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Many citizen decision-making bodies, from juries to boards, have the potential to represent racial minority views because they must deliberate and decide unanimously. However, little is known about the effects of racial diversity on group decisions. Existing studies use observational data, include too few people of color (POCs), or cannot disentangle race and preferences. We study one such body, the civil jury, which can check economic actors whose actions disproportionately affect minoritized populations. We analyze 2,694 citizens randomly assigned to 449 mock juries tasked with deciding punitive damages against corporations. The number of POCs on a jury affects private opinions, even accounting for other group and individual characteristics. However, group decisions are less affected, because POC dissenters carry less influence than White dissenters: POCs can change minds more easily than votes. Deliberation and veto power do not eliminate racial barriers to substantive representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reexamine the concept of individualism and its political implications. While both political scientists and social psychologists agree that individualism is a core value for many Americans, political science has primarily associated the concept with views about economic mobility. Building upon insights from political theory, we argue that a narrow focus on economics overlooks key elements of individualism and its relation to political life. With the help of five distinct datasets collected between 2018 and 2022 (combined N = 12,169), we develop a new index that emphasizes autonomy from authority, which we label moral individualism. We show how it and other dimensions of individualism explain interactions with the political world, including responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across multiple indicators, moral individualists were far less likely to engage in collective action or pursue other behaviors meant to assist the community. For example, even after controlling for the effects of ideology and partisanship, moral individualism reduced the probability of wearing a mask during the first year of the pandemic by approximately 30 percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]