Racial Policy Attitudes Research Articles

Group Positions Beyond the Binary: The Determinants of Immigration Attitudes Among Black, Hispanic, and White Americans

ABSTRACT Research on racial policy attitudes has primarily focused on the attitudes of black and white Americans. However, given the shifting racial landscape in the United States, it is important to understand how other racial groups view important social issues. Using Blumer’s group positions model, this research seeks to determine the predictors of five immigration attitudes among white, black, and both U.S. and foreign-born Hispanic Americans. Results using data from the 2004 and 2008 National Politics Study show that black, white, and U.S.-born Hispanic Americans display more anti-immigration attitudes than foreign-born Hispanics, with Black and White Americans showing the most anti-immigrant attitudes. Further, results show that whereas individual economic threat has a similar effect on immigration attitudes for Americans of all racial backgrounds, whites’ attitudes are also shaped by group-based economic and political threat and racial affect. These findings indicate that whites’ unique position as the dominant economic and political group in the United States makes their immigration attitudes uniquely sensitive to group-based threats to their dominant position.

Partisan Learning or Racial Learning: Opinion Change on Sanctuary City Policy Preferences in CA and TX

AbstractSignificant research indicates that attitude change is often a product of partisan learning. However, as the party system continues to rearrange around issues of race and immigration, and as new racial policy issues thrust onto the agenda, it is unclear whether voters learn to adopt racial policy attitudes more based on race/ethnicity or on party identification. We evaluate the partisan-learning model versus a racial-learning model with regards to public opinion on sanctuary cities/policies among survey respondents in CA and TX. Given President Trump's public antipathy toward sanctuary cities, we argue and show that negative partisanship is the most plausible vehicle for sanctuary city attitude change between 2015 and 2017. In this particular case, we find no support for a racial/ethnic-learning model.

A Puzzle of Racial Attitudes: A Measurement Analysis of Racial Attitudes and Policy Indicators

In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers argued that a new dimension of racial prejudice, termed “symbolic racism” and later “racial resentment,” emerged among white Americans as their endorsement of traditional prejudice declined. Recently, Carmines, Sniderman, and Easter have challenged this conceptualization. Relying on American National Election Surveys data, they argue that racial resentment and the attitudes about racial policy that it presumably explains are part of the same latent construct (labeled racial policy attitudes). This conclusion undermines theories that racial prejudice among white Americans is a primary determinant of their continued opposition to racial policies. We replicate their analyses and test an alternative model using five additional samples. We find that an alternative model that specifies racial resentment as distinct from racial policy attitudes was a better fit to the data, and additionally, we find preliminary evidence that it is inappropriate to consider racial policy attitudes as a single dimension using traditional indicators.

Different shades of racial colorblindness: The role of prejudice

Supporters of racial colorblindness are united by their opposition to racial categorization. However, we suggest that the nature of the relationship between racial colorblindness and racial policy attitudes among Whites varies based on individual differences in racial prejudice. Across two independent samples (Studies 1a and 1b), we demonstrated that colorblindness predicts opposition to affirmative action for low prejudice Whites. For high prejudice Whites, who presumably oppose affirmative action regardless of colorblind concerns, no significant relationship between colorblindness and affirmative action support was found. In Study 2, we examined the relationship between various rationales for supporting colorblindness and affirmative action attitudes, and again detected moderation by prejudice. Low prejudice Whites’ evaluations of affirmative action appeared to be based upon perceptions of declining discrimination as well as a concern for balancing the interests of both Whites and minorities. The affirmative action attitudes of high prejudice Whites, in contrast, appeared to be based primarily upon defending the interests of their racial ingroup. The implications of these findings for theoreticians and social justice advocates are discussed.

Whites’ Racial Policy Attitudes in the Twenty-First Century: The Continuing Significance of Racial Resentment

A topic of long-standing interest in racial attitudes research is whites’ support for principles of racial equality on one hand coupled with their intransigence on policies designed to redress that inequality on the other. Much has been written on possible explanations of this “principle-policy gap” and what the gap reveals about the state of contemporary American race relations. In this article, the authors provide an update and partial replication of their 1996 study of whites’ views of racial policies in what has been referred to as our post-racial society. Using both General Social Survey and American National Election Survey data, the authors assess the current state of whites’ racial policy attitudes and the factors that shape those attitudes and consider whether any meaningful change has occurred in recent decades. Among the explanations of the principle-policy gap that the authors examine, one stands out as especially powerful: racial resentment, a variant of stratification ideology that focuses on the role of racial individualism in shaping white resistance to meaningful policy change. Moreover, the authors find no evidence that whites’ racial policy views have changed since the 1980s.

Racial Contact and Change in South Africa

We investigate the effects of sociopolitical change on intergroup contact and social distance attitudes in South Africa, and the effect of these variables on intergroup attitudes and racial policy attitudes. The data come from secondary analysis of surveys conducted between 1991 and 2005, as well as a dedicated survey conducted in 2006. The results reveal widespread racial isolation among Black people; ambivalent attitudes to racial integration among Whites, who support integration in principle but are opposed to it personally; and contrasting outcomes of contact for Blacks and Whites. Increased intergroup contact was associated with reduced stereotyping and increased support for transformation policies among Whites but was associated with increased opposition to transformation policies among Blacks. Contrary to the predictions of contact theory, attitudes of Blacks and Whites toward Coloured and Indian compatriots were generally more negative in provinces with high levels of intergroup contact between these groups.

