Place, Partisanship, and Prejudice: Using Place Identity to Assess Anti-Black Racial Attitudes Among White Americans

• In Event: 20468 - Global Voices, Shifting Views: Exploring Trends in Public Opinion

Abstract

The United States is a country where political divisions across different place types, namely urban, rural, and suburban areas, run deep. One crucial ideological divide concerns beliefs among White Americans about the role of structural racism in contemporary American society. White racial attitudes in the United States are inextricably linked to place type, from the post-WWII suburban exodus to contemporary racial resentment common in rural areas due to simultaneous economic stagnation and significant demographic change. Place attachment theory suggests that place plays a distinct role in shaping ideology, which could potentially lead to White Democrats in rural areas exhibiting more racial resentment than their urban Democrat counterparts, while White urban Republicans may exhibit less racial resentment than their rural counterparts. Alternatively, group threat theory suggests that living in an urban area, by bringing White residents into more contact with minority groups, should heighten White racial resentment. We test place identity and group threat theories as competing hypotheses by performing OLS regressions on a 2023 representative YouGov survey to measure racial resentment differences among White rural, urban, and suburban respondents of the same political party. We find that rural and suburban Democrats exhibited lower racial resentment than urban Democrats, but otherwise uncover limited evidence that anti-Black racial resentment is different between White Republicans or Democrats of differing urban status. These findings suggest that place-based effects on White racial attitudes operate differently between political parties, suggesting limitations in how established theories of place identity predict ideological attitudes.

Authors

• Evan James Ferstl, Pennsylvania State University

• John Iceland, Penn State University

• Eric Silver, Pennsylvania State University