The best case against racial resentment

Forthcoming at the Journal of Politics is Rice et al. 2021 "Same As It Ever Was? The Impact of Racial Resentment on White Juror Decision-Making".

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See the prior post describing the mock juror experiment in Rice et al. 2021.

The Rice et al. 2021 team kindly cited my article questioning racial resentment as a valid measure of racial animus. But Rice et al. 2021 interpreted their results as evidence for the validity of racial resentment:

Our results also suggest that racial resentment is a valid measure of racial animus (Jardina and Piston 2019) as it performs exactly as expected in an experimental setting manipulating the race of the defendant.

However, my analyses of the Rice et al. 2021 data indicated that a measure of sexism sorted White participants by their propensity to discriminate for Bradley Schwartz or Jamal Gaines:

I don't think that the evidence in the above plot indicates that sexism is a valid measure of racial animus, so I'm not sure that racial resentment sorting White participants by their propensity to discriminate for Bradley or Jamal means that racial resentment is a valid measure of racial animus, either.

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I think that the best two arguments against racial resentment as a measure of anti-Black animus are:

[1] Racial resentment on its face plausibly captures non-racial attitudes, and it is not clear that statistical control permits any post-statistical control residual association of racial resentment with an outcome to be interpreted as anti-Black animus, given that racial resentment net of statistical control often predicts outcomes that are not theoretically linked to racial attitudes.

[2] Persons at low levels of racial resentment often disfavor Whites relative to Blacks (as reported in this post and in the Rice et al. 2021 mock juror experiment), so the estimated effect for racial resentment cannot be interpreted as only the effect of anti-Black animus. Racial resentment in these cases appears to sort to low levels of racial resentment a sufficient percentage of respondents who dislike Whites in absolute or at least relative terms, so that indifference to Whites might plausibly be better represented at some location between the ends of the racial resentment measure. But the racial resentment measure does not have a clear indifference point such as 50 on a 0-to-100 feeling thermometer rating, so -- even if argument [1] is addressed so that statistical control isolates the effect of racial attitudes -- it's not clear how racial resentment could be used to accurately estimate the effect of only anti-Black animus.

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NOTES

1. The sexism measure used responses to the items below, which loaded onto one factor among White participants in the data:

[UMA306bSB] We should do all we can to make sure that women have the same opportunities in society as men.

[UMA306c] We would have fewer problems if we treated men and women more equally.

[UMA306f] Many women are actually  seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for "equality."

[UMA306g] Women are too easily offended.

[UMA306h] Men are better suited for politics than are women.

[CC18_422c] When women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against.

[CC18_422d] Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men.

Responses to these items loaded onto a different factor:

[UMA306d] Women should be cherished and protected by men.

[UMA306e] Many women have a quality of purity that few men possess.

2. Data for Rice et al. 2021 from the JOP Dataverse. Original 2018 CCES data for the UMass-A module, which I used in the aforementioned analyses. Stata code. Stata output. Data and code for the sexism plot.

3. I plan a follow-up post about how well different measures predicted racial bias in the experiment.