Racial Resentment and Health Insurance Policy Attitudes: Assessing the Mediating Roles of Anger and Anti-Statism

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. The Politics of Public Policy

Abstract

Recent studies reveal a link between whites’ racial attitudes and opinions of Obama-era health insurance reform proposals. Higher racial resentment is associated with lower support for prominent reforms. A leading explanation for this relationship is that racial attitudes toward Barack Obama “spill over” onto policies with which he is closely associated. Yet prior research has neither directly tested the mediating effects of attitudes toward Obama nor fully assessed alternative explanations involving the racialization of social programs more broadly. We draw from theories of racial spillover, emotional racism, and the racialized state as well as data from the 2007-2009 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project to evaluate a range of hypotheses about opinions toward health insurance policy. The findings reveal that anger toward Obama significantly mediates the relationship between racial resentment and opinions of health insurance reform. Yet we find that anti-statist attitudes also significantly mediate this relationship. The intervening effects of anger toward Obama and anti-statism persist in a model accounting for both factors, which suggests first that the mediating effect of anger toward Obama has a distinctly racial emotional component which is not based in assessments of Obama’s position on the scope of government and, second, that anti-statism mediates the link between racial resentment and policy opinions net of feelings toward Obama in particular.

Authors

• Daniel Lanford, Florida State University

• Daniel Tope, Florida State University