Leftover comments from 2021

Below are leftover comments on publications that I read in 2021.

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ONO AND ZILIS 2021

Politics, Groups, and Identities published Ono and Zilis 2021, "Do Americans perceive diverse judges as inherently biased?". Ono and Zilis 2021 indicated that "We test whether Americans perceive diverse judges as inherently biased with a list experiment". The statements to test whether Americans perceive diverse judges to be "inherently biased" were:

When a court case concerns issues like #metoo, some women judges might give biased rulings.

When a court case concerns issues like immigration, some Hispanic judges might give biased rulings.

Ono and Zilis 2021 indicated that "...by endorsing that idea, without evidence, that 'some' members of a group are inclined to behave in an undesirable way, respondents are engaging in stereotyping" (pp. 3-4).

But statements about whether *some* Hispanic judges and *some* women judges *might* be biased can't measure stereotypes or the belief that Hispanic judges or women judges are *inherently* biased. For example, a belief that *some* women *might* commit violence doesn't require the belief that women are inherently violent and doesn't even require the belief that women are on average more violent than men are.

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Ono and Zilis 2021 claimed that "Hispanics do not believe that Hispanic judges are biased" (p. 4, emphasis in the original), but, among Hispanic respondents, the 95% confidence interval for agreement with the claim that Hispanic judges might be biased in cases involving issues like immigration did not cross zero in the multivariate analyses in Figure 1.

For Table 2 analyses without controls, the corresponding point estimate indicated that 25 percent of Hispanics agreed with the claim about Hispanic judges, but the ratio of the relevant coefficient to standard error was 0.25/0.15, which is about 1.67, depending on how the 0.25 and 0.15 were rounded. The corresponding p-value isn't less than p=0.05, but that doesn't support the conclusion that the percentage of Hispanics that agreed with the statement is zero.

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BERRY ET AL 2021

Politics, Groups, and Identities published Berry et al 2021,"White identity politics: linked fate and political participation". Berry et al 2021 claimed to have found "notable partisan differences in the relationship between racial linked fate and electoral participation for White Americans". But this claim is based on differences in the presence of statistical significance between estimates for White Republicans and estimates for White Democrats ("Linked fate is significantly and consistently associated with increased electoral participation for Republicans, but not Democrats", p. 528), instead of being based on statistical tests of whether estimates for White Republicans differ from estimates for White Democrats.

The estimates in the Berry et al 2021 appendix that I highlighted in yellow appear to be incorrect, in terms of plausibility and based on the positive estimate in the corresponding regression output.

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ARCHER AND CLIFFORD FORTHCOMING

In "Improving the Measurement of Hostile Sexism" (reportedly forthcoming at Public Opinion Quarterly), Archer and Clifford proposed a modified version of the hostile sexism scale that is item specific. For example, instead of measuring responses about the statement "Women exaggerate problems they have at work", the corresponding item-specific item measures responses to the question of "How often do women exaggerate problems they have at work?". Thus, to get the lowest score on the hostile sexism scale, instead of merely strongly disagreeing that women exaggerate problems they have at work, respondents must report the belief that women *never* exaggerate problems they have at work.

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Archer and Clifford indicated that responses to some of their revised items are measured on a bipolar scale. For example, respondents can indicate that women are offended "much too often", "a bit too often", "about the right amount", "not quite often enough", or "not nearly often enough". So to get the lowest hostile sexism score, respondents need to indicate that women are wrong about how often they are offended, by not being offended enough.

Scott Clifford, co-author of the Archer and Clifford article, engaged me in a discussion about the item specific scale (archived here). Scott suggested that the low end of the scale is more feminist, but dropped out of the conversation after I asked how much of an OLS coefficient for the proposed item-specific hostile sexism scale is due to hostile sexism and how much is due to feminism.

The portion of the hostile sexism measure that is sexism seems like something that should have been addressed in peer review, if the purpose of a hostile sexism scale is to estimate the effect of sexism and not to merely estimate the effect of moving from highly positive attitudes about women to highly negative attitudes about women.

