685186 research-article2017
PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916685186Political Research QuarterlyWallsten et al.
Article
Prejudice or Principled Conservatism? Racial Resentment and White Opinion toward Paying College Athletes
Political Research Quarterly 2017, Vol. 70(1) 209–222 © 2017 University of Utah Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912916685186 DOI: 10.1177/1065912916685186 journals.sagepub.com/home/prq
Kevin Wallsten1, Tatishe M. Nteta2, Lauren A. McCarthy2, and Melinda R. Tarsi3
Abstract Despite its widespread use in studies of race and ethnic politics, there exists a long-standing debate about whether racial resentment primarily measures antiblack prejudice or ideological conservatism. In this paper, we attempt to resolve this debate by examining racial resentment’s role in shaping white opinion on a “racialized” policy issue that involves no federal action and no government redistribution of resources: “pay for play” in college athletics. Using cross-sectional and experimental data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we find evidence not only that racial resentment items tap racial predispositions but also that whites rely on these predispositions when forming and expressing their views on paying college athletes. More specifically, we demonstrate that racially resentful whites who were subtly primed to think about African Americans are more likely to express opposition to paying college athletes when compared with similarly resentful whites who were primed to think about whites. Because free-market conservatism, resistance to changes in the status quo, opposition to expanding federal power, and reluctance to endorse government redistributive policies cannot possibly explain these results, we conclude that racial resentment is a valid measure of antiblack prejudice. Keywords public opinion, conservatism, racial resentment, college athletes, racial policies
Introduction The United States has witnessed a sea change in whites’ racial attitudes over the last half-century. In one of the signature shifts of American public opinion, overwhelming majorities of whites have renounced beliefs about the biological inferiority of African Americans, rejected institutionalized forms of discrimination, and endorsed norms of racial and ethnic equality (Schuman et al. 1997). Despite this evolution in attitudes, however, many scholars claim that antiblack prejudice still plays a prominent role in shaping how whites see the political world. Specifically, a large body of research shows that racial resentment—a subtle form of racism justified by the belief that African Americans make excessive demands on government and violate cherished American values— shapes white opinion on everything from criminal justice policy (Green, Staerkle, and Sears 2006) to gun ownership (O’Brien et al. 2013). The measurement of racial resentment has been the subject of numerous methodological debates over the last thirty years (Sears and Henry 2005). Although some scholars argue that the survey items used to measure
racial resentment provide a valid method for assessing antiblack prejudice, others argue that the items reveal little more than a respondent’s commitment to ideological conservatism (Carmines, Sniderman, and Easter 2011; Feldman and Huddy 2005; Schuman 2000; Sniderman et al. 1991; Sniderman and Piazza 1995; Sniderman and Tetlock 1986). The debate about racial resentment has produced more heat than light over the last few decades, however. We believe that this contentiousness is largely a function of the fact that scholars have chosen poor testing grounds on which to conduct their evaluations of the concept’s validity. Specifically, empirical work on the role that racial resentment plays in shaping white opinions frequently 1
California State University, Long Beach, USA University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA 3 Bridgewater State University, MA, USA 2
Corresponding Author: Tatishe M. Nteta, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 408 Thompson Hall, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. Email:
[email protected]
210 focuses on issues involving explicit (or implicit) redistributive action by the federal government on behalf of African Americans. Given that racial resentment “[melds] ordinary conservatism with some racial animosity” (Valentino and Sears 2005, 674), it is invariably difficult for these studies to definitively identify whether there is a prejudicial component to racial resentment (Sniderman and Tetlock 1986; Zigerell 2015). Do the questions typically used to assess racial resentment provide valid measures of white racial prejudice? To answer this question, we examine racial resentment’s role in shaping white opinion on a “racialized” policy issue with no federal involvement and no government redistribution of resources: “pay for play” in college athletics. Relying on cross-sectional and experimental data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we find evidence not only that racial resentment items tap racial predispositions but also that whites rely on these predispositions when forming and expressing their views on paying college athletes. More specifically, we demonstrate that racially resentful whites who were subtly primed to think about African Americans are more likely to express opposition to paying college athletes when compared with similarly resentful whites who were primed to think about whites. Because key elements of contemporary conservatism cannot possibly explain these results, we conclude that racial resentment is in fact a valid measure of antiblack prejudice.
