Abstract
Black Americans are a core Democratic constituency, despite holding views on social issues that put them in conflict with the party. Conventional wisdom attributes this partisan commitment to the salience of race and concerns about racial inequality. This paper considers whether the Democratic bias derives in part from low levels of political knowledge. Using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study, this paper examines how political knowledge moderates the relationship between social issue cross-pressures and partisan attitudes among Black Americans. I demonstrate that the extent to which Democratic allegiance persists despite policy disagreements depends on whether blacks are sufficiently knowledgeable to act on their policy views, and not simply on the importance that blacks assign to their racial commitments. It is only among politically knowledgeable Black Americans that social issue cross-pressures are at all politically consequential; for them, Democratic partisanship is resilient but not immune to policy disagreements. For blacks with low levels of political knowledge, partisan support is unaffected by policy disagreements. This pattern is most pronounced among religiously active Black Evangelicals, for whom social issues are highly salient.
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Notes
Tate (2010) argues that Blacks are becoming more conservative on social welfare issues. But, on balance, they remain liberal, when viewed relative to whites and relative to their opinions on social and cultural issues.
Although FDR secured more than two-thirds of the Black vote in his election bids, the majority of African Americans continued to self-identify as Republicans (Hajnal and Lee 2011). As late as 1960, nearly a quarter of Black respondents to the American National Election Study described themselves as Republican.
A notable exception to the lack of direct Black leadership on social issues is Julian Bond’s 2009 speech at the National Equality Rally in which he equated homophobia to racism and declared that ‘no people of good will should oppose marriage equality’.
Hajnal and Lee (2011) document a growing propensity among Blacks to reject partisan labels altogether and self-identify as Independents. This rejection, they argue, is motivated not by views on moral and social issues but by perceptions of waning Democratic advocacy on racial issues. Notably, their analysis of relationship between partisan identification and social issues, such as gay rights, does not take political information into account.
The Bush–Kerry Favorability scale has a Cronbach’s alpha of .90, indicating high reliability. The reliability coefficients for the constituent scales are .93 (Kerry items) and .92 (Bush items).
Ideology and Gay Marriage are the only items that were included in each wave of the NAES rolling cross-section, from October 7, 2003–November 16, 2004. The schedule for the other items was as follows: Abortion (10/7/03–9/20/04); Vouchers (10/7/03–9/19/04); Favor Feminists (10/7/03–6/24/04, for two-thirds of the sample; 6/25/04–8/19/04, for one-quarter of the sample); Favor Gay Groups (10/7/03–6/24/04, for two-thirds of the sample; 6/25/04–9/19/04, for one-quarter of the sample) Other social policy items, e.g. stem cell research, available in the NAES were not included in this analysis because the items appeared in too few waves and/or were asked of only a small subsample of the black respondents.
The Cronbach’s alpha for the four-item factual knowledge scale is .58.
I have replicated this analysis using respondents answers to the series of four factual knowledge questions. (The factual knowledge questions asked the respondent to identify then-Vice President Dick Cheney; the role of the Supreme Court; the votes required to override a presidential veto; and the majority party in the House of Representatives.) The results are substantively unchanged, though more pronounced. Althaus (2003) constructs knowledge scales that combine the subjective interviewer assessment with factual items (see also Claassen and Highton (2009); Zaller (1992)). A similar approach, if pursued here, would reduce the sample size by two-thirds, from 6,550 to 2,463 black respondents. The reliability of interviewer ratings makes that approach unnecessary.
In a few waves of the survey (between 9/21/04–11/16/04), a random subset of the cross-section was asked about the positions of presidential candidates on abortion. Eight hundred and forty-seven Black respondents received this question.
Analysis available from author upon request.
These parsimonious models are not meant to predict individual-level partisan attitudes. Rather, the models are intended to capture differences in partisan attitudes between social conservative and social liberals, under conditions of low- or high-information.
Each graph reports the first differences simulated based on the results from six separate regressions, each estimating the relationship between a given partisan attitude (e.g. Party ID in Fig. 1a) and one of the social issue indicators, controlling for demographic covariates and interview date. To avoid out-of-sample predictions, I simulate first differences using values that appear in the dataset (i.e. the 25th and 75th percentile positions), rather than the minimum and maximum of a given scale.
The 2004 NAES did not include items measuring racial attitudes (e.g racial linked fate). As a result, it is not possible to model the relationship between racial and partisan attitudes, and examine this claim directly.
A total of 24 models were estimated, six for each of the four dependent variables (Party ID, Bush Job, Bush Vote, Bush–Kerry Favorability). In each of the six models, a given dependent variable was regressed on either Abortion, Gay Marriage, Vouchers, Favor Feminists, Favor Gay Groups or Ideology, in addition to information, the policy-information interaction terms, demographic covariates and interview date.
For the models of Party ID, 3 of 6 likelihood ratio tests identify statistically significant differences in the fit of restricted and unrestricted models; for Bush Vote, 1 of 6 tests identify statistically significant improvements in model fit.
Analysis of Black NAES respondents demonstrates that frequent churchgoers are statistically significantly less likely to offer ‘Don’t Know’ or ‘Neither Favor Nor Oppose’ responses to the policy items, a pattern consistent with the higher salience of social issues among the religiously active. Regression results available from author upon request.
I credit an anonymous reviewer for this insight.
Sixty-one percent of Black respondents identify as born-again or evangelical Christians, a figure consistent with McDaniel and Ellison (2008, pp. 182–183)’s claim that ‘African Americans are much more likely than Anglos to hold orthodox theological beliefs.’ Nearly two-thirds of black evangelicals report attending church one or more times per week, compared with only 30 % of non-evangelicals.
For example, among low knowledge, low-church attendance Evangelicals, in only 1 of 24 cases is a change in policy view associated with a statistically significant difference in partisan attitude. For high-knowledge, low- church attendance Evangelicals the figure is 11 of 24.
The 2004 NAES includes neither measures of racial policy preferences (e.g. opinion toward affirmative action) nor measures of racial group consciousness (e.g. racial linked fate).
The political knowledge scale for white NAES respondents has a mean (standard deviation) of 3.81 [1.03], with 65.5 % of respondents scoring grades of A or B and 10.5 % of respondents scoring grades of D or F. (The figures for blacks are 53.5 and 17.9 %, respectively.)
The subjectivity of the interviewer ratings also means that it is not possible to establish with certainty a respondent’s command of factual information about politics, although factual knowledge and interviewer ratings are shown above to be positively correlated (for the subset of respondents who were asked factual knowledge questions). Respondents judged by the interviewer to be uninformed about politics, and who exhibit a weak party–policy relationship, may misperceive party positions or be unaware of them. I credit an anonymous reviewer for this insight.
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Gay, C. Knowledge Matters: Policy Cross-pressures and Black Partisanship. Polit Behav 36, 99–124 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9227-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9227-3