Publications

Posey, Patricia. 2023. “Information Inequality: How Race and Financial Access Reflect the Information Needs of Lower-Income Individuals.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 707(1), 125-141.

The media landscape is more expansive than ever and offers increasingly fast and cheap ways to consume information. However, many racially and economically marginalized communities live in information environments that fail to provide in-depth coverage of critical topics, such as day-to-day finance. I offer an overview of financial access and news deficits to argue that financial institutions and news providers have historically underserved racially and economically marginalized communities, contributing to information gaps in financial news and the need for alternate sources of information. I investigate how the placement of brick-and-mortar fringe economy financial providers, such as payday lenders, affects how people learn about and make sense of their financial options. I show that these sorts of concrete neighborhood characteristics influence how people participate in today’s economy and share information. Because economic participation is an essential element of citizenship, I propose that these kinds of disparities in neighborhood characteristics and financial access should influence the ways in which we conceive of and deliver information to marginalized groups.

Bounds, Dawn and Posey, Patricia. 2022. “A Resistance Framework for Racially Minoritized Youth Behaviors During the Transition to Adulthood.” J Res Adolesc, 32: 959-980.

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a challenging time marked by rapid changes in relational connections, housing status, and academic or work trajectories. We emphasize how structural inequality shapes racially minoritized youth behaviors and center the potential for resistance, arguing that a resistance lens allows us to deepen our understanding of the transition to adulthood for racially minoritized youth. Throughout the paper, we include research on how racially minoritized youth experience marginalizing institutional structures concurrently across multiple systems and their resulting behaviors. We end with the clinical and research implications of a resistance framework to illuminate resistance-informed responses such as rethinking risk and creating spaces for youth-led self-making, youth–adult partnerships to scaffold transitions, and cultivating youth activism.

Gillion, Daniel and Posey, Patricia. 2019. “Minority Protest and the Early Stages of Governmental Responsiveness in the Electoral Process” in Can America Govern Itself? ed. Nolan McCarty and Frances Lee. Cambridge University Press. 144-161

Does minority political protest lead to governmental responsiveness? Although minority protest has played a large role in conveying minority grievances to government since the civil rights era, little is known of how marginalized voices navigate a majoritarian political system to influence the behavior of political officials. Using protest data that spans across several decades into a post-civil rights era, we show that minority protests have a large effect on the early stages of governmental responsiveness, but the influence of minority protest actions are heavily linked to the party system. Placing protests on an ideological scale, we find that protests that express liberal issues increases vote share for Democratic candidates, while protests that espouse conservative issues offer Republican candidates a greater share of the two-party vote. However, minority protests, which often express liberal concerns, uniquely lead to a greater percentage of the two-party vote share for Democratic candidates. In addition, this study shows that minority protest produces a “vulnerability effect,” in that it underscores an incumbent politician’s failure to address constituent concerns, which leads quality candidates to enter subsequent races to challenge incumbents. 

Public Engagement

Patricia Posey. “Revisiting the Information Needs of Communities for Democracy in Crisis.” Social Science Research Council Webinar. April 2024.

Patricia Posey. “Political Consequences of Racialized Resource Distribution.” Future of Finance Contesting Debt and Reimaging Finance. April 2022.

Posey, Patricia and Carrillo, Raul. Interviewed by Hannah Appeal (UCLA). “Crypto, Payday Lending, and Finance for the Poor” Future of Finance Podcast – UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and the Race & Capitalism project at the University of Chicago. In Production.

Posey, Patricia. Interviewed by Elizabeth Kiefer. “We Asked. You Exploded. Inside Cosmo‘s First-Ever Survey of Financial Fury” Cosmopolitan. February 2023.

Posey, Patricia. Interviewed by Michael Dawson (University of Chicago). “The Poor Pay More” The New Dawn Podcast. November 2019.

Alvarez, Linda, Posey, Patricia, & Silva, Andrea et al. “The One They've Been Waiting for: White Fear and the Rise of Donald Trump” The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics -- Politics of Color. November 27, 2016. 

Liu, Sara, Posey, Patricia, & Reuning, Kevin. “Who were the protesters at the Democratic National Convention this week?” The Washington Post -- Monkey Cage. July 29, 2016. 

Liu, Sara, Posey, Patricia, & Reuning, Kevin. “Three surprising facts about the protesters at the Republican National Convention” The Washington Post -- Monkey Cage. July 24, 2016.                                                                                                                                                      Project covered in The Chronicle of Higher Education and USA Today