Symbolic racism’s policy effects cannot be explained by mere question-content overlap
Evidence
But we have more concrete evidence against this interpretation. (a) The effects of symbolic racism are not confined to contemporary race-conscious policies of special treatment for blacks but occur just as consistently concerning the equal opportunity policies dating from the 1950s (compare Table 20.1 with Table 20.3). Any policy issues with manifest racial content seem to evoke symbolic racism. (b) Symbolic racism has consistently significant effects on evaluations of Jesse Jackson and Pat Buchanan, neither of whom, as an attitude object, presumably suffers from this conceptual overlap. (c) We have imposed substantial controls on ideology, party identification, and social welfare attitudes, which bear directly on the magnitude of government action but make no explicit reference to blacks. They consistently have weaker effects than does symbolic racism, whose effects are not substantially reduced by such controls. And (d) we earlier presented analyses purging the symbolic racism scales of any items alluding to government action and “special favors,” which reduced their reliability and predictive power very little. “Content overlap” does not seem to account for much of the link between symbolic racism and racial policy preferences. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3749
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to measurement validity debates in political science; the multi-pronged robustness strategy resembles best-practice criterial validation across attitude research. — connects to: Some symbolic racism items overlap tautologically with the policy attitudes they predict — Christopher Tarman and David O. Sears, The Conceptualization and Measurement…, 24; Symbolic racism effects persist even after removing items about government programs — Christopher Tarman and David O. Sears, The Conceptualization and Measurement…, 42; Response biases fail to explain symbolic racism’s predictive findings — Christopher Tarman and David O. Sears, The Conceptualization and Measurement…, 227