The Relationship Between Racial Attitudes and Perceived Economic Threat Among Whites: A Three Study Analysis

• Author: Spencer Lindsay
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221110038
• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Date: 01 May 2023

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(3) 279–298

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221110038

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The Relationship Between Racial Attitudes

and Perceived Economic Threat Among

Whites: A Three Study Analysis

Spencer Lindsay

1



Abstract

Multiple theoretical orientations propose a link between economic anxiety and racial attitudes. This article explores this link

using three studies. The first study uses observational data from the 2016 CCES and ANES to determine whethe r or not

anticipating a loss in income in the coming year is associated with negative racial affect. The second study uses observational data

from the 2020 CCES to determine whether or not perceiving a greater risk of personal discrimination is associated with racial

resentment. The last uses an original survey experiment from the 2020 CCES to gain insight into how priming intergroup

competition shapes whites’racial attitudes. These studies find an association between perceived economic thre at and negative

racial attitudes. However, the way respondents perceive economic threats seems to be largely shaped by partisan identification

with Republicans perceiving greater levels of threat. They also suggest that material and symbolic threats may be mutually

reinforcing. These findings support the claim that racial attitudes are deeply connected to economic anxieties and provide

insight into how party identification shapes our psychology.

Keywords

racial attitudes, group conflict, partisanship, economic threat, symbolic threat

Political psychologists and public opinion scholars have long

explored the origins of whites’racial attitudes in the mass

public. Some arguethat negative racial attitudes are mainlythe

result of symbolic “feelings that blacks violatesuch traditional

American values as individualism and self-reliance, the work

ethic, and discipline”(Kinder & Sears, 1981). They argue that

these feelings ste m from “socio-cultural learning”beginning in

early childhood and adolescence (Kinder & Sears, 1981).

Othersarguethatnegativeracialaffectismorelikelytostem

from feelings of material threat (Bobo, 1983). This school

argues that whitesare more likely to harbor negative out-group

affect whenit appears to them that intergroup competition over

scarce resources is greater. Bobo (1983) argues that as per-

ceived intergroup competition increases, self-interested whites

become more likely to harbor negative racial attitudes. While

these two schoolsof thought were once thought to be mutually

exclusive, scholarshave more recently found circumstancesin

which these differing types of racial threat work together to

form an integrated threat (Riek et al., 2006;Stephan et al.,

2002). Nonetheless, the role of perceived economic interest in

the formation of racial attitudes remains the subject of some

debate.

In the four decades since the initial debate between Bobo

and Kinder and Sears, plenty of research has explored the

relationship between self-interest and racial attitudes or

policy attitudes related to racialized issues. The results of this

research has been mixed. Some have found that self-interest

has little to no effect on racial attitudes and policy preferences

(McConahay, 1982;Sears & Funk, 1991), while others have

found that “direct and indirect competitive self-interest”

motives shape whites’preferences in regards to issues of race

(Kluegel & Smith, 1983, see also Bobo & Kluegel, 1993;

Jacobson, 1985). This debate has recently been renewed with

the work of Melcher (2020,2021), arguing for new ways of

thinking about the measurement of self-interest and providing

new evidence that self-interest does indeed shape racial

1

Political Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

The author would like to thank the following individuals for help and

feedback on this work: Levi Allen, David Campbell, David Cortez, Geoff

Layman, Wayde Marsh, Dianne Pinderhughes, Ricardo Ramirez, Erin Rossiter

and Stephen Utych. The author would also like to thank the Rooney

Center for the Study of American Democracy and its participants for

funding and feedback.

Corresponding Author:

Spencer Lindsay, Political Science, University of Notre Dame, 2060 Nanovic

Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.

Email: slindsay@nd.edu

attitudes, as others have down-played the role of self-interest

in favor of the primacy of group-based interests, often the

protection of status (Mutz, 2018;Jardina, 2019). Others,

including Sides et al. (2019), have proposed new frames for

thinking about ways in which economic interest and racial

attitudes interact with one another. This line of theory argues

that whites’perception of symbolic threats drives perception

of economic deprivation. I argue that symbolic and material

threats are likely mutually reinforcing. Symbolic attitudes

may drive perceptions of economic deprivation and inter-

group competition, just as perceived economic and self-

interest threats may drive negative racial affect and feel-

ings of undeservingness.

