Pliable Prejudice: The Case of Welfare

Abstract

The conventional wisdom maintains that whites’ racial predispositions are exogenous to their views of welfare. Against this position, scattered studies report that prejudice moves in response to new information about policies and groups. Likewise, theories of mediated intergroup contact propose that when individuals encounter messages about racial outgroups, their levels of prejudice may wax or wane. In conjunction, these lines of work suggest that whites update their global views of blacks based on how they feel about people on welfare. The current article tests this “prejudice revision” hypothesis with data from “welfare mother” vignettes embedded on national surveys administered in 1991, 2014, and 2015 and ANES panel data from the 1990s. The results indicate that views of welfare recipients systematically affect racial stereotypes, racial resentment, individualistic explanations for racial inequality, and structural explanations for racial inequality. Prejudice, in short, is endogenous to welfare attitudes.

The racialization of pit bulls: What dogs can teach us about racial politics

“…Combining the results across twenty models from two different datasets in Table 1 , Tables A2, and A3 in S1 Appendix shows that three blatant measures of racial prejudice—anti-Black affect, old fashioned racism, and negative stereotypes of Black men—are all significant predictors of harboring unfavorable opinions of the breed. Those results should not be susceptible to the same endogeneity issues as analyses of how racial attitudes predict public opinion about affirmative action, welfare, and Donald Trump [ 69 , 75 , 76 ], either, since pit bulls probably aren’t salient enough to alter feelings towards African Americans. Nor is omitted variable bias a threat to the validity of our findings.…”