Measuring Religious and Racial Bias at the Ballot Box: Is the Post-Differences Society a Myth?

It will probably not come as a surprise to anyone that evidence we live in a society in which bias has been eliminated and tolerance is rampant are exaggerated.

But what researchers are beginning to understand with a far greater degree of specificity and accuracy is just to what degree that is true - and why.

President Obama's race and Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormon relgion have thrown into high relief the extent to which those factors continue to cleave our civilization.

Measurement and interpretation matter because our economy is increasingly dependent on sales and profits derived from outside the US - or whatever country of origin in which you reside. Beyond tolerance, the need for understanding frames societal norms and may influence standards of living. If the measure of resistance to these precepts can be captured, a better understanding of the underlying biases may be obtained and analysis of its potential economic and social impact evaluated.

Particularly for those in the US, foreign cultures pay far more attention to us than we do to them. Our understanding of race exceeds our understanding of religion, but with many of our future customers following Islam, Buddhism and Hindu faiths, we are being forced to learn that beliefs have consequences. JL

Gary Stix reports in Scientific American:

The color of a candidate’s skin failed to sway voters to depress the lever for either Obama or McCain in the 2008 election, immediate analyses of that contest seemed to suggest. Some pundits hailed it as the first postracial election.

But a closer look after the election has revealed a much more nuanced picture of that historic faceoff. In the 2012 election, reearchers want to use the same method to examine, not only race, but this year’s added hot-button issue of Mitt Romney’s religion.
It turns out that as many as a fifth of the voters cared about race more than other considerations like gender, endorsements by a local newspaper or a candidate’s political party.

A study by political scientist Brian F. Schaffner at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the December issue of Political Psychology showed that concerns about race may have meant that Obama procured 3 percent less of the vote than he would have if he were white—enough to decide an election in a close race. “It’s pretty clear that if Obama were white he would have done better than he did,” Schaffner says.

His finding echoes the results of similar probings by other researchers into the 2008 statistics. Schaffner’s work stands out, though, because of the care that he took in trying to figure out whether a voter was trying to mask biases about the hyper-sensitive issue of race. The researcher devised what he calls an “unobtrusive observational measure” to try to elicit a voter’s real opinions.

Schaffner deployed a simple ranking method to get beyond what political scientists call “social desirability bias:” voters’ attempts to cover up opinions that they know might be repellent to others. After the election, Schaffner asked 934 respondents, 825 of whom voted, to rank the importance of six items from most to least helpful in making a decision.

Whites who placed race higher on the list, which included a candidate’s gender, occupation, political party and other factors, were less likely to vote for Obama, The definition of “higher” encompassed any ranking from first to fourth on the list, allowing the survey to detect the importance of race even if respondents didn’t rank that category first and may have wanted to hide their views.

These findings held up even after taking into account a measure of political conservatism, specifically, opposition to affirmative action. A white respondent who opposed affirmative action but put race last instead of fourth on the list was 25 percent more likely to vote for Obama.

A well-known political blog, The Monkey Cage, raised the question of whether trying to deduce voters’ recondite opinions was really needed. John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, noted that other studies had produced similar results even when asking respondents more directly about their racial prejudices. Schaffner defends his methodology, citing evidence from exit polls that indicates that social desirability bias really matters. “If people are obscuring answers, that’s going to make it much more difficult to detect what the effect is of those answers,” he says.

Other political science researchers have taken a different tack in exploring the extent that race plays a role in voting. A recent study by Harvard economics doctoral candidate Seth Stephens-Davidowitz used Google searches to detect voting bias four years ago. He compared the extent that racially charged language from 200 media markets nationwide was tied to a loss of votes for Obama: in aggregate, the racial issue translated into a drop of three to five percent of the popular vote for Obama in the 2008 election.

The methods may be different but the message is still apparently the same: we are still far from arriving at the vaunted ideal of a postracial society.