Clarifying Social Context: The Political Effects of Racial Embeddedness Measures

• In Event: Political Psychology and Race

Abstract

“Social context” is an oft-illuded to term in political science but can mean a variety of things depending on the scholar. Some imagine social context as representing a social network and use ego-centric name generator questions to evaluate individuals’ social space; others define social context through geographic boundary and use census data to examine the characteristics of context; still others examine social context by focusing on the salience of a single social identity. Although rarely measured together, scholars often assert – or at least assume – these measures are bundled around each other, with geographic environment shaping the social, which in turn shapes the psychological.

In this paper, we argue instead that each of these measures of social context is unique. We use novel data including large samples of the four largest racial groups in America to show that geographic, social, and psychological racial embeddedness are related to each other, but only weakly so. We then show how the inclusion of these variables together in models of basic political outcomes – political efficacy, partisanship, policy attitudes, and racial linked fate – help to better isolate the mechanisms driving relationships between racial group context and politics. Specifically, we find that geographic embeddedness in one’s racial group rarely has an effect on political attitudes with one exception – political efficacy, where size of group is extremely consequential. Further, social and psychological embeddedness in one’s own racial group are largely unrelated to political attitudes for White people. However, social and psychological embeddedness importantly predict a range of outcomes, often in concert with each other, for Black and Latino people.

Rather than finding that social context is a nested concept, we show that each of these embeddedness measures is uniquely related to political outcomes. Our results provide prescriptions for future research, helping scholars identify when they should use various measures of social context and encouraging a focus on what, conceptually, these unique measures truly capture.

Authors

• Allison Penelope Anoll, Vanderbilt University

• Lauren D. Davenport, Stanford University

• Rachel Lienesch, Stanford University