How well does racial resentment predict rating racial groups equally?

Racial resentment (also known as symbolic racism) is a common measure of racial attitudes in social science. See this post for items commonly used for racial resentment measures. For this post, I'll report plots about racial resentment, using data from the American National Election Studies 2020 Time Series Study.

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This first plot reports the percentage of respondents that rated Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians/Asian-Americans equally on 0-to-100 feeling thermometers, at each level of a 0-to-16 racial resentment index. Respondents at the lowest level of racial resentment had a lower chance of rating the included racial groups equally, compared to respondents at moderate levels of racial resentment or even compared to respondents at the highest level of racial resentment.

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This next plot reports the mean racial resentment for various groups. The top section is based on responses to 0-to-100 feeling thermometers about Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians/Asian-Americans. Respondents who rated all four included racial groups equally fell at about the middle of the racial resentment index, and respondents who reported isolated negative ratings about Whites (i.e., rated Whites under 50 but rated Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian/Asian-Americans at 50 or above) fell toward the low end of the racial resentment index.

The bottom two sections of the above plot report mean racial resentment based on responses to the "lazy" and "violent" stereotype items.

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So I think that the above plots indicate that low levels of racial resentment aren't obviously normatively good.

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Below is an update on how well racial resentment predicts attitudes about the environment and some other things that I don't expect to have a strong direct causal relationship with racial attitudes. The plot below reports OLS regression coefficients for racial resentment on a 0-to-1 scale, predicting the indicated outcomes on a 0-to-1 scale, with controls for gender, age group, education, marital status, income, partisanship, and ideology, all controlled for using categorical predictors.

The estimated effects of racial resentment on attitudes about federal spending on welfare and federal spending on crime (attitudes presumably related to race) are of similar "small to moderately small" size as the estimated effects of racial resentment on attitudes about greenhouse regulations, climate change causing severe weather, and federal spending on the environment.

Racial resentment had the ability to predict attitudes about the environment net of controls in ANES data from 1986.

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NOTES

1. Data source: American National Election Studies. 2021. ANES 2020 Time Series Study Preliminary Release: Combined Pre-Election and Post-Election Data [dataset and documentation]. March 24, 2021 version. www.electionstudies.org.

2. Stata and R code. Dataset for Plot 1. Dataset for Plot 2. Dataset for Plot 3.