Background on National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Compensation Policies In 2016, the NCAA announced an eight-year, $8.8-billion extension to their existing fourteen-year, $10.8-billion agreement with CBS and Turner Sports to broadcast the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. In 2012, ESPN secured the media rights to college football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) by agreeing to a twelveyear, $7-billion contract with the nation’s top football conferences. These contracts represent only the most recent and noteworthy examples of the manner in which the NCAA, individual athletic conferences, and universities have generated huge revenue through broadcasting deals, televised tournaments, corporate sponsorships, and ticket and merchandise sales. According to some reporting, college athletics is now one of the most profitable businesses in all of sports.1 Although professional sports leagues allocate 40 to 50 percent of their revenues from broadcast rights, merchandising, and ticket sales to players, the NCAA’s principle of amateurism prevents college athletes from sharing in any of the NCAA’s profits (Edelman 2013). The stark inequities of the current financing model have led a number of
Political Research Quarterly 70(1) college athletes to openly question the legality of the NCAA’s practices in recent years (Branch 2011; Edelman 2013; Nocera and Strauss 2016). In 2009, for example, former University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) basketball player Ed O’Bannon filed a class action lawsuit against the NCAA and the gaming company EA Sports, which argued that the NCAA violated antitrust law by failing to compensate current and former college athletes for using their likenesses in video games.2 In 2014, football players from Northwestern University successfully petitioned a regional director at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to be certified as employees of the university so that they could vote on forming a union.3 The broadening debate over the treatment of college athletes is between, on one side, the NCAA and the universities it represents and, on the other, college athletes and their advocates. The NCAA argues that college athletes are “students first and athletes second” and that their payment is delivered in the form of scholarships. According to the NCAA, the institution of a “pay for play” program would undermine the mission of the university by turning amateur athletes into professionals. In addition, the NCAA argues that most college sports do not bring in enough revenue to break even, and paying players would only serve to make the few programs that do unattractive to fans and, therefore, insolvent. On the contrary, college athletes argue that they work hours that are equivalent to a full-time job, leaving them little control over their schedules and little time to take advantage of the educational opportunities provided to them through their scholarships. Meanwhile, proponents of “pay for play” argue that universities profit greatly from the seemingly endless well of low-cost labor in the form of gate revenues, corporate sponsorships, and sale of merchandise. In addition, college athletes argue that many scholarships do not cover the full costs of attending college and are unfairly based on year-to-year performance (Branch 2011; Edelman 2013; Nocera and Strauss 2016). The issue of increasing financial compensation for college athletes is implicitly about race because the perceived but unspoken beneficiaries of any change to the current system are African Americans. Indeed, African American men are dramatically overrepresented in the ranks of the NCAA football and basketball programs relative to their numbers in the overall collegiate population. For instance, in the nation’s six largest athletic conferences between the years 2007 and 2010, African American men were only 2.8 percent of full-time degree seeking undergraduate students but represented 57.1 percent football teams and 64.3 percent of basketball teams (Harper, Williams, and Blackman 2011). According to data provided by the NCAA on Division 1 teams, in 2013–2014, African Americans were the plurality racial group (47%) in men’s college football and the majority racial group on
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Wallsten et al. men’s college basketball teams (58%). The large number of African Americans in these high-profile and profitgenerating college sports means that debates about the financial benefits provided to college athletes are likely to be implicitly about race for most white Americans. In this sense, the debate over paying college athletes is similar to other “racialized” issues, such as welfare, health care, and criminal justice, in which whites view African Americans as the central beneficiaries of policy reform (Gilens 1999; Tesler 2012; Winter 2008).
Racial Resentment Literature Decades of social science research have shown that racial resentment drives white opinion on a diverse array of policy issues and correlates with a surprising number of ostensibly race-neutral political behaviors. In the last two decades, for example, scholars have found evidence that racial resentment predicts opposition to welfare policies (Kinder and Sanders 1996), resistance to expanding health care benefits (Tesler 2012), support for more punitive criminal policies (Unnever and Cullen 2007), opposition to gun control laws (Filindra and Kaplan 2016), hostility toward black candidates (Ford, Maxwell, and Shields 2010; Tesler and Sears 2010) and Tea Party membership (Tope, Pickett, and Chiricos 2015). Each of these studies treats racial resentment as a valid measure of antiblack bias and concludes that the presence of a statistically significant effect for racial resentment items indicates the continued importance of racial prejudice in shaping white opinion and political behavior. The empirical work on racial resentment has been the subject of countless methodological and theoretical debates (Sears and Henry 2005). For critics of the concept, the survey items that measure racial resentment are more likely to reflect a respondent’s commitment to conservative ideals than they are to reflect the amount of racial animus a respondent has for African Americans (Feldman and Huddy 2005; Sniderman et al. 1991; Sniderman and Piazza 1995; Sniderman and Tetlock 1986). From this perspective, the fact that empirical work often finds a statistically significant relationship between racial resentment and policy preferences with a heavily ideological component is at once unsurprising and uninformative (Carmines, Sniderman, and Easter 2011; Schuman 2000). Perhaps the most withering critique of the empirical research on racial resentment is provided by Zigerell (2015). Unlike other challenges to the validity of racial resentment measures, Zigerell does not fundamentally question the notion that the racial resentment indices used in existing studies contain some element of racial bias (p. 521). What Zigerell shows, however, is that the substantive significance of racial resentment often drops “to the
level of noise” on “racialized” dependent variables, such as opinions on welfare spending, health care reform, and immigration policy, once the appropriate controls and calibrations are added to the analysis (p. 532). This evidence suggests that racial resentment may not in fact contain a strong racial component.4 For proponents of the concept, racial resentment items are primarily a measure of antiblack bias and are not tainted by ideology in any particularly problematic way. Proponents of this view typically argue that even if racial resentment does have a marginal ideological component, it can be easily purged through the use of a relatively small number of statistical controls (Rabinowitz et al. 2009; Sears et al. 1997; Valentino and Sears 2005). From this perspective, empirical studies showing a significant effect for racial resentment items in analyses predicting opinion on explicitly and implicitly racialized issues confirm the validity of racial resentment as a measure of racial prejudice.
