Month: May 2019

The 2018 CCES (Cooperative Congressional Election Study, Schaffner et al. 2019) has two items to measure respondent sexism and, in the same grid, two items to measure respondent racism, with responses measured on a five-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree:

• White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.
• Racial problems in the U.S. are rare, isolated situations.
• When women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against.
• Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men.

The figure below reports the predicted probability of selecting the more liberal policy preference (support or oppose) on the CCES's four environmental policy items, weighted, limited to White respondents, and controlling for respondents' reported sex, age, education, partisan identification, ideological identification, and family income. Blue columns indicate predicted probabilities when controls are set to their means and respondent sexism and racism are set to their minimum values, and black columns indicate predicted probabilities when controls are set to their means and respondent sexism and racism are set to their maximum values.

Below are results replacing the two-item racism measure with the traditional four-item racial resentment measure:

One possibility is that these strong associations are flukes; but similar patterns appear for the racism items on the 2016 CCES (the 2016 CCES did not have sexism items).

If the strong associations above are not flukes, then I think three possibilities remain: [1] sexism and racism combine to be a powerful *cause* of environmental policy preferences among Whites, [2] this type of associational research design with these items cannot be used to infer causality generally speaking, and [3] this type of associational research design with these items cannot be used to infer causality about environmental policy preferences but could be used to infer causality about other outcome variables, such as approval of the way that Donald Trump is handling his job as president.

If you believe [1], please post in a comment below a theory about how sexism and racism cause substantial changes in these environmental policy preferences. If you believe [3], please post in a comment an explanation why this type of associational research design with these items can be used to make causal inferences for only certain outcome variables and, if possible, a way to determine for which outcome variables a causal inference could be made. If I have omitted a possibility, please also post a comment with that omitted possibility.

NOTES

Stata code.