UC Irvine

Existing literature on the role that attitudinal racism plays in shaping opinions towards progressive policies or political participation at the individual-level has stressed the impact of such racism on Whites. Despite the increasingly multiracial political context, fewer scholars have interrogated how such racism affects minorities. Does it affect minorities at similar levels, less, or perhaps even more? Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study 2018, the dissertation project fills in this empirical and theoretical gap by examining how the same measures of attitudinal racism might be correlated with Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White political participation as well as opinions of three legislative domains (i.e., healthcare, immigration reforms, and gun control). To calculate the likelihoods of each racial category and capture interracial variations, logistic regression analyses were conducted and average marginal effects were calculated. These analyses highlight that racial positioning—i.e., the unequal placement of racial groups within the racial hierarchy—plays a critical role in how racial views can in turn affect individual policy opinions and political participation. Specifically, African Americans are the group least impacted by their racial views, Whites are the group most impacted, and Hispanics and Asians are the most second most impacted. Consequently, I advance group stratification theory as a new framework to explain the multiracial landscape of how race and attitudinal racism can influence micro-level politics. Pushing back against the notion that racial views result from elite-driven psychological socialization processes or act as micro-level manifestations of competitive threats, I advocate for the re-conceptualization of racial views as elements of the larger racial ideology and a political tool utilized by individuals on the ground when they assess political options. At the top of the racial hierarchy, Whites use this sociocultural tool more than minorities.