Suchergebnisse

Examines attitudes of Blacks and Whites towards race-targeted policies, such as affirmative action in higher education, racial quotas in education, government aid and spending to assist Blacks, school integration, and equal treatment in hiring; some focus on consequences of political distrust; uses National Election Study (NES) data from 1990-94.

Polarization is at an all-time high in the United States. But contrary to popular belief, Americans are polarized not so much in their policy preferences as in their feelings toward their political opponents: To an unprecedented degree, Republicans and Democrats simply do not like one another. No surprise that these deeply held negative feelings are central to the recent (also unprecedented) plunge in congressional productivity. The past three Congresses have gotten less done than any since scholars began measuring congressional productivity. In Why Washington Won't Work, Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph argue that a contemporary crisis of trust--people whose party is out of power have almost no trust in a government run by the other side--has deadlocked Congress. On most issues, party leaders can convince their own party to support their positions. In order to pass legislation, however, they must also create consensus by persuading some portion of the opposing party to trust in their vision for the future. Without trust, consensus fails to develop and compromise does not occur. Up until recently, such trust could still usually be found among the opposition, but not anymore. Political trust, the authors show, is far from a stable characteristic. It's actually highly variable and contingent on a variety of factors, including whether one's party is in control, which part of the government one is dealing with, and which policies or events are most salient at the moment. Political trust increases, for example, when the public is concerned with foreign policy--as in times of war--and it decreases in periods of weak economic performance. Hetherington and Rudolph do offer some suggestions about steps politicians and the public might take to increase political trust. Ultimately, however, they conclude that it is unlikely levels of political trust will significantly increase unless foreign concerns come to dominate and the economy is consistently strong.

Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews - what guides people's view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in what Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe as authoritarianism. They show that differences of opinion concerning the most provocative issues on the contemporary issue agenda - about race, gay marriage, illegal immigration, and the use of force to resolve security problems - reflect differences in individuals' levels of authoritarianism. Events and strategic political decisions have conspired to make all these considerations more salient. The authors demonstrate that the left and the right have coalesced around these opposing worldviews, which has provided politics with more incandescent hues than before

AbstractWe seek to understand the extent to which affective polarization is driven by in-group love or out-group hate and whether it varies across context. The answer may, in turn, allow us to evaluate how well the fundamental premises of social identity theory mesh with different manifestations of affective polarization. Using an experiment to analyze partisans' trust judgments, we find that the amount of affective polarization and the dominant mechanism underlying it varies by context—whether political or nonpolitical. We find that affective polarization is nearly twice as strong in political settings as in nonpolitical settings. In addition, although affective polarization reflects a blend of both in-party love and out-party hate in both contexts, we find that in-party love is the more dominant source of polarization in nonpolitical settings while out-party hate is the more dominant source in political settings. The latter finding causes us to question how well-suited social identity theory is for understanding polarization in the political sphere.

Using a scale of child rearing preferences, scholars find that African Americans are far more authoritarian than Whites. We argue that this racial gap in authoritarianism is largely a measurement artifact. The child rearing scale now used to measure authoritarianism is cross-racially invalid because it draws heavily on a metaphor about hierarchy. Akin to someone who favors enforcing conformity in a child, the authoritarian is thought to be inclined toward enforcing conformity in social subordinates. In both cases, one's perspective is drawn from a position of relative power. We believe this metaphor is effective among members of a majority racial group becauseindividualdominance at home meshes withgroupdominance in society. For members of a racial minority, we believe this metaphor breaks down. Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we establish that Blacks and Whites construe the child rearing items differently. Consequently, authoritarianism correlates highly with the things it should for Whites, but rarely so for Blacks. Using an illegal immigration experiment, we then show divergent patterns of intolerance based on the same child rearing scale. Our results highlight measurement's role in producing large racial gaps in authoritarianism, while illuminating the racial boundaries of the child rearing scale.