NCAA Compensation Policies as a Critical Case for Racial Resentment Debates about racial resentment have produced little scholarly consensus concerning the validity of racial resentment as a measure of racial prejudice (Carmines, Sniderman, and Easter 2011). Part of the disagreement undoubtedly stems from the fact that almost every empirical study analyzes racial resentment’s impact on “racialized” policy issues that involve expanding the role and power of the federal government (primarily, though not exclusively or explicitly, to redistribute scarce resources for the benefit of racial and ethnic minority groups). The existing literature’s focus on policies of this kind makes it difficult to disentangle whether the consistently demonstrated effect of racial resentment on white opinion is evidence of long-standing racial prejudice or principled conservative opposition. This problem is compounded by the fact that it is nearly impossible to sufficiently control for all of the dimensions of conservatism that are likely included in measures of racial resentment. As a result, it becomes nearly impossible to “cleanly assess the unique effects of racism” using an index of racial resentment (Zigerell 2015, 534). Two features of the “pay for play” issue make it an attractive case for disentangling the complicated relationship between the racial prejudice and the ideological conservatism components of racial resentment. First, due to the fact that financial compensation for college athletes is dictated by a private, nongovernmental entity—the NCAA—attitudes toward the federal government should not be activated in the minds of survey respondents. Second, because increased financial compensation from the NCAA benefits college athletes—a group that is seen
212 to be hard working, dedicated, and highly skilled (Branch 2011; Nocera and Strauss 2016)—attitudes toward government redistributive policies should also not be activated. In short, although NCAA compensation policies are similar to welfare, health care, and criminal justice in their implicitly racialized character, they are unlikely to activate the same confounds associated with the conservative component of racial resentment. It is essential to point out here that although increasing financial compensation for college athletes does not activate attitudes about federal power or government redistributive policies, it does present new confounds by activating two other conservative predispositions potentially contained within the racial resentment questions: (1) resistance to change and (2) affinity for free-market capitalism. Although there is no consensus on how political conservatism should be defined, Jost et al. (2003) provide a useful starting point by distinguishing between so-called “core” and “peripheral” elements of conservatism. According to Jost et al. (2003, 384), the “core” feature of conservative ideology is resistance to change. As they write, “from Burke to Buckley and from Lincoln to Huntington, it has been widely assumed that, ceteris paribus, conservatives favor the status quo.” The “peripheral” elements of conservatism change based on context. In the contemporary United States, they include, among other things, opposition to expanding federal power and support for free markets (McCloskey and Zaller 1984; Stenner 2009; Zumbrunnen and Gangl 2008). In short, although our focus on paying college athletes controls for the potentially confounding impact of attitudes about the federal government and its use of redistributive policies to benefit minority groups, it is not a perfect instrument for assessing whether racial resentment is a measure of whites’ racial prejudice or a reflection of their conservative attachments. Despite these problems, “pay for play” possesses a number of advantages when compared with policies traditionally used in studies of racial resentment. The vast majority of empirical studies on racial resentment focus on issues, such as welfare spending, health care reform, affirmative action, and gun control, in which both the core and peripheral pillars of American conservatism work in unison to push conservatives in the direction of opposition. On the issue of paying college athletes, however, these key conservative principles may pull people in different directions. On one hand, American conservatives may oppose paying college athletes because they view this change as a direct assault on a long-standing and popular institution: college athletics. Fearing the consequences that a revolutionary change may have on the future of college sports, conservatives may staunchly oppose any and all efforts to alter the status quo and expand financial compensation for athletes.
Political Research Quarterly 70(1) On the other hand, conservatives may support increasing financial compensation for college athletes due to the fact that the current system violates key tenets of a freemarket economy, most notably the notion that people should be free to receive adequate and fair compensation for their labor. Indeed, as the NCAA’s profits have grown over the years, an increasing number of observers have argued that rules against paying college athletes are violations of free-market principles (Becker 2011; Belzer and Schwarz 2012; Hruby 2012; Sanderson and Siegfried 2015). Regardless of the specific relationship between conservatism and support for increasing college athletes’ financial compensation, however, the fact that these attitudes are very likely to be activated by asking about the NCAA’s policies means that we must control for them in our attempt to assess whether racial resentment measures racial prejudice.
Hypotheses Does racial resentment measure antiblack effect or ideological conservatism? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question by studying an issue that does not activate the two primary sources of confounding conservatism— feelings toward the federal government and feelings about redistributive policies—in the racial resentment measure. As discussed above, however, the “pay for play” issue is likely to activate an alternative set of conservative commitments: support for free-market ideals and support for the status quo. Interestingly, these two dimensions of conservatism predict differing responses to the issue of paying college athletes. Taken together, these various attributes provide us with the leverage needed to evaluate the idea that racial resentment measures antiblack bias. Using the existing literature as a guide, we hypothesize that if racial resentment measures prejudice in the way assumed by most contemporary studies, more resentful whites should more strongly oppose NCAA compensation policies that are widely perceived to benefit blacks. As discussed above, we have a similar expectation about whether racial resentment has no prejudicial component at all and, instead, primarily measures conservative resistance to change. We state this hypothesis more formally as follows: Hypothesis 1 (H1): High levels of racial resentment will be associated with high levels of opposition to paying college athletes. By contrast, if racial resentment primarily taps into support for free-market principles instead of racial prejudice or resistance to change, more “resentful” whites should more strongly support revisions to the NCAA’s compensation policies.
Wallsten et al. Hypothesis 2 (H2): High levels of racial resentment will be associated with low levels of opposition to paying college athletes. These different approaches to understanding racial resentment make different predictions about how white respondents will react to racial cues in the context of an experiment as well. Viewing racial resentment as a measure of antiblack affect leads us to expect that increases in racial resentment will lead those primed to think about African Americans to greater opposition to paying college athletes. Racial resentment should demonstrate no such effect among those primed to think about whites. Hypothesis 3 (H3): Increases in racial resentment will lead whites to express greater opposition to paying college athletes only when they are primed to think about African Americans. If racial resentment measures resistance to changes in the status quo, we should expect all whites to respond in the same way to racial primes. Specifically, we hypothesize the following: Hypothesis 4 (H4): Increases in racial resentment will lead whites to express greater opposition to paying college athletes regardless of whether they are primed to think about African Americans or not. Finally, if racial resentment is mostly a measure of support for free-market principles, white respondents should increase their support for paying college athletes independent of which groups they are primed to think about. Hypothesis 5 (H5): Increases in racial resentment will lead individuals to express less opposition to paying college athletes regardless of whether they are primed to think about African Americans or not. In the studies that follow, results that support H1 and H3 will suggest that racial resentment contains a significant prejudicial component. Results supporting H2, H4, or H5 will significantly damage the claim that racial resentment measures antiblack bias.
