Comments on "Fear, Institutionalized Racism, and Empathy: The Underlying Dimensions of Whites’ Racial Attitudes"

The PS: Political Science and Politics article "Fear, Institutionalized Racism, and Empathy: The Underlying Dimensions of Whites' Racial Attitudes" by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith reports results for four racial attitudes items from a "FIRE" battery.

I have a paper and a blog post indicating that combinations of these items substantially associate with environmental policy preferences net of controls for demographics, partisanship, and political ideology. DeSante and Smith have a paper that reported an analysis that uses combinations of these items to predict an environmental policy preference ("Support E.P.A.", in Table 3 of the paper), but results for this outcome variable are not mentioned in the DeSante and Smith 2020 PS publication. DeSante and Smith 2020 reports results for the four FIRE racial attitudes items separately, so I will do so below for environmental policy preference outcome variables, using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES).

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Square brackets contain predicted probabilities from a logistic regression—net of controls for gender, education, age, family income, partisanship, and political ideology—of selecting "oppose" regarding the policy "Strengthen enforcement of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act even if it costs US jobs". The sample is limited to White respondents, and the estimates are weighted. The first probability in square brackets is at the highest level of measured agreement to the indicated statement on a five-point scale, with all other model predictors at their means; the second probability is for the corresponding highest level of measured disagreement to the indicated statement.

• [38% to 56%, p<0.05] I am angry that racism exists.
• [29% to 58%, p<0.05] White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.
• [39% to 42%, p>0.05] I often find myself fearful of people of other races.
• [51% to 36%, p<0.05] Racial problems in the U.S. are rare, isolated situations.

Results below are from a fractional logistic regression predicting an index of values of the four environmental policy items summed together and placed on a 0-to-1 scale:

• [0.28 to 0.48, p<0.05] I am angry that racism exists.
• [0.23 to 0.44, p<0.05] White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.
• [0.28 to 0.32, p<0.05] I often find myself fearful of people of other races.
• [0.42 to 0.26, p<0.05] Racial problems in the U.S. are rare, isolated situations.

The standard deviation for the 0-to-1 four-item environmental policy index is 0.38, so three of the four results immediately above indicate nontrivially high differences in predictions for a environmental policy preferences outcome variable that has no theoretical connection to race, which I think raises legitimate questions about whether these racial attitudes items should ever be used to estimate the causal influence of racial attitudes.

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NOTES

1. Stata code.

2. Data source: Stephen Ansolabehere and Brian F. Schaffner, Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 2016: Common Content. [Computer File] Release 2: August 4, 2017. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University [producer] http://cces.gov.harvard.edu