Beliefs about Racial Discrimination and Support for Pro-Black Policies

Haaland, Ingar; Roth, Christopher

doi:10.1162/rest_a_01036

Cited by 55 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Similarly, 35% of the Democrats overestimated the number of deaths in the US compared to 27% of the Republicans. These results suggest that exposure to the same information can correct for partisan gap in estimating the gravity of a crisis, in line with recent studies (Haaland and Roth, 2019). We also find a directional, although not significant, change in the way respondents judged the gravity of the crisis and the success of the response by public authorities as a result of this intervention.…”

Section: Information Processing and The Interpretation Of Realitysupporting

confidence: 90%

Living and perceiving a crisis: how the pandemic influenced Americans' preferences and beliefs

Briscese¹,

Grignani²,

Stapleton³

2022

Preprint

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Crises can cause important societal changes by shifting citizens' preferences and beliefs, but how such change happens remains an open question. Following a representative sample of Americans in a longitudinal multi-wave survey throughout 2020, we find that citizens reduced trust in public institutions and became more supportive of government spending after being directly impacted by the crisis, such as when they lost a sizeable portion of their income or knew someone hospitalized with the virus. These shifts occurred very rapidly, sometimes in a matter of weeks, and persisted over time. We also record an increase in the partisan gap on the same outcomes, which can be largely explained by misperceptions about the crisis inflated by the consumption of partisan leaning news. In an experiment, we expose respondents to the same source of information and find that it successfully recalibrates perceptions, with persistent effects. We complement our analysis by employing machine learning to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects, and show that our findings are robust to several specifications and estimation strategies. In sum, both lived experiences and media inflated misperceptions can alter citizens' beliefs rapidly during a crisis.

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Section: Information Processing and The Interpretation Of Realitysupporting

confidence: 90%

Living and perceiving a crisis: how the pandemic influenced Americans' preferences and beliefs

Briscese¹,

Grignani²,

Stapleton³

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…11 For recent examples, see Armantier et al (2016); Delavande and Zafar (2018); Fuster et al (2018); Andre et al (2019); Armona et al (2019); Roth and Wohlfart (2020); Roth et al (2021). 2021) 12 , and the amount of discrimination faced by Black Americans in the labor market (Haaland and Roth, 2021). 13 Moreover, our fourth finding--that providing accurate information fails to change behavior--echoes the null result obtained by Alesina et al (2018) and Hopkins et al (2019), albeit in a very different context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Race and Redistribution in the United States: An Experimental Analysis

Akesson¹,

Hahn

Metcalfe

et al. 2022

SSRN Journal

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Race and Redistribution in the United States: An Experimental Analysis

Åkesson¹,

Hahn²,

Metcalfe³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Scholars have suggested that White American support for welfare is related to beliefs about the racial composition of welfare recipients. While a host of observational studies lend credence to this view, it has not yet been tested using the tools of randomized inference. In this study, we do this by conducting two incentive-compatible experiments (n = 9,775) in which different participants are randomly given different signals about the share of welfare recipients who identify as Black and White. Our analysis yields four main findings. First, 86% of respondentsgreatly overestimate the share of welfare recipients who are Black, with the average respondent overestimating this by almost a factor of two. Second, White support for welfare is inversely related to the proportion of welfare recipients who are Black—a causal claim that we establish using treatment assignment as an instrument for beliefs about the racial composition of welfare recipients. Third, just making White participants think about the racial composition of welfare recipients reduces their support for welfare. Fourth, providing White respondents with accurateinformation about the racial composition of welfare recipients (relative to not receiving any information) does not significantly influence their support for welfare.

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Beliefs about Racial Discrimination and Support for Pro-Black Policies

Cited by 55 publications

References 44 publications

Living and perceiving a crisis: how the pandemic influenced Americans' preferences and beliefs

Living and perceiving a crisis: how the pandemic influenced Americans' preferences and beliefs

Race and Redistribution in the United States: An Experimental Analysis

Race and Redistribution in the United States: An Experimental Analysis

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