RSF Review

As part of our Election 2012 series, Lindsay Owens and David S. Pedulla examine the effects of the economic downturn on political attitudes. Owens, a graduate student at Stanford University, contributed to the RSF volume The Great Recession. Pedulla is a graduate student in sociology at Princeton University.

As Americans head to the ballot box, they will no doubt consider whether Obama or Romney will be better able to stimulate our sluggish economy. People were hit hard by the Great Recession and the aftershocks of economic distress are still forceful in the lives of individuals, families, and communities across the country. How will these economic hardships influence the choices that voters make at the ballot box in the upcoming election? While only time will be able to answer this question definitively, below we present findings from some of our research that hints at some possibilities for how economic hardship may (or may not) influence the political attitudes and voting behavior of the American electorate.

In research for the Russell Sage Foundation’s edited volume The Great Recession (2011), Owens (with her co-author, Lane Kenworthy) examined whether a variety of political and social attitudes change during and after economic recessions. On the whole, the findings from this study suggest that recessions do not seem to produce lasting shifts in Americans’ attitudes in the aggregate (Kenworthy and Owens 2011). They found little evidence of a “recession effect” on perceptions of fairness and opportunity in the economy, interests in helping the poor, confidence in government, or beliefs about the proper role of the government in regulating the economy. And, the changes that do occur tend to be temporary, reversing when the economy begins to recover. Given these macro-level findings, we might expect that the current economic situation will not affect political attitudes in any significant ways.

Attitudes Toward The Financial Sector

Although we have not seen wholesale shifts in political attitudes due to the recent recession, there are a few areas where attitudes have changed. Americans’ favorability toward banks and financial institutions has reached at least a forty year low. And, drawing on data from the The Gallup Poll and Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Owens (2012) finds that Americans’ attitudes toward the ethical practices of bankers and Wall Street stockbrokers are at historic lows. Social scientists don’t usually think these types of political attitudes matters in elections. But there is reason to think this election might be different. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has strong ties to the financial sector. In particular, he was a founding partner of Bain Capital, a large private equity investment firm. The Obama campaign has certainly seized upon Romney’s connection with such an unpopular industry, running a variety of ads linking Romney to Bain Capital and in particular highlighting Bain Capital’s role in outsourcing jobs overseas. Although there is little evidence that these ads have had a lasting negative impact on Romney’s favorability, his ties to Bain Capital are certainly not an asset given the shift in Americans’ attitudes towards the financial sector. The upshot is that Americans’ overwhelming negativity toward financial institutions and those individuals who work in them may pose a problem for the Romney campaign.

As part of our Election 2012 series, Seth K. Goldman examines the impact of President Barack Obama's campaign on levels of white prejudice. A Russell Sage grantee, Goldman is a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication.

In the wake of the presidential and vice-presidential debates, pundits and political scientists alike have dissected the performance and rhetoric of the candidates, hoping to answer one question: Who will win the election? Obviously, this is an important question, but given the historic nature of Barack Obama’s candidacy, we need to also address another issue: Will the campaign to reelect the first African-American president influence white Americans’ racial attitudes? If the 2008 campaign is any indication, it may very well do so. My research demonstrates that during the 2008 campaign, long before Obama's election, levels of white racial prejudice declined significantly.

More Research on Prejudice
• RSF Program: Cultural Contact
• RSF Book: Envy Up, Scorn Down
• RSF Award: The Legal Design of Equality Based on the Science of Ordinary Prejudice

Using three waves of nationally representative panel data collected during the 2008 campaign, I found that in just a handful of months whites became less likely to rate whites more positively than blacks on three scales ranging from hardworking to lazy, trustworthy to untrustworthy, and intelligent to unintelligent. And although the size of the decline was modest statistically, it was big historically. Between July 2008 and January 2009, racial prejudice declined by a rate that was at least five times faster than the secular trend in prejudice occurring in the United States over the previous two decades.

A True Change of Heart?

These are dramatic changes, but could they be the result of a methodological artifact driven by social desirability bias—that is, did whites become increasingly concerned about looking racist without changing their personal beliefs? Based on a variety of reasons, however, this appears unlikely. As an illustration, consider that in the late summer of 2008 (during the first of the three waves of the panel survey) fully 56 percent of whites rated whites more positively than blacks on the three scales described above. This suggests little aversion to answering the questions in a way that indicates prejudice, probably due to the fact that the measure of prejudice did not require whites to directly compare whites and blacks. The items about the two groups appeared at different points in the survey (with the order randomized), separated by several minutes' worth of items about non-racial topics.