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VIDAL ET AL 2021

Social Science Quarterly published Vidal et al,"Identity and the racialized politics of violence in gun regulation policy preferences". Appendix A indicates that, for the American National Election Studies 2016 Time Series Study, responses to the feeling thermometer about Black Lives Matter ranged from 0 to 999, with a standard deviation of 89.34, even though the ANES 2016 feeling thermometer for Black Lives Matter ran from 0 to 100, with 999 reserved for respondents who indicate that they don't know what Black Lives Matter is.

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ARORA AND STOUT 2021

Research & Politics published Arora and Stout 2021 "After the ballot box: How explicit racist appeals damage constituents views of their representation in government", which noted that:

The results provide evidence for our hypothesis that exposure to an explicitly racist comment will decrease perceptions of interest representation among Black and liberal White respondents, but not among moderate and conservative Whites.

This is, as far as I can tell, a claim that the effect among Black and liberal White respondents will differ from the effect among moderate and conservative Whites, but Arora and Stout 2021 did not report a test of whether these effects differ, although Arora and Stout 2021 did discuss statistical significance for each of the four groups.

Moreover, Arora and Stout 2021 footnote 4 indicates that:

In the supplemental appendix, we confirm that explicit racial appeals have a unique effect on interest representation and are not tied to other candidate evaluations such as vote choice.

But the estimated effect for interest representation (Table 1) was -0.06 units among liberal White respondents (with a "+" indicator for statistical significance), which is the same reported number as the estimated effect for vote choice (Table A5): -0.06 units among liberal White respondents (with a "+" indicator for statistical significance).

None of the other estimates in Table 1 or Table A5 have an indicator for statistical significance.

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Arora and Stout 2021 repeatedly labeled as "explicitly racist" the statement that "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row", but it's not clear to me how that statement is explicitly racist. The Data and Methodology section indicates that "Though the comment does not explicitly mention the targeted group...". Moreover, the Conclusion of Arora and Stout 2021 indicates that...

In spite of Cindy Hyde-Smith's racist comments during the 2018 U.S. Senate election which appeared to show support for Mississippi's racist and violent history, she still prevailed in her bid for elected office.

... and "appeared to" isn't language that I would expect from an explicit statement.

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CHRISTIANI ET AL 2021

The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics published Christiani et al 2021 "Masks and racial stereotypes in a pandemic: The case for surgical masks". The abstract indicates that:

...We find that non-black respondents perceive a black male model as more threatening and less trustworthy when he is wearing a bandana or a cloth mask than when he is not wearing his face covering—especially those respondents who score above average in racial resentment, a common measure of racial bias. When he is wearing a surgical mask, however, they do not perceive him as more threatening or less trustworthy. Further, it is not that non-black respondents find bandana and cloth masks problematic in general. In fact, the white model in our study is perceived more positively when he is wearing all types of face coverings.

Those are the within-model patterns, but it's interesting to compare ratings of the models in the control, pictured below:

Appendix Table B.1 indicates that, on average, non-Black respondents rated the White model more threatening and more untrustworthy compared to the Black model: on a 0-to-1 scale, among non-Black respondents, the mean ratings of "threatening" were 0.159 for the Black model and 0.371 for the White model, and the mean ratings of "untrustworthy" were 0.128 for the Black model and 0.278 for the White model. These Black/White gaps were about five times the standard errors.

Christiani et al 2021 claimed that this baseline difference does not undermine their results:

Fortunately, the divergent evaluations of our two models without their masks on do not undermine either of the main thrusts of our analyses. First, we can still compare whether subjects perceive the black model differently depending on what type of mask he is wearing...Second, we can still assess whether people resolve the ambiguity associated with seeing a man in a mask based on the race of the wearer.

But I'm not sure that it is true, that "divergent evaluations of our two models without their masks on do not undermine either of the main thrusts of our analyses".

I tweeted a question to one of the Christiani et al 2021 co-authors that included the handles of two other co-authors, asking whether it was plausible that masks increase the perceived threat of persons who look relatively nonthreatening without a mask but decrease the perceived threat of persons who look relatively more threatening without a mask. That phenomenon would explain the racial difference in patterns described in the abstract, given that the White model in the control was perceived to be more threatening than the Black model in the control.

No co-author has yet responded to defend their claim.

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