Sophistication and the Antecedents of Whites’ Racial Policy Attitudes

Christopher M Federico,Jim Sidanius

doi:10.1086/339848

Abstract

A number of researchers have argued that the effects of prejudice on the racial policy attitudes and general political beliefs of white Americans may be restricted to the poorly educated and politically unsophisticated. In contrast, rather than being motivated by prejudice, the racial policy attitudes and ideological values of the politically so- phisticated white Americans should be more firmly informed and mo- tivated by the tolerant values at the heart of American political culture. These values include such things as individualism, notions of fair play, and devotion to the principle of equality of opportunity. We tested this hypothesis using white respondents from the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies. Our evidence generally indicated that racial policy attitudes and political ideology were more powerfully associated with ideologies of racial dominance and superiority among politically so- phisticated white Americans than among political unsophisticated white Americans. Moreover, even among the sophisticated, we found that various forms of egalitarianism predicted support for-rather than op- position to-affirmative action and that support for equal opportunity is not uniformly distributed across the political spectrum.

Highlights

A number of researchers have argued that the effects of prejudice on the racial policy attitudes and general political beliefs of white Americans may be restricted to the poorly educated and politically unsophisticated
It suggests that whites reject affirmative action for many of the same reasons they oppose the sort of institutionalized discrimination dismantled by the civil rights movement: namely, because it violates key elements of what Gunnar Myrdal (1944) famously referred to as the “American Creed,” such as equality before the law and equality of opportunity, principles thought to be consensually accepted throughout the mainstream political spectrum (Sniderman and Piazza 1993)
Consistent with the argument that most Americans have internalized the message of the civil rights movement and accepted racial equality as one of the assumptions of the American Creed, research suggesting that education and political sophistication may weaken the effects of prejudice implies that political conservatism and prejudice will be linked only among whites who do not truly understand the color-blind nature of conservative values, that is, political novices

Summary

Introduction

A number of researchers have argued that the effects of prejudice on the racial policy attitudes and general political beliefs of white Americans may be restricted to the poorly educated and politically unsophisticated. In order to gauge the effects of respondents’ basic racial attitudes on opposition to affirmative action, we measured prejudice as a sense of white in-group superiority in both data sets.3 In the 1986 NES, prejudice was measured in

Results

Conclusion