Whether or not perceived economic interest is associ-

ated with racial attitudes remains, to some, an open

question. The following three studies seek to shed light on

this debate using data from the common content 2016

Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), the

2016AmericanNationalElection Study (ANES) and an

institutional module in the 2020 CCES. All three surveys

provide nationally representative samples that enable re-

searchers to make generalizations about the behavior of

white Americans in the aggregate. The studies seek to test

the relationship between perceived competitive economic

interest and various measures of racial attitudes. Using a

variety of different measurements for economic interest

and racial attitudes add to the findings by demonstrating

that such a relationship can not only be found in the dif-

fering contexts of the three studies but also that it is robust

to differing measurement choices. The first study explores

whether respondents’anticipating a loss in income is

correlated with higher levels of racial resentment and

higher scores on the color-blind racial attitudes scale. The

second study tests the relationship between a series of

questions to measure whites’perception of discrimination

against their racial group and racial resentment. The third

study is a survey experiment meant to prime a sense of

intergroup competition over scarce resources in a context

one might encounter in their everyday lives: college a d-

missions. A subsequent analysis of all three studies tests

the role of partisan identification in shaping the perception

of and response to economic threat. I find that there is a

relationship between perceived economic interest and

whites’racial attitudes, however, this relationship appears

to be driven by Republican whites.

This article will proceed as follows. First, I will discuss

the theoretical insights of past literature on the topic and

build on these insights to explain why we should expect

racial attitudes to be associated with perceived economic

interest. I will then lay out and discuss the results of each of

my three studies. These results will be followed by a dis-

cussion of partisan differences in perceptions of and re-

sponse to economic threat. I will conclude by discussing the

cumulative insight that these studies provide and how they

may inform future research.

Perceived Economic Interest and

Racial Attitudes

Both the material and symbolic threat theoretical orientations

provide plausible reasons for perceptions of economic threat,

whether stemming from perceived deprivation or racial

grievance, to be associated with symbolic and affective racial

attitudes. Material threat stresses competitive self-interest

motives (Melcher, 2020,2021) whereas symbolic threat

stresses racialized perceptions of economic justice (Sides

et al., 2019). Admittedly, the present studies cannot distin-

guish between these two mechanisms. However, both the-

oretical orientations provide compelling reason to believe that

perceptions of material and symbolic threat are deeply linked

to one another. I argue that symbolic threat and material threat

are likely to reinforce one another. Feelings of economic

depravity may spur a heightened sense of intergrup com-

petition, which may drive feelings of symbolic threat. Ad-

ditionally, feelings of symbolic threat may drive some to

perceive greater levels of intergroup competition. If this is the

case, one should expect economic anxiety and the perception

of intergroup competition to be associated with feelings of

symbolic threat and negative racial affect. Each proposed

mechanism, competitive self-interest and racialized eco-

nomics, warrants deeper discussion, as does the potential for

material and symbolic threat to be mutually reinforcing.

Competitive Self-Interest

Group conflict theory argues that perceived competition

over scarce resources drives tension and hostility between

groups (Jackson, 1993). A number of studies have indicated

support for this theory. Sherif et al. (1961) found that when

children were assigned into random groups and made to

compete with one another, they quickly developed high

levels of intergroup hostility. However, this hostility sub-

sided when the groups were made to work together towards

a common goal. Scholarship has shown that violence be-

tween groups becomes more common in cases where

stresses were placed on food security (Ember, 1982)andthat

prejudice is more prevalent in countries where economic

opportunity is low and ethnic diversity is high (Quillian,

1995). There has also been support for Group Conflict

Theory in the context of race relations in the US. Several

studies have found that lower-class whites are more likely to

hold and act on negative racial attitudes (Branton & Jones,

2005;Giles & Evans, 1985;Huckfeldt & Kohfeld, 1989).

Lower socioeconomic environments are even more corre-

lated with negative racial affect than the population of racial

out-groups in those environments (Oliver & Mendelberg,

2000). Branton and Jones (2005) find that “high socio-

economic contexts and highly diverse contexts are related to

higher levels of support for racial social issues; however,

contexts characterized by low socioeconomic context and

280 American Politics Research 51(3)