requires the activation or mobilization of non-racial factors that substantially overlap with racial boundaries (e.g. class, occupation, geography, land tenure, etc.). When race is structurally salient to political behavior it may bypass the activation of identification and consciousness altogether.

Racialized Democracy: the electoral politics of race in Latin America examines the discursive and structural salience of race to political behavior in Afro-Latin America. The book begins with a regional comparison of discursive salience through an examination of racial patterns in partisanship, ideology and the degree to which political parties explicitly mobilize voters by race and ethnicity. Following this analysis, the book turns to an examination of structural salience and uncovers disproportionate patterns of political participation and clientelism by race and skin color. Despite, little evidence of the discursive salience of Black identity in Latin America, racial structure (through class and skin color) predicts substantive differences in how Black voters are politically mobilized. The book leverages an in-depth case study of the historical and contemporary salience of race to electoral politics in Panamá to theorize the conditions for concordance and discordance between the structural and discursive salience of race to electoral politics in the region.

Ahmed, Ali T., Marcus Johnson & Mateo Vásquez-Cortés. "Social Stratification, Targeted Reform, and Political Violence: Theory and Evidence from Colombia" (under review)

Gómez-Vidal, Analía and Marcus Johnson. "Intersectional Perspectives of Racism and Discrimination: A vignette experiment" (in draft)

Alvarado de León, Juan Diego and Marcus Johnson. "The Social Roots of Political Party Membership in Panamá" (research in progress)