Data and Measures In testing these hypotheses, we first rely on data from a module of the 2014 CCES. The CCES is an online survey of more than fifty-five thousand Americans conducted by YouGov on behalf of more than forty colleges and universities. Our particular survey module was administered to one thousand respondents in the pre- and postelection
213 phases of the survey. Given our interest in the opinions of white Americans, we focus our attention here exclusively on the 674 respondents who self-identified in the CCES as white. Our dependent variable of interest tapped a respondent’s opinion on a policy that seeks to increase financial compensation for college athletes. Specifically, respondents were asked to indicate their level of agreement with the statement, “Some people believe that college athletes should receive salaries in addition to their scholarship. Others disagree with this position and believe that college athletes should only receive scholarships. Do you agree or disagree that college athletes should receive a salary in addition to their scholarship?” In our analyses, this item is scaled from 0 to 1, with 1 representing the highest level of opposition to the policy in question. To accurately assess whether racial predispositions play a role in predicting white opinion on “pay for play,” we also measured a number of other theoretically important concepts. We were interested, for example, in exploring the impact of self-interest on NCAA policy opinions. Following in the footsteps of previous studies of public opinion (Chong, Citrin, and Conley 2001), we included a measure of self-interest in the 2014 CCES that asked whether a respondent is or was a college athlete. To control for the effect a respondent had toward the key groups involved in the “pay for play” issue, we included two feeling thermometers: one asking about the NCAA and one asking about college athletes. We also included an item that measured the extent to which a respondent is interested in college sports. Finally, to explore whether people who attended universities with major athletic programs express distinct opinions on paying college athletes, we asked respondents with an undergraduate college degree for the name of the institution they received their degree from. These responses were then used to separate out alumni of the universities that make up the “Power Five” athletic conferences from alumni of non–“Power Five” schools.5 Our primary independent variable measures a respondent’s level of racial resentment. In measuring the concept of racial resentment, we use an index of three questions that have featured prominently in the literature on racial resentment (Sears and Henry 2005). The first item asked respondents whether they support the statement “The Irish, Italians, Jews, and many other minorities overcame prejudice, and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.” Our second item asked respondents whether they agree with the statement “It is really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they could be as well-off as whites.” Our final measure asked respondents whether they agree with the statement “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that
214 make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” The index composed of responses to these three items is scaled from 0 to 1, with 1 representing high levels of racial resentment and 0 representing low levels.6
Findings Study 1: 2014 CCES Preelection Survey. What are whites’ views on providing increased financial compensation to college athletes? Consistent with previous surveys (Prewitt 2014), we found that a majority of whites oppose paying college athletes (57.7%). To explore the origins of white opinion on this issue, we ran an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model that controlled for all of the previously discussed, individual-level variables. As the results in Table 1 show, age and education were the only important demographic characteristics predicting white opinion on paying college athletes. To be more specific, we found that older whites and whites who graduated from a non–“Power Five” university were more likely to express opposition to “pay for play.” Interestingly, attending a “Power Five” university, relative to not attending college at all, significantly increased opposition to paying college athletes. Attitudes about collegiate athletics and political orientations exerted an inconsistent effect on white opinions. Feelings toward college athletes and the NCAA as an organization, for example, had no effect on how whites felt about “pay for play.” Interest in college sports, however, led to significantly more support for increasing financial compensation. More importantly for our purposes here, the political variables in our analysis—partisanship and ideology—did not exert any influence over NCAA policy opinions whatsoever. If the questions used in our study to tap racial resentment are actually measuring support for free-market conservatism instead of prejudice toward African Americans, we would expect higher levels of racial resentment to be associated with higher levels of support for expanding financial compensation for college athletes. If, by contrast, the racial resentment items are revealing prejudicial attitudes that have little to do with political ideology, we would expect higher levels of racial resentment to predict higher levels of opposition to paying the predominately black population of college athletes. As pointed out above, a strong and positive relationship between racial resentment and opposition to increased compensation for college athletes could also be the result of conservative resistance to change. As Table 1 shows, racial resentment was among the strongest predictors of white opinion on NCAA compensation policy. Indeed, movement from the least resentful to the most resentful position on our index yielded a .23
Political Research Quarterly 70(1) Table 1. OLS Regression for White Opinion on College Athletes, 2014 CCES. Paying college athletes Female Age Two-year degree Non– “Power Five” university four-year degree “Power Five” university fouryear degree Party identification (Democrat = 1) Ideology (Liberal = 1) Income Union NCAA thermometer College athlete thermometer Interest in college sports College athlete Racial resentment index Midwest South West Constant SE R2 n
.07 (.04) −.20* (.09) .03 (.06) .19*** (.04) .13* (.06) −.05 (.07) −.09 (.09) .03 (.08) .00 (.04) .10 (.09) −.15 (.11) −.15** (.05) .03 (.06) .23** (.07) −.02 (.05) −.03 (.05) −.05 (.04) .69*** (.11) .31 .18 474
These are weighted unstandardized coefficients. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. OLS = ordinary least squares; CCES = Cooperative Congressional Election Study; NCAA = National College Athletic Association. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
increase in opposition to paying college athletes. This positive and statistically significant coefficient provides fairly strong evidence that racial resentment questions are not tapping the kind of free-market conservatism that might lead someone to support increasing compensation for college athletes. The results in Table 1 cannot, however, rule out the possibility that racial resentment is
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Wallsten et al. merely a proxy for a respondent’s level of conservatism. As noted above, conservatism is defined by not only an adherence to free-market ideals but also an opposition to altering the status quo. The results of our cross-sectional analysis, in other words, are consistent with both the argument that racial resentment measures antiblack prejudice and the argument that racial resentment measures conservative resistance to change. Study 2: 2014 CCES Postelection Survey experiment. In an attempt to distinguish between these alternatives, we decided to supplement our cross-sectional analysis with an experiment embedded in the postelection portion of the 2014 CCES. Respondents in our experiment were randomly assigned to one of three treatments. In the control condition, respondents were asked to respond to the following statement: Some people believe that college athletes should receive salaries in addition to their scholarship. Others disagree with this position and believe that college athletes should only receive scholarships. Do you agree or disagree that college athletes should receive a salary in addition to their scholarship?
