Comments on "Racial Sympathy and its Political Consequences"

The Chudy 2021 Journal of Politics article "Racial Sympathy and Its Political Consequences" concerns White racial sympathy for Blacks.

More than a decade ago, Hutchings 2009 reported evidence about White racial sympathy for Blacks. Below is a table from Hutchings 2009 indicating that, among White liberals and White conservatives, sympathy for Blacks predicted at p<0.05 support for government policies explicitly intended to benefit Blacks such as government aid to Blacks, controlling for factors such as anti-Black stereotypes:

Chudy 2021 thanked Vincent Hutchings in the acknowledgments, and Vincent Hutchings is listed as co-chair of Jennifer Chudy's "Racial Sympathy in American Politics" dissertation. But see whether you can find in the Chudy 2021 JOP article an indication that Hutchings 2009 had reported evidence that White racial sympathy for Blacks predicted support for government policies explicitly intended to benefit Blacks.

Here is a passage from Chudy 2021 referencing Hutchings 2009:

I start by examining white support for "government aid to blacks," a broad policy area that has appeared on the ANES since the 1970s. The question asks respondents to place themselves on a 7-point scale that ranges from "Blacks Should Help Themselves" to "Government Should Help Blacks." Previous research on this question has found that racial animus leads some whites to oppose government aid to African Americans (Hutchings 2009). This analysis examines whether racial sympathy leads some white Americans to offer support for this contentious policy area.

I think that the above passages can be reasonably read as suggesting an incorrect claim that the Hutchings 2009 "previous research on this question" did not examine "whether racial sympathy leads some white Americans to offer support for this contentious policy area [of government aid to African Americans]".

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NOTES:

1. Chudy 2021 reported results from an experiment that varied the race of a target culprit and asked participants to recommend a punishment. Chudy 2021 Figure 2 plotted estimates of recommended punishments at different levels of racial sympathy.

The Chudy 2021 analysis used a linear regression, which produced an estimated difference by race on a 0-to-100 scale of -22 at the lowest level of racial sympathy and of 41 at the highest level of racial sympathy. These differences can be seen in my plot below to the left, with a racial sympathy index coded from 0 through 16.

However, a linear relationship might not be a correct presumption. The plot to the right reports estimates calculated at each level of the racial sympathy index, so that the estimate at the highest level of racial sympathy is not influenced by cases at other levels of racial sympathy.

2. Chudy 2021 Figure 2 plots results from Chudy 2021 Table 5, but using a reversed outcome variable for some reason.

3. Chudy 2021 used the term "predicted probability" to discuss the Figure 2 / Table 5 results, but these results are predicted levels of an outcome variable that had eight levels, from "0-10 hours" to "over 70 hours" (see the bottom of the final page in the Chudy 2021 supplemental web appendix).

4. The bias detected in this experiment across all levels of racial sympathy was 13 units on a 0-to-100 scale, disfavoring the White culprit relative to the Black culprit (p=0.01) [svy: reg commservice whiteblackculprit].

5. Code for my analyses.