Voter ID and Race, Part 1

With the election coming up in two weeks, voter ID laws are back in the news. The Supreme Court has accepted or rejected state voter suppression laws in a seemingly random pattern, without explaining their rationale. In news stories about voter ID, the corporate media typically demonstrate false balancing. They fail to examine Republican claims that voter impersonation is a problem. (It is not.) They report but don't evaluate the Democrats' argument that voter ID laws suppress turnout among key Democratic constituencies, such as the poor, minorities, and college students. (There is evidence to support this claim.) While the media sometimes imply that these laws are politically motivated, new evidence suggests that they may also be motivated by racial prejudice. These studies confirm every bad thing you suspected about voter ID laws.

In a new study, David Wilson and his colleagues at the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication (CPC) used cognitive priming to test the prejudice hypothesis. Their experiment was embedded in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, managed by computer by YouGov/Polimetrix. They had 1436 US adult respondents, 1100 of whom were White. The White participants were randomly assigned to one of three versions of a question asking them whether they favor or oppose voter ID laws. For one-third of the respondents, the question was accompanied by a photo of a White voter and poll worker. For another third, the voter and poll worker were African-American. The remainder of the participants were not shown any image. The photos and the wording of the question are shown in the results table below.

Support for voter ID laws was quite high. Most importantly, when given the Black prime, a reminder of the fact that African-Americans vote, the White respondents were more in favor of voter ID laws than when given the White prime or no prime at all. The fact that the race of the prime was manipulated in a true experiment suggests that race plays a causal role in attitudes toward voter ID.

These results are consistent with an earlier correlational study by Wilson and Brewer. This was a 2012 telephone survey of 906 adult Americans conducted by the CPC. Particpants were asked their party affiliation (Democrat, Republican or Independent) and their political ideology (liberal, moderate or conservative). White respondents were also given a three item measure of racial resentment similar to the Symbolic Racism Scale:

• I resent any special considerations that African Americans receive because it's unfair to other Americans.
• Special considerations for African Americans place me at an unfair disadvantage because I have done nothing to harm them.
• African Americans bring up race only when they need to make an excuse for their failure.

As indicated in the chart, Republicans and conservatives supported voter ID laws more than Democrats and liberals. There was also a significant correlation between racial resentment and support for voter ID. Racial resentment was higher among Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and liberals, with Independents and moderates in the middle. However, racial resentment still had a significant effect on attitudes toward voter ID laws even when controlling for political partisanship, ideology and several other demographic variables. Interestingly, racial resentment had a greater effect on the attitudes of Democrats and liberals, since Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly support voter ID laws regardless of how much racial resentment they express.

Of course, public opinion does not automatically translate in social policy. Please see Part 2 of this post.

You may also be interested in reading:

Voter ID and Race, Part 2

Don't Forget Not to Vote

Old-Fashioned Racism