Racial Attitudes and Health Care
Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler write:
As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.
Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.
Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.
No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.
It would be silly to assert that all, or even most, opposition to President Obama, including his plans for health care reform, is motivated by the color of his skin. But our research suggests that a key to understanding people’s feelings about partisan politics runs far deeper than the mere pros and cons of actual policy proposals. It is also about a collision of worldviews.
On the “collision of worldviews,” see their new book, Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics.
Comments
More embarrassing spurious correlations from political science.
Did the authors consider the myriad Z variables that give rise to both racial attitudes AND policy attitudes?
Probably not in any detail, because then the association would have disappeared, and the authors commitment to a specific finding would have been undermined.
This kind of work is just, well, really incomplete, and possibly just bad.
Posted by: Millard F. | September 21, 2009 02:43 PM
I don’t see why these correlations are necessarily spurious, nor do I see evidence that the sorts of variables Millard F. mentions were ignored.
I did wonder similarly, though. Did the methodology and data really lead to the racial conclusion, as reported here?
Posted by: Julie | September 21, 2009 03:49 PM
Millard raises a good point. There are a few things, notably ideology and party identification, that are correlated with both opinions on health care and racial resentment. Although the Washington Post was for obvious reasons not interested in a fully specified model for our blog post, we, in fact, did estimate one. And, not surprising to us, the relationship between racial resentment and health care preferences remained statistically significant and substantively large.
I think, though, we can get some leverage on the problem just by considering the bivariate case. Why would the correlation between racial resentment and preferences for a more government run health care system be about -.15 in 1996 but about -.40 in 2008? Anyone who works with survey data knows that a .4 correlation is very, very strong.
Posted by: Marc Hetherington | September 21, 2009 04:17 PM
I wonder how the 1990s debate was framed. I was too young to have a good recollection of it. The current discussion seems to spend a lot of time making the moral argument about insuring people who can’t afford access. I’ve had several conversations with otherwise fairly liberal people who are concerned about decreasing their access to health care en route to providing it for others. In short, I wonder if this framing is tapping into the feelings people have about welfare — which are undoubtably racialized for many people.
Posted by: Jason | September 21, 2009 08:40 PM
Why would the correlation between racial resentment and preferences for a more government run health care system be about -.15 in 1996 but about -.40 in 2008?
Here’s a partial answer:
Percent of white Southerners calling themselves Democrats in 1996: 33.
Percent of white Southerners calling themselves Democrats in 2008: 22.
Posted by: Seth | September 22, 2009 12:48 AM
We found similar patterns regarding attitudes on immigration, adjusting for several confounding variables and different indicators of immigration preferences.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122512589/abstract
One explanation is that policy attitudes become racialized when the perceived benefiting group is a minority.
Posted by: Keith | September 22, 2009 09:33 AM