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.

Published Works

Ahmed, A. T., Johnson, M., & Vásquez-Cortés, M. (2021). Slavery, Elections and Political Affiliations in Colombia. Journal of Historical Political Economy, Vol. 1, Issue. 3, p. 283. doi: 10.1561/115.00000011

Ahmed, A., Johnson, M., Vásquez-Cortés, M. (Accepted). Land Titling, Race, and Political Violence: Theory and Evidence from Colombia. World Politics.

Gelvez JD, Johnson M. (Forthcoming) Los nadies y las nadies: The Effect of Peacebuilding on Political Behavior in Colombia. Latin American Politics and Society. doi:10.1017/lap.2023.34

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.

Book Project

When and how does race matter in political behavior in Latin America? The predominant approach to the study of race and ethnic politics in political science argues that racial identities, like other identities and issues, influence political behavior when they are salient. In this view, race matters when it becomes a (sub)conscious motivation for the political attitudes and behaviors of voters and office-seekers. However, Racialized Democracy: The Electoral Politics of Race in Latin America challenges this focus on salience and identification, arguing that it presents an incomplete picture of the relationship between race and political behavior. Drawing on structural theories of race, my book contends that a society’s racial structure shapes political behavior, even when racial identities are not salient. This structural pathway to racialized political behavior operates through the mobilization of ostensibly non-racial factors (e.g., class, labor sector, geography, land tenure) that significantly overlap with racial boundaries.

Racialized Democracy addresses decades of research that have produced mixed conclusions about the salience of race to Black political behavior in Afro-Latin America. In this book, I set aside the question of Black identity salience to demonstrate that the class-based segmentation of electoral campaigns, combined with racial stereotypes, mobilizes Black voters in ways that differ systematically from mestizo and white voters. My book reveals that Black voters are disproportionately targeted for clientelism, based on assumptions about their material needs. Consequently, Black partisanship and political party membership are more strongly shaped by informal (and often inexpensive) clientelistic exchanges compared to those of mestizo and white voters.

The book employs cross-country survey analyses and an in-depth case study of the historical and contemporary salience of race in electoral politics in Panama to theorize the mechanisms through which political parties profit from Black votes without explicitly appealing to Black voters. Racialized Democracy also explores the implications of racially segmented campaigns for Black political representation.

Current Article-length Projects

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" (in draft)

Marcus Johnson. "Decolonizing the Politics of Development: The case for reparations in the Black Atlantic" (in draft)