In the two experimental conditions, respondents were asked a variation of this question, which stated, “Some people believe that college athletes like the ones pictured above should receive salaries in addition their scholarships . . . .” As shown in Online Appendix A (http://prq. sagepub.com/supplemental/), respondents in the “African American names and faces” treatment group were shown pictures of three young African American men taken from Stanford University’s Eberhardt Face Database. To comport with the stereotypes concerning African American men, each man was given a stereotypical African American first and last name derived from a list of the most popular African American male names (Levitt and Dubner 2009). In the “white names and faces” treatment group, respondents were asked this same question but were shown three images of young white men taken from the Eberhardt Database. In this condition, each white picture was paired with a name derived from the list of the most popular names among white Americans. Table 2 shows the results of an OLS regression analysis in which each of our treatment conditions is represented by a dummy variable, and whites in the control condition are excluded from the model. In addition, Table 2 shows how the effects of exposure are conditioned by racial resentment. Because the coefficients for the interaction terms shown in Table 2 cannot be easily interpreted, we present these findings by calculating conditional marginal effects. According to Braumoeller (2004), Brambor, Clark, and Golder (2006), and Kam and
Table 2. OLS Regression for White Opinion on College Athletes, 2014 CCES Survey Experiment. Paying college athletes Black names and faces treatment White names and faces treatment Racial resentment Black treatment × Racial resentment White treatment × Racial resentment Constant SE R2 n
.02 (.10) .01 (.10) .21* (.10) .13 (.14) .16 (.13) .51*** (.07) .33 .09 635
These are weighted unstandardized coefficients. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. OLS = ordinary least squares; CCES = Cooperative Congressional Election Study. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Franzese (2007), the significance of the marginal effects is far more important than the significance of the interaction terms. As Gidengil, Giles, and Thomas (2008, 550) write, “it is quite possible for the interaction term to be significant in the absence of a significant marginal effect and vice versa. Accordingly, a proper assessment requires that we calculate the marginal effects along with the corresponding standard errors”. Following this advice, we focus most of our attention in the discussion that follows on the substantively relevant marginal effects displayed in Figure 1.7 Once again, we scaled our measure such that higher scores represented opposition to paying college athletes. We found limited evidence in support of any of our hypotheses about racial resentment. As Figure 1 shows, opposition to paying college athletes increased sharply for those in the “African American names and faces” treatment condition as racial resentment increased. Indeed, although the NCAA policy opinions of white respondents in the “African American names and faces” and control condition were indistinguishable from one another at relatively low levels of racial resentment, opposition to paying college athletes was much higher for members of the “African American names and faces” treatment than members of the control group at high levels of racial resentment (greater than .6 on our 0 to 1 index). As Figure 1 also shows, however, our findings for respondents in the “African American names and faces” treatment were closely mimicked by respondents in our “white names and faces” treatment. To be more precise,
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Figure 1. Predicted values for white opinion on paying college athletes, 2014 CCES (n = 635). CCES = Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
we found that racially resentful whites who were shown pictures of white faces with white names were also more likely to express opposition to paying college athletes than nonracially resentful whites exposed to the same treatment. In other words, racial resentment increased opposition to paying college athletes regardless of which treatment group an individual was assigned to. This is a somewhat perplexing pattern of results that cannot be easily explained by any of the existing interpretations of racial resentment. Confirming the conclusions of our cross-sectional analysis, the experimental results presented in Figure 1 clearly indicate that racial resentment items do not measure free-market conservatism. If racial resentment questions were capturing residual support for free-market principles, increases in racial resentment should have caused more support (not less) for paying college athletes among whites in all three of our experimental conditions. As Figure 1 shows, this was decidedly not the case. Our experimental results are also not consistent, however, with either the notion that racial resentment measures prejudice or the notion that racial resentment measures conservative resistance to change. If racial resentment taps feelings of racial animus, we should have discovered a clear treatment effect among racially resentful individuals in the “African American names and faces” condition but not the “white names and faces” condition. If, by contrast, racial resentment items measure opposition to changes in the status quo, the control group should have moved in tandem with the two treatment conditions rather than remaining statistically distinct from them at high levels of racial resentment. As Figure 1 clearly shows, neither of these expectations were borne out by our data. Given that the data in Figure 1 are inconsistent with all of the existing accounts in one way or another, it is
