Racial attitudes influence white Americans’ policy and candidate preferences beyond ideology

Evidence

Our first empirical goal is to provide some systematic data on how strong a role racism does play in white Americans’ contemporary racial policy and candidate preferences. We attack this in four ways. Our primary analytic strategy is straightforward and reasonably standard: regressing policy attitudes on indicators of racism, imposing controls on the other plausible causal factors, especially ostensibly nonracial attitudes (such as party identification, ideology, social welfare attitudes, and traditional social values) and demographic variables. We proceed from that point with three further strategies. First, we test the contention (Sniderman & Piazza, 1993) that each racial policy issue elicits a different set of underlying attitudes and values appropriate to its unique content, rather than all tapping into a common substrate of racism. Second, we go beyond policy issues to test the effects of racial attitudes on whites’ evaluations of black candidates and of fringe white candidates with a reputation for ethnocentrism. Third, we test whether or not higher education blocks the impact of racism. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3600

Categorization

• XREF: This recaps the methodological structure of the classic ‘Racism in America’ debate between Sears’s symbolic racism and Sniderman/Piazza’s principled conservatism — connects to the ideological asymmetry literature in political psychology. — connects to: Race and segregation preoccupied American audiences even in economic policy contexts — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 550; Whether racism or conservatism drives white policy opposition determines who must change — Christopher Tarman and David O. Sears, The Conceptualization and Measurement…, 34; Racial appeals do not generally amplify the effect of racial attitudes on welfare support — Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer, Who Is Called by the Dog Whistle?…, 54