[EL] Elemendorf and Spencer: Are the Covered States “More Racist” than Other States?
Rick Hasen
rhasen at law.uci.edu
Mon Mar 4 08:07:04 PST 2013
Election Law Blog <http://electionlawblog.org/>
Elemendorf and Spencer: Are the Covered States “More Racist” than
Other States? <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=48009>
Posted on March 4, 2013 8:06 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=48009> by
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
The following is a guest post from Chris Elmendorf and Doug Spencer:
*Are the Covered States “More Racist” than Other States? *
*Christopher S. Elmendorf*
*Douglas M. Spencer*
**During oral argument last week in /Shelby County v. Holder/, the
constitutional challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,
Chief Justice Roberts asked, “[I]s it the government’s submission
that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the
North?” Solicitor General Verrilli responded, “It is not, and I do
not know the answer to that . . . .”
This post offers a preliminary answer to the Chief Justice’s
question, using recent data. Our initial results suggest that the
coverage formula of Section 5 does a remarkably good job of
differentiating states according to the racial attitudes of their
nonblack citizens.
There are essentially three schools of thought about how best to
measure racial prejudice using survey questions. Some researchers
favor explicit measures of prejudice (“old-fashioned racism” or
stereotyping), based on agreement with statements like “blacks are
less intelligent than whites” and “blacks are lazy.” Others favor
symbolic measures of prejudice or “racial resentment,” based on
questions about affirmative action and whether blacks have gotten
“more than they deserve.” Still others favor measures of implicit
or subconscious bias. For the results reported here we use explicit
stereotyping, as it remains disputed
<http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.062906.070752?journalCode=polisci>
whether racial resentment measures capture prejudice as opposed to
conservatism, and it is uncertain whether implicit bias predicts
political behavior
<http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/22/poq.nfs051.abstract>.
We created a binary measure of stereotyping that roughly captures
whether a person is more prejudiced toward blacks than is typical of
nonblack Americans. Our data source is the 2008 National Annenberg
Election Survey (NAES), which asked non-black respondents to rate
their own racial group and blacks in terms of intelligence,
trustworthiness, and work effort, on a scale of 0-100. On average
respondents ranked their own group about 15 points above blacks on
each trait. We coded respondents as holding “prejudiced” views with
respect to blacks on a particular trait if the difference between
their rating of their own racial group and their rating of blacks
exceeded the national mean difference for the trait. To create an
overall measure of prejudice for each respondent, we summed the
number of traits on which the respondent was more prejudiced than
the national mean. Finally, we converted this sum into a binary
variable, coding as “prejudiced overall” those respondents who
exceeded the national mean with respect to at least two of the three
traits.[1] <http://electionlawblog.org/#_ftn1>
To be clear, a respondent whom we have coded as “not prejudiced
overall” may well be quite prejudiced. But the Chief Justice’s
question—whether “citizens in the South are more racist than
citizens in the North”—is a question about /relative /prejudice, and
this is what we are trying to capture.
We provide two estimates of the proportion of adult, nonblack
residents in each state who are “prejudiced overall.” The first is
based on simple disaggregation of the large NAES dataset
(N=19,325). This method should work pretty well for the largest
states but may yield unreliable estimates for smaller states, which
contribute relatively few respondents to the NAES sample. For the
second estimate we use multilevel regression with
post-stratification (MRP), a recently developed statistical
technique that has been shown to yield remarkably accurate estimates
<http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejrl2124/Lax%20Phillips%20-%20Estimating%20State%20Public%20Opinion.pdf>
of state-level public opinion. We model prejudice as a function of
individual-level covariates (sex, race, age, and education) and a
set of state-level predictors (black population, percent of blacks
in poverty, segregation, and income inequality).
Using either technique we find a strong positive correlation between
Section 5 “covered status” and anti-black prejudice, but with MRP
the correlation is truly stunning:
elemendorf-graphic
<http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/elemendorf-graphic.png>
The MRP model suggests that the six fully covered states in the
South are, by our measure, six of the seven most prejudiced in the
nation. The two fully covered states that rank lower on the list,
Arizona and Alaska, are presumably covered for reasons other than
discrimination against blacks (anti-Latino discrimination in
Arizona, and anti-Native discrimination in Alaska).
We wish to emphasize that these are preliminary results only.
Though our findings are not entirely unexpected
<http://web.posc.jmu.edu/seminar/readings/4a-realignment/race+party%20realignment%20in%20the%20south%20old%20times%20not%20forgotten.pdf>,
other ways of aggregating the NAES prejudice questions, or of
modeling responses, may yield different rankings of the states (to
say nothing of other ways of measuring prejudice
<http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Esstephen/papers/RacialAnimusAndVotingSethStephensDavidowitz.pdf>).
We will present additional results at the Midwest Political Science
Association conference in April.
Suffice it to say for now that the coverage formula seems defensible
under the standard implicit in the Chief Justice’s questioning. Or,
to borrow a metaphor from Judge Williams of the D.C. Circuit,
Congress appears to have “hit the bull’s eye throwing a dart
backwards over its shoulder.”
<http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/D79C82694E572B4D85257A02004EC903/$file/11-5256-1374370.pdf>
/Elmendorf is Professor of Law at UC Davis. Spencer is a doctoral
student in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley.
Elmendorf contributed to an amicus brief on behalf of the
respondents in /Shelby County v. Holder/./
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] <http://electionlawblog.org/#_ftnref1> Our overall measure of
prejudice includes just those respondents who exceeded the national
average by at least one standard deviation, or 14% of the sample.
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--
Rick Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
UC Irvine School of Law
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