Political Research Quarterly 70(1) necessary to consider the possibility that flaws in our experimental design produced our unexpected results. To be more precise, we must consider the possibility that our study fell victim to “social desirability” bias—the welldocumented tendency of survey respondents to answer questions on sensitive topics in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others. Empirical work on racial attitudes has struggled with social desirability concerns for decades. A vast literature on social desirability effects in studies of racial and ethnic attitudes reveals that survey respondents often conceal their true feelings out of concern about judgment from researchers (Finkel, Guterbock, and Borg 1991). If respondents in our experiment correctly guessed that we were attempting to study the impact of racial attitudes on NCAA policy opinions, it is possible that they may have tempered or misrepresented their opinions to provide the “socially desirable” (i.e., nonracist) response. This kind of reactivity could explain the results presented in Table 2 and Figure 1. Unfortunately, two aspects of our experimental design may have alerted survey respondents to our interest in studying racial resentment. First, the treatments included in our experiment might have been too overt and heavy handed. Specifically, our use of racially homogeneous, close-up headshots framed by stereotypical names might have alerted some respondents to the true purposes of our study.8 Our ability to hide our intentions was likely not helped by the fact that our experiment was the only one in the postelection CCES to use images and names of this kind. Second, our experiment was placed shortly after a battery of questions on race and political leadership by African Americans. Ten questions prior to the administration of our survey experiment, white respondents on our module of the CCES were asked a lengthy series of questions about in-group favoritism among African Americans. It is possible that these questions encouraged respondents to think about how their racial attitudes were being studied. Taken together, these two factors may explain the somewhat curious results discussed above. Study 3: March 2016 Amazon Mechanical Turk Survey experiment. To address these design problems, we made use of data from two separate online survey experiments administered through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. MTurk is an online marketplace for crowd-sourced task completion. Researchers can solicit respondents for participation in surveys by offering compensation for survey completion. Our first experiment ran between March 6 and March 9, 2016, and our second experiment ran between April 2 and 4, 2016. The advertisements on MTurk mentioned only a “brief survey” on “current events” and made no mention of sports, politics, or any other phrases that could cause selection bias in our sample. Participants were compensated
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Wallsten et al. $0.25 for completion of the experiments, and each survey took approximately five minutes. Social scientists are increasingly turning to MTurk as it provides an opportunity to easily gather samples that are only slightly less representative than national telephone surveys and significantly more representative than traditional convenience samples (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz 2012; Weinberg, Freese, and McElhattan 2014). Perhaps more importantly, there is evidence that the results of well-established survey experiments can be replicated using the MTurk subject pool (Crump, McDonnell, and Gureckis 2013; Rand 2012). In addition, MTurk workers are as attentive to Internet-based survey experiments as participants in lab-based studies, and their ability to follow instructions is on par with respondents in other modes of survey experimentation (Buhrmester, Kwang, and Gosling 2011; Goodman, Cryder, and Cheema 2012; Grose, Malhotra, and Van Houweling 2015; Paolacci, Chandler, and Ipeirotis 2010). A major concern with online experiments is that participants will not pay enough attention to receive the treatment. To control for a lack of attentiveness among our participants, we included two “attention check” questions at various points in our surveys. Near the end of each survey, respondents were presented with the following question: “to help us calibrate our survey, please leave the following blank and do not select an answer.” Respondents who were not carefully reading each question might fail to leave this blank. In addition, the surveys concluded with a self-reported measure of distraction.9 Together, these attention checks allowed us to limit our analyses to those respondents who were paying close attention to the task at hand. As suggested above, our attempt to prime respondents in the CCES may have been too explicit in its simultaneous use of racially homogeneous pictures and highly racialized names. In our March 2016 MTurk experiment, we attempted a more subtle racial priming by diversifying our treatment images and eliminating the stereotyped names associated with those images. Specifically, respondents in our experiment were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: an “all white faces” condition (featuring the same three pictures used in the “all white names and faces” treatment of the CCES experiment) and a “mixed faces” treatment (featuring two of the white faces and one of the African American faces from the CCES experiment). To maximize the external validity of these photos, we manipulated each headshot to appear as if they were wearing athletic uniforms in their headshots (see Online Appendix A at http://prq.sagepub.com/supplemental/). Unlike the CCES experiment, no names were used to label any of the pictures presented to respondents. Given that we care primarily about the difference between exposure to black treatments and white treatments among
Table 3. OLS Regression for White Opinion on College Athletes, March 2016 MTurk Survey Experiment. Paying college athletes Mixed faces treatment Racial resentment Mixed faces treatment × Racial resentment Constant SE R2 n
−.06 (.08) .20 (.12) .27 (.16) .45*** (.06) .35 .08 287
These are weighted unstandardized coefficients. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. OLS = ordinary least squares. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Figure 2. Predicted values for white opinion on college athletes, March 2016 MTurk (n = 287).