Taking Threat Seriously: Prejudice, Principle, and Attitudes Toward Racial Policies

Drawing from group theories of race-related attitudes and electoral politics, we develop and test how anxiety influences the relative weight of prejudice as a determinant of individuals’ support for racial policies. We hypothesize that prejudice will more strongly influence the racial policy preferences of people who are feeling anxious than it will for people who are not. Using an experimental design we manipulate subjects’ levels of threat and find significant treatment effects, as hypothesized. We find that individuals’ racial policy attitudes are partially conditional on their affective states: individuals who feel anxious report less support for racial policies than those individuals who do not feel anxious, even when this threat is stimulated by non-racial content. More broadly, we conclude that affect is central to a better understanding of individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors.

Identity Salience, Identity Acceptance, and Racial Policy Attitudes: American National Identity as a Uniting Force

Political science has paid a great deal of attention to sources of intergroup conflict, but the discipline has focused less on forces that bring people together and lead them to transcend group boundaries. This study presents evidence that attachment to a shared superordinate identity can improve intergroup relations by reducing the social distance between people of different racial groups. Using a survey experiment, this research shows that making a superordinate identity salient increased support for a tax increase. The effects of the identity salience treatment are compared to a policy particularism treatment in terms of effect size and their interaction with each other. The size and direction of the identity salience effect is affected by the degree of respondents' acceptance of the proffered identity. Implications for social identity theory, racial policy attitudes, and American national identity are discussed.

Rethinking Symbolic Racism: Evidence of Attribution Bias

This paper demonstrates that cognitive tendencies related to political sophistication produce an attribution bias in the widely accepted symbolic racism scale. When this bias is controlled statistically, the effect of symbolic racism on racial policy attitudes is greatly diminished. Our theory posits that high sophisticates tend to make global/distal attributions, allowing them to associate racial inequality with broader sociopolitical causes. Less sophisticated individuals, conversely, tend to make local/proximal attributions, thus biasing them against ascribing responsibility systemically. Consequently, less sophisticated individuals tend to be classified as intolerant by the symbolic racism scale, even when controlling for factors such as ideology and anti-black affect.

Sophistication and the Antecedents of Whites’ Racial Policy Attitudes

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.

Prejudice, Politics, and Public Opinion: Understanding the Sources of Racial Policy Attitudes

This review examines the intersection of prejudice, politics, and public opinion. It focuses specifically on research that seeks to understand the sources of attitudes toward policies intended to benefit African Americans and other racial/ethnic minorities by ensuring equal treatment, providing opportunity enhancement, or striving for equal outcomes. After a review of the main patterns of white and African-American public opinion on this topic, three central theoretical interpretations of racial policy attitudes—new racism, politics and nonracial principles and values, and group conflict theories—are described and compared. The empirical evidence for each approach is assessed. Finally, directions of research that pursue a more complex view of racial policy attitudes are introduced. These include efforts to incorporate insights across theoretical domains as well as correcting an overemphasis on cognitive issues to the exclusion of affect. In addition, gaps in our understanding of “non-white” attitudes, nonprejudiced respondents, nonracial policies, and non-Americans are identified as potentially fertile ground for future research aimed at understanding the complexity of racial policy attitudes and what these can reveal about contemporary US race relations.

Traditional versus social values as antecedents of racial stereotyping and policy conservatism

Recent studies of racial attitudes have focused on traditional values, such as individualism, as important antecedents of Americans' opinions on racial issues, with mixed results. We focus on another set of values that has its roots in an older research tradition examining the psychological sources of racial prejudice, which suggests that prejudice against blacks is part of a more encompassing set of values regarding one's acceptance of social diversity. We find that these social values—conformity and social intolerance—are much stronger predictors of racial stereotypes and racial policy attitudes than traditional values of individualism and equalitarianism. We also find these social values to condition an ethnocentric response toward international outgroups in a domain as diverse as foreign affairs, thus providing additional evidence of the pervasive and general nature of values related to a rejection of diversity. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future research.

A Comparison of Symbolic Racism Theory and Social Dominance Theory as Explanations for Racial Policy Attitudes

Abstract Symbolic racism and social dominance theories were compared by reanalysis of data from a national probability sample of 234 White Americans and by using observed-variables, structural equation models. Contrary to the conclusions reached by Jessor (1989), the results did not support the major contentions of symbolic racism theory; rather, they seemed more consistent with the assumptions of social dominance theory. The possibility that symbolic racism serves as an important legitimizing myth in American society is discussed.

Racial Issues and The Structure of Mass Belief Systems

C ONVERSE'S MASTERLY STUDY of political belief systems in mass publics generated a controversy that, if anything, has grown more intense during the last few years.' Examining a large collection of diverse data pertaining to mass political attitudes and issue preferences, Converse drew a most unflattering portrait of the American electorate. According to his analysis most voters did not use ideological terms to evaluate political parties and candidates, and did not even recognize the terms when asked about them; their