Denial of racial inequality and skepticism about the legitimacy of elections
The recent Rhodes et al 2022 Monkey Cage post indicated that:
...as [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] would have predicted, those who deny the existence of racial inequality are also those who are most willing to reject the legitimacy of a democratic election and condone serious violations of democratic norms.
Regarding this inference about the legitimacy of a democratic election, Rhodes et al 2022 reported results for an item that measured perceptions about the legitimacy of Joe Biden's election as president in 2020. But a potential confound is that reported perceptions of the legitimacy of the U.S. presidential election in 2020 are due to who won that election and are not about elections per se. One way to address this confound is to use a measure of reported perceptions of the legitimacy of the U.S. presidential election *in 2016*, which Donald Trump won.
I checked data from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group VOTER survey for responses to the items below, which can help address this confound:
[from 2016 and 2020] Over the past few years, Blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
[from 2016] How confident are you that the votes in the 2016 election across the country were accurately counted?
[from 2020] How confident are you that votes across the United States were counted as voters intended in the elections this November?
Results are below:
The dark columns are for respondents who strongly disagreed that Blacks have gotten less than they deserve, so that these respondents can plausibly be described as denying the existence of unfair racial inequality. The light columns are for respondents who strongly agreed that Blacks have gotten less than they deserve, so that these respondents can plausibly be described as most strongly asserting the existence of unfair racial inequality.
Comparison of the 2020 column for "strongly disagree" to the 2020 column for "strongly agree" suggests that, as expected based on Rhodes et al 2022, skepticism about votes in 2020 being counted accurately was more common among respondents who most strongly denied the existence of unfair racial inequality than among respondents who most strongly asserted the existence of unfair racial inequality.
But comparison of the 2016 column for "strongly disagree" to the 2016 column for "strongly agree" suggests that the general phrasing of "those who deny the existence of racial inequality are also those who are most willing to reject the legitimacy of a democratic election" does not hold for every election, such as the presidential election immediately prior to the election that was the focus of the relevant item in Rhodes et al 2022.
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NOTE
1. Data source. Stata do file. Stata output. Code for the R plot.
This is one of the most retarded studies I've ever seen, and shows how little you actually understand the people you are studying, you might have well used country music ownership, gun ownership, or any other number of correlates.
Perhaps the reason why people thought that the election was manipulated was because they perceived irregularities. I say that as a person who was involved with election litigation research in the 2020 election, which resulted in a court settlement by the State of Pennsylvania admitting that they had numerous dead people voting, despite their claims that they automatically such people from the voter rolls.
Hi Benjamin. I'm not sure of your objection: my post didn't make claims of causality or claims about whether any of the responses were correct.
If your argument is that there is sufficient evidence to justify not being confident about the vote counting in 2020, then it might be worth considering whether there is sufficient evidence to justify not being confident about the vote counting in 2016. It might be possible to justify different levels of confidence across the elections, but I think that the correctness of the responses is irrelevant to the point of my post, which is that claims about perceptions of the legitimacy of elections in general should involve perceptions about more than one election.