racially resentful respondents in this experiment, we did not include a “pure” control condition (where respondents were asked only for their opinion on paying college athletes without any racial priming). In addition, we attempted to mask our study’s intentions by not presenting respondents with any racial, political, or demographic questions prior to the administration of our experiment. The results from our March 2016 MTurk experiment are presented in Table 3 and in Figure 2. As Figure 2 shows, the interaction between racial resentment and exposure to racial cues had a substantively large impact on white’s NCAA policy opinions.10 The least racially resentful whites in our “mixed faces” condition, for example, were generally supportive of paying college athletes—with a predicted score on the NCAA salary question of .38. By contrast, the most racially resentful whites in our “mixed faces” condition were strongly
218 opposed to changing the NCAA’s current compensation policies—with a predicted score greater than .85. Increases in racial resentment mattered much less, however, for white respondents in our “all white faces” condition. Specifically, the most racially resentful whites exposed to pictures of only white athletes were predicted to be, on average, only .20 more opposed to paying college athletes than the least racially resentful whites exposed to these images. As Figure 2 also demonstrates, the differences between similarly resentful whites in our two experimental conditions were statistically significant at high levels of racial resentment (i.e., those scoring higher than .6 on our 0 to 1 index of racial resentment) but not at low levels of racial resentment (i.e., racial resentment index scores less than .6). In other words, our March 2016 MTurk experiment shows strong support for the expectations articulated in H3. Study 4: April 2016 Amazon Mechanical Turk Survey experiment. We were concerned that our findings from the CCES and the March 2016 MTurk study might be contingent upon being primed by an image or, more importantly, the particular facial images we selected for these studies. To control for this possibility, we also conducted an experiment that did not use any pictures. Our April 2016 MTurk survey was a close replica of our experiment from the CCES with one important exception: rather than use both stereotypical pictures and names to prime racial attitudes, we did not show respondents any pictures and only included names in the text of the question. Specifically, we deleted the headshots from our experiment and replaced the part of the CCES’s question text that read “like the ones pictured above” with the list of white names used to identify the pictures in the CCES (i.e., “like Connor Woods, Jake Sullivan, and Cody Myers”) or the list of black names used to identify the pictures in the CCES (i.e., “like DeShawn Washington, Marquis Jefferson, and Darnell Booker”).11 Similar to our first MTurk survey, we did not include a pure control condition in this experiment, and no racial, political, or demographic questions preceded the experiment. The findings from our April 2016 MTurk experiment closely mirrored the findings from our March 2016 MTurk experiment. Once again, there were substantively large differences between the white respondents primed to think about race based on their level of racial resentment. As Table 4 and Figure 3 show, the most racially resentful whites in our “black names” condition were predicted to be, on average, .47 less supportive of paying college athletes than the least racially resentful whites in the “black names” condition. As Figure 3 also shows, there were significant differences between similarly racially resentful whites based on the treatment condition they were assigned to. Specifically, racially resentful whites (i.e., those scoring higher than .6 on our 0 to 1 index) in the
Political Research Quarterly 70(1) Table 4. OLS Regression for White Opinion on College Athletes, April 2016 MTurk Survey Experiment. Paying college athletes Black names treatment Racial resentment Black names treatment × Racial resentment Constant SE R2 n
−.05 (.09) .21 (.11) .27 (.16) .50*** (.06) .34 .08 250
These are weighted unstandardized coefficients. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. OLS = ordinary least squares. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Figure 3. Predicted values for white opinion on college athletes, April 2016 MTurk (n = 250).
“black names” condition of our April 2016 experiment were .22 less supportive of paying college athletes than similarly resentful whites in the “all white names” condition. At low levels of racial resentment, no such treatment effect emerged. To put all of this differently, we found further support for H3 in the April 2016 MTurk experiment, and there appears to be little difference between priming race by using pictures and priming race by using names. These results allow us to make a more definitive statement about of the validity of racial resentment as a measure of antiblack affect. If racial resentment items were simply tapping resistance to fundamental changes in the status quo, we should have found relatively similar increases in opposition to paying college athletes among all of our white respondents (regardless of the experimental group they were assigned to). Consistent with H3, however, we found that racial resentment significantly
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Wallsten et al. increased opposition only among respondents who were subtly primed to think about race. Considered alongside the cross-sectional results presented in Table 1 and the fact that NCAA compensation policies do not involve any redistributive efforts on the part of the federal government, these results lead us to conclude that racial resentment items measure antiblack prejudice far more than they measure political conservatism.
Discussion Studying white opinion on the NCAA’s compensation policies provides a unique opportunity to test the validity of racial resentment as a measure of racial prejudice. The “pay for play” issue does not involve expanding federal power and government efforts to redistribute scarce resources to “undeserving” groups. These characteristics allow us to sidestep many of the methodological and theoretical concerns that critics of racial resentment have presented in recent years, and, in doing so, allow us to conduct a more unvarnished test of racial resentment’s validity. As demonstrated above, racial resentment influences NCAA policy opinions in a way that is only consistent with racial resentment serving as a measure of antiblack prejudice. No other plausible explanation—racial resentment as a measure of support for limited federal power, racial resentment as a measure of opposition for government redistributive policies, racial resentment as a measure of resistance to change, or racial resentment as a measure of free-market conservatism—can explain the pattern of results uncovered in our data. Despite criticisms to the contrary, therefore, we are compelled to conclude that racial resentment measures racial bias. Two caveats to our conclusions are important to point out here. First, the findings presented above do not mean that statistically significant findings for racial resentment indices always indicate antiblack prejudice. As discussed above, Zigerell (2015) convincingly shows that the ideological conservatism captured by racial resentment items can often explain the correlation between racial resentment and white opinions on “racialized” policies. Our findings, in other words, do not eliminate the need for appropriate statistical controls, and scholars should take great care to ensure that ideological conservatism is fully purged from their racial resentment measures before concluding that racial bias matters. Second, the findings presented above rest in part on data drawn from an MTurk population that is somewhat unrepresentative of the American public. Consistent with previous research (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz 2012; Weinberg, Freese, and McElhattan 2014), the samples from our March 2016 and April 2016 MTurk experiments were slightly younger, slightly more educated, and slightly more liberal than Internet users and the population on the
whole. Perhaps more importantly, the white respondents in our MTurk samples expressed lower levels of racial resentment than the white respondents included in our nationally representative CCES experiment. Specifically, although 56.2 percent of white respondents in our module of the CCES received racial resentment index scores greater than .5, only 40.1 percent of whites in our March MTurk experiment and 47.2 percent of whites in our April MTurk experiment received such scores. Although we are comforted by the fact that the relatively low number of older, uneducated, racially resentful whites was likely to stack the deck against findings like the ones presented above, we believe that future work would do well to test the external validity of our work by using more nationally representative samples of the American public. In addition to contributing to the academic literature on racial resentment, our findings help shed light on the dynamics driving public opinion on an increasingly salient public issue: paying college athletes. Given that the majority of athletes in the most popular, revenue-generating college sports are African Americans, a number of journalists have asserted that the high levels of opposition to paying college athletes among whites is a function of racial prejudice (Branch 2011; Nocera and Strauss 2016). Unfortunately, few empirical studies have explored what impact racial prejudice plays in predicting white opinions on NCAA compensation policies (Mondello et al. 2013). This study is the first exploration of the impact that racial predispositions have on support for policy changes affecting college athletes. The story our data reveal, however, is not new and not unique to the narrow question of how the NCAA treats its athletes. In fact, our evidence tells a tale that has been told time and time again in countless studies of white opinion on controversial “racialized” policy areas. Indeed, scholars have repeatedly demonstrated that when whites believe that blacks are the primary targets and beneficiaries of the federal government’s health care, welfare, and criminal justice policies, their racial attitudes inevitably become a central ingredient in the recipe whites use to cook up their policy opinions on these issues. The findings presented above demonstrate that NCAA policies should, in fact, be added to the long list of policies that are racially neutral in terms of content but racially biased in terms of public opinion.
