[EL] Elemendorf and Spencer: Are the Covered States “More Racist” than Other States?

Tue Mar 5 07:59:07 PST 2013

Congrats to Christopher and Douglas on this quick study. As soon as I hear
the quote of the question from Justice Roberts I wondered what planet he's
on.

In addition to the ANES data, I thought about looking to see if there are
any national records (by state) of housing or other civil rights complaints
or race-based crimes.

Of course, in several states the non-white population is either very small
(and thus would be less likely targetted by election rules meant to harm
them) or, as the authors note, not (only) made up of a large Black
population. So, even if prejudice against Blacks on this measure was as
high in Maine as in Alabama, the law might be right to target only certain
states (those with the largest population).

One last thought, if there are no explicit racial questions on the ANES
about other minority populations, there might be "thermometer" question
about immigrants, which could be a proxy for anti-Latino and Asian bias.

Doug

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu>
> To: "law-election at UCI.edu" <law-election at UCI.edu>
> Cc:
> Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013 08:07:04 -0800
> Subject: [EL] Elemendorf and Spencer: Are the Covered States “More Racist”
> than Other States?
>    [image: 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:
>
> [image: 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.
>
>   [image: Share]<http://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D48009&title=Elemendorf%20and%20Spencer%3A%20Are%20the%20Covered%20States%20%E2%80%9CMore%20Racist%E2%80%9D%20than%20Other%20States%3F&description=>
>   Posted in Supreme Court <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, Voting
> Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15> | Comments Off
>
> --
> Rick Hasen
> Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
> UC Irvine School of Law
> 401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
> Irvine, CA 92697-8000949.824.3072 - office949.824.0495 - faxrhasen at law.uci.eduhttp://law.uci.edu/faculty/page1_r_hasen.htmlhttp://electionlawblog.org
>
>
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