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01-12-2010 | Original Paper

How Explicit Racial Prejudice Hurt Obama in the 2008 Election

Author: Spencer Piston

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 4/2010

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Abstract

Some commentators claim that white Americans put prejudice behind them when evaluating presidential candidates in 2008. Previous research examining whether white racism hurts black candidates has yielded mixed results. Fortunately, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama provides an opportunity to examine more rigorously whether prejudice disadvantages black candidates. I also make use of an innovation in the measurement of racial stereotypes in the 2008 American National Election Studies survey, which yields higher levels of reporting of racial stereotypes among white respondents. I find that negative stereotypes about blacks significantly eroded white support for Barack Obama. Further, racial stereotypes do not predict support for previous Democratic presidential candidates or current prominent Democrats, indicating that white voters punished Obama for his race rather than his party affiliation. Finally, prejudice had a particularly large impact on the voting decisions of Independents and a substantial impact on Democrats but very little influence on Republicans.

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To be sure, it would have been no small feat to obtain the support of a majority of white voters, given that no Democrat has done so since Lyndon B. Johnson. Still, as Lewis-Beck et al. (Lewis-Beck 2009) argue, Obama enjoyed some advantages that his recent Democratic predecessors did not, such as George W. Bush’s record-setting low approval ratings, the economic recession, and the financial meltdown in the months prior to before the election. Indeed, numerous forecasting models overestimated the support Obama would receive (Abramowitz 2008; Holbrooke 2008; Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008; Lockerbie 2008), leading some to suspect prejudice was the cause (e.g., Lewis-Beck and Tien 2009).

If the American National Election Studies 2008 time series survey is used, estimates of Obama’s support among blacks and Latinos are even higher (98 and 75%, respectively).

I do not expect, however, that all scholars will agree that negative stereotypes constitute a measure of racial prejudice. After all, Allport’s (1954/1988) classic definition of prejudice as “an antipathy based on a faulty and inflexible generalization” sets a high bar. Negative generalizations about social groups need not be accompanied by hostility (Jackman 1994). Further, some defend statistical generalizations about social groups, particularly if these generalizations are based on experience (see Pager and Karafin 2009). Finally, the limitations of cross-sectional survey data will certainly not allow me to assess the “flexibility” of generalizations about racial groups. I therefore adopt an etymological perspective. An assessment that one racial group possesses a negative attribute relative to another racial group is a “pre-judgment”; it precedes, but may or may not influence, the evaluation of an individual member of that group, such as Barack Obama.

I exclude those respondents who, though listing their primary racial group as white, also either identified themselves as belonging to the ethnic group of Hispanic/Latino (n = 61) or identified themselves as being of Hispanic descent (n = 14). Results are robust to including either or both of these groups.

Question wording can be found online at www.electionstudies.org.

Respondents are also asked to evaluate Asians and Hispanic-Americans.

The difference measure is potentially subject to the criticism that it also captures the effects of esteem toward blacks (Sniderman and Stiglitz 2008). However, excluding those respondents who rated whites more negatively than blacks on the stereotype scales yields substantively equivalent results.

When examining the ACASI measure of stereotypes, I exclude those respondents who did not participate in the post-election wave in order to ensure comparability.

A couple of caveats are in order. First, interviewers were not randomly assigned to respondents, and I make no attempt to account for that here. Second, race of interviewer was only measured in the pre-election wave, although ANES staff have informed me that respondents almost always had the same interviewer for both waves.

The stereotype index (interviewer measure) shows a high degree of stability dating back to 1992, the first year in which the stereotype questions were asked, and also reveals perhaps a slight decline of about 5% points in negative stereotypes about blacks over that time period.

All regressions in the paper are weighted in order to approximate national representativeness, though unweighted regressions do not substantively change the results.

Pearson’s r = .61 for the ACASI measure and .52 for the interviewer measure.

More precisely, the “lazy” question has a somewhat stronger effect on vote choice than the “intelligent” question. The ratio of the coefficients is about 5:4.

Using the seven-category interval variable for party identification is suboptimal, as it assumes that the effect of moving from any one category to the category next to it is equivalent to any other such effect. The interval variable is easier to present, however, and the substantive results of interest are similar for either form of the variable.

Further, explicit prejudice was not associated with 2008 white respondents’ self-reports of whether they voted for John Kerry rather than another candidate in 2004.

My claim that prejudiced white voters punished Obama for his race does not hinge on the use of stereotypes as the measure of prejudice. The results presented in Table 2 are robust to changing the independent variable of interest from the stereotype index to the symbolic racism index. Further, there is a possibility that positive racial affect caused some whites to vote for Barack Obama. In an alternate model, a variable measuring admiration for blacks was substituted for the stereotype index. The coefficient on this variable was in the expected direction and of moderate size but fell short of conventional standards of statistical significance (one-tailed p < .07). The coefficient decreases to almost zero when the stereotype index is included in the model.

The interviewer measure yields similar results. Although the ACASI measure results in greater reporting of prejudice, a comparison of columns in Table 1 shows that the coefficient on this measure is slightly smaller. These two countervailing factors lead to nearly identical results for the two measures.

A more fine-grained description of the effects of prejudice is as follows. Of those white respondents expressing prejudice against blacks, about one-half scored greater than 0.5 but less than 0.6 on the stereotype index, and their predicted probability of voting for Obama ranged from about 35 to 43%. Another quarter scored greater than or equal to 0.6 but less than 0.7, and their predicted probability of voting for Obama ranged from 28 to 35%. The final quarter scored greater than or equal to 0.7 and less than or equal to 1, and their predicted probability of voting for Obama ranged from 11 to 28%.

Another method of assessing the impact of prejudice is to estimate its total contribution by comparing the mean predicted probability of voting for Obama using the independent variables’ actual values to the mean predicted probability of voting for Obama after setting the stereotype index to its midpoint, at which no prejudice is expressed. I use this method to compare the effect of prejudice when the interviewer measure is used to its effect when the ACASI measure is used. Using the interviewer measure, I estimate that the total contribution of explicit prejudice was to depress the white vote for Obama by 2.81% points. The ACASI measure yields a similar estimate of a decrease of 2.66% points.

Prejudice was also not associated with feeling thermometer scores for John McCain or Sarah Palin.

Sniderman and Carmines make their argument primarily using self-identified ideology rather than partisanship, although they state that “the basic logic remains the same” for partisanship. I examine partisanship because about one-third of ANES respondents refuse to place themselves in an ideological category, consistent with the findings of Converse (1964). My findings are substantively equivalent, however, when ideology is used instead of partisanship.

Sniderman and Carmines do not present the correlation between partisanship and negative stereotypes in the three surveys they analyze from the early 1990s, but they do present the correlation between ideology and their measure of prejudice. This correlation ranges from .09 to .14, close to the correlation between self-identified ideology and the stereotype index in the 2008 ANES, which is .15.

The employment variable was dropped for the regression for Democrats due to multicollinearity resulting from the fact that only a small proportion of the sample was unemployed.

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Title: How Explicit Racial Prejudice Hurt Obama in the 2008 Election
Author: Spencer Piston
Publication date: 01-12-2010
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Political Behavior / Issue 4/2010
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9108-y

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