Conclusion The results presented here show not only that racial resentment measures prejudice against African Americans but also that prejudice against African Americans determines how whites feel about increasing compensation for college athletes. In addition to testing the external validity of our findings with nationally representative samples, we hope that future scholarship will build on our work in
220 a number of ways. First, we hope that future studies will extend this study’s validity test by examining white opinion on other nongovernmental, nonredistributive policy questions. If racial resentment is found to influence white opinion on “racialized” issues without a federal or redistributive dimension, such as union negotiations around majority-black, professional sports collective bargaining agreements, we can be more confident that racial resentment provides a valid measure of antiblack affect. Second, we hope future work will examine the nature of black opinions on paying college athletes. In every survey to date, African Americans have expressed higher levels of support than whites for paying college athletes. Our data from the 2014 CCES, for example, found that African Americans (53%) were more than twice as likely to favor paying college athletes than whites (22%). Future studies should explore the origins of this racial divide by looking at, among other things, the role that perceptions of linked fate play in shaping black opinions.
Political Research Quarterly 70(1)
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Authors’ Note Upon publication of this article, the data used in this article will be made available on the Harvard Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/harvard.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Peter McCarthy for providing valuable assistance with the graphics for this paper. We would also like to thank Jennifer Eberhardt and Amrita Maitreyi of Stanford University for providing access to the Eberhardt Face Database. Finally, thanks goes to Scott Blinder, Tony Carey Jr., Paul Collins, Paul Djupe, Justin Gross, Seth Goldman, Patrick Hruby, Ray La Raja, Neil Malhotra, Jesse Rhodes, Meredith Rolfe, Brian Schaffner, John Sides, Elizabeth Sharrow, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors at Political Research Quarterly for their insightful comments and suggestions at various stages of this paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Department of Political Science, and the Legal Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst provided financial support for the paper.
Notes 1. The National College Athletic Association’s (NCAA) 2014 revenues were nearly $1 billion with about $80.5 million in profits. See http://www. u s a t o d a y. c o m / s t o r y / s p o r t s / c o l l e g e / 2 0 1 5 / 0 3 / 11 /
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ncaa-financial-statement-2014-1-billion-revenue/70161386/. In 2014, the court concluded that the NCAA’s rules against paying athletes for image rights constituted an antitrust violation, and players are entitled to receive some of the licensing revenue from video games. In 2015, EA Sports and the NCAA agreed to a $60-million settlement with the more than twenty-nine thousand athletes whose names and likeness were used in video games. See http://www.si.com/college-basketball/2016/03/15/ ed-obannon-trial-ea-sports-settlement-average-1200. In August 2015, the full National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declined to assert jurisdiction in this case, effectively ending the attempt of Northwestern football players to unionize. See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/ sports/ncaafootball/nlrb-says-northwestern-football-players-cannot-unionize.html. Alternatively, Zigerell’s evidence could be interpreted to mean that the racial component of racial resentment is not as important for white attitudes as previously thought. The “Power Five” refers to the athletic conferences in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). The “Power Five” athletic conferences are the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big 12, the Big Ten, the Pac-12, and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). There are currently sixty-five universities in the Power Five conferences. The alpha reliability for this index was .84 among white respondents. When using predicted values to determine statistically significant marginal effects, it is too conservative to use two separate 95 percent confidence intervals (Knezevic 2008). When the standard errors are roughly equivalent, a single 95 percent test translates into using two sets of 84 percent confidence intervals (Payton, Greenstone, and Schenker 2003). When there is no overlap between these two separate confidence intervals, a significant effect is indicated. Figures 1, 2, and 3 display two separate 84 percent confidence intervals. We would like to thank Neil Malhotra for suggesting this possibility. Respondents were asked, “Did you do any of the following activities while taking the survey? Check all that apply.” Unlike the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), where we had time to ask only three of the questions used to measure racial resentment, we were able to present our MTurk respondents with the standard fouritem index used in the work on racial resentment (Kinder and Sanders 1996). This type of experimental design has been used in countless studies of racial discrimination in housing and employment markets as well as in recent work on the responsiveness of state legislators to African American constituents (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2003; Butler and Broockman 2011; Pager and Shepherd 2008).
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