Long-Run Effects of School Segregation on Whites' Partisanship

• In Event: Putting White Racial Attitudes in Context

Abstract

What effect does whites' exposure to people of different races and ethnicities in childhood have on their partisanship later in life? Two literatures - one on the deleterious effects of racial threat, the other on the beneficial effects of intergroup contact - offer different predictions about whether such exposure should lead to increases in Republican or Democratic partisanship respectively. Here, I explore this question by leveraging the conclusion of court-ordered school desegregation between 1990 and 2014, which resulted in an exogenous increase in the racial segregation of a subset of the public high schools in the United States. Contemporaneous survey data from these schools indicate that white students in more segregated schools exhibited more favorable attitudes towards people of color. To link adolescent schooling data with present-day partisanship, names and graduation years of high school students were identified by scraping a website for high school alumni; these were merged with present-day voter files of six Southern states. Consistent with theories of racial threat, I find that as levels of racial segregation increased, non-Hispanic white students were significantly more likely to identify as Democrats 20 years after graduating by about 3.5 percentage points.

Author

• Taylor Mattia, New York University