Moreover, although social desirability effects are common in face-to-face and telephone surveys, this study was conducted over the Internet, where such effects are much less common because the respondents do not interact with another person. Nonetheless, as another check, I took advantage of the random order in which whites were asked about whites and blacks. This allowed me to assess whether whites changed their ratings of the second group in an effort to rate the two groups equally. For instance, if fears of looking racist altered whites' ratings, then they should have rated blacks more positively when whites were asked about first (in order to shift closer to a presumably higher rating of whites). Similarly, whites should have rated whites less positively when blacks were asked about first (in order to shift closer to a presumably lower rating of blacks). Completely contradicting the possibility of social desirability effects, neither pattern appeared on any of the three waves of the panel survey.

As part of our Election 2012 series, James A. McCann evaluates the political voice of non-citizens during an election season. A political scientist at Purdue University, McCann is also a former RSF Visiting Scholar.

At present, some forty million residents of the United States – or about one-eighth of the total population – are foreign-born. The number of immigrants in the U.S. is now at an all-time high. To find a period in history when as large a proportion of the mass public was foreign-born, we must look back a century to the first great wave of migrant settlement. Immigrants today vary widely with respect to country of origin, language use, cultural practice, family structure, and job skills. There is also considerable variation in formal civic and migration status. According to the most recent Census estimates, 37 percent of the foreign-born are naturalized American citizens, 35 percent are permanent or temporary legal residents, and 28 percent are unauthorized to reside in the United States.

More Research on Immigration
• RSF Program: Immigration in the United States
• RSF Book: Immigration Research for a New Century
• RSF Book: Civic Hopes and Political Realities

In this campaign season, much concern has been expressed about these latter two groups, and the possibility that immigrants without voting rights may gain access to the ballot box. Over a dozen states have sought to purge alleged non-citizens from electoral registration lists, and nine require voters to prove their identity by showing a government-issued document with a photograph at polling stations. To date, however, exceedingly little evidence of unlawful voting has emerged. Except in scattered municipalities around the country where non-citizens can vote in local elections, immigrants who have not completed naturalization cannot, and do not, cast ballots.

But does the lack of citizenship rights necessarily translate into a lack of voice during major national election campaigns? Large-scale telephone surveys of Mexican immigrants that I conducted with Stacey Connaughton (Purdue University) and Katsuo Nishikawa (Trinity University) during the 2008 campaigns with the support of the Russell Sage Foundation demonstrate that the foreign-born are far from disengaged from electoral politics. This holds true even for immigrants without voting rights. Below I point to three features of political engagement that we discovered among the foreign-born.

As part of our Election 2012 series, Lawrence Mead evaluates the state of welfare reform. A professor of politics and public policy at NYU, Mead is the author of several books on poverty and welfare reform; he also co-edited the RSF volume Welfare Reform and Political Theory.

What is the status of welfare reform today? I will take "welfare reform" to mean primarily the changes in family aid made by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The act replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Children (TANF), in which eligibility for welfare was much more strongly conditioned on work by the adult recipients than it had been before.

Reform attained its chief goals, to raise work levels on welfare and to reduce dependency. Among poor mothers, work levels soared in the 1990s, although some of that gain was lost in ensuing recessions. Cash welfare rolls plummeted by over two-thirds and grew very little in the recent hard times. Reductions in poverty were less dramatic, but still sizable, again with the gains reversing in the 2000s.

Evaluating Welfare Reform

Reform did not, however, assure that poor mothers who left welfare for jobs would have enough to live on. The combination of earnings with food stamps and wage subsidies was usually enough to lift a family out of poverty, but only if the mother worked steadily and full-time. Nor did reform assure that a working mother would be able to move up to higher pay over time. Few former welfare mothers work steadily, and more needs to be done to help them do that.

The leading criticism of reform has been that some 40 percent of mothers leaving cash aid did not go to work and have been left with little apparent support. Some think these “disconnected” mothers are in trouble, but so far no systematic evidence has emerged to show this. More inquiry is needed to find out how these mothers are coping. Most likely, most of them have found other means of support, such as living with other adults who are working or on other government benefits.

Another criticism is that some states have placed so many conditions on TANF that they have effectively closed the door to aid. In these places, applicants for aid have to produce so much documentation and search for jobs so strenuously up front that few can ever get on the rolls, even if they meet the income rules. If the federal government pays states to run a welfare program, then they must do so and not effectively deny aid to eligible recipients. Congress should investigate this issue when TANF is next reauthorized.