Racists More Likely to Vote Republican

Posted on | January 30, 2006

Like Pam over at the House Blend, I am trying to find even a micron of surprise over the fact the research indicates Republican votes are more likely to be racist. It does not surprise me in the least but because the party is already on record as homophobic and racism is not that much different.

Using widely accepted measures of racial bias, the study found a positive correlation between negative attitudes towards blacks and Republican voting. While correlation does not necessarily mean causation so from this we cannot say "Republicans are racist" since there was no filtering of other things like how gun advocacy, the abortion issue, or homophobia interact since those are potential confounds. But we can infer from this study that a person with a racial bias is more likely to also be a Republican voter. Naturally these are only preliminary results and subject to reliability checks via replication. It will be definitely interesting to see results others get.

I will admit it is a hard question to filter for specifically since asking "Do you vote Republican because of its image of being a white-friendly party?" or something similar would not be a good question in terms of validity because a self conscious participant may answer "no" to not look like a racist when the truthful response might have been "yes". Note: validity in experimental design refers to whether or not the device, in this case a survey, measures what it is supposed to be measuring.

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