Unpublished studies [1-3]

This post discusses three unpublished studies that I don't expect to be working on in the foreseeable future.

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1.

I posted at APSA Preprints "The Yuge Effect of Racist Resentment on Support for Donald Trump and…Attitudes about Automobile Fuel Efficiency Requirements?". This paper reports evidence indicating that a published measure of "racist resentment" does a remarkably good job predicting non-racial outcome variables such as environmental policy preferences. Sample results are at this prior post.

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2.

I posted at OSF a write-up of results for a preregistered study "Belief in Genetic Differences and Support for Efforts to Reduce Inequality". I reported these data in an unaccepted proposal for a short study with the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Science.

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3.

Data for the second study and this third study are from a 2017 YouGov survey that I had conducted using funds from Illinois State University New Faculty Start-up Support and the Illinois State University College of Arts and Sciences. My initial plan was to run a version of my 2014 TESS proposal, but I saw the Carney and Enos paper (current version) in the 2015 MPSA program and realized that their experiments were similar to my plan, so I changed the survey.

Here is an early version of the planned survey.

One element of the new survey was an experiment involving attitudes about food stamps. I planned for the final three slides to each include an item about poor Americans, with the third item being randomly assigned to be about either poor White Americans or poor Black Americans. The third item was:

Most [randomize: poor Black Americans/poor White Americans] who receive government welfare could get along without it if they tried.

Carney and Enos had done something similar with the traditional racial resentment items, but these traditional racial resentment items aren't particularly good at measuring resentment (such as "Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve"). The "could get along without it if they tried" is an old racial resentment item that wasn't included on the traditional four-item battery, but I think it does a nice job of capturing resentment.

I posted at OSF a write-up of results from this "unnecessary welfare experiment". I submitted to a journal a more extensive analysis and discussion, but the manuscript was rejected in peer review.

The "unnecessary welfare experiment" research design might have caused the estimated differences to be underestimates, given that the prior two items had the same response scale and were about poor Americans in general. Nonetheless, the results provide evidence that, in 2017, non-Hispanic White conservatives and non-Hispanic Whites in general reported more agreement that most poor Black Americans who receive government welfare could get along without it if they tried, compared to their reported agreement to the same statement about poor White Americans who receive government welfare.