Antecedent Attitudinal Predictors of Likelihood of Voluntary Support for Affirmative Action in a Statewide Law Enforcement Organization

Abstract

This study focused on understanding the types of attitudes toward external factors of reward distribution that served as antecedent predictors of likelihood of support for the voluntary practice of affirmative action (AA) in a statewide law enforcement organization in the United States (US). The impetus for the study was the concern over the perennial opposition to AA and the banning of the policy in some US states, despite that the policy has been strongly linked to increased hiring of racial-ethnic minorities in police organizations across the country. The hierarchical regression method was used to investigate three antecedent attitudinal factors, in addition to demographic factors, in four analytic models. Findings of the third and fourth (last two) models indicated that only one demographic factor, "years in law enforcement", predicted likelihood of support for AA. Class antecedent attitude was a significant predictor of support for AA in model 3, but it was fully mediated in model 4. Race-ethnic antecedent attitude emerged as the strongest predictor of likelihood of support for AA in the fourth model which accounted for 38 percent of likelihood of support for AA. A major take away from this study is that while a favorable attitude toward the use of social class as an external condition of reward distribution may have its merits, it is the positive attitude toward the use of race-ethnicity as a factor of reward distribution and years in law enforcement that ultimately predicted the likelihood of support for the voluntary practice of AA.