Participant estimates of race and gender bias in Bateson 2020 "Strategic Discrimination"

Participants in studies reported on in Regina Bateson's 2020 Perspectives on Politics article "Strategic Discrimination" were asked to indicate the percentage of other Americans that the participant thought would not vote for a woman for president and the percentage of other Americans that the participant thought would not vote for a black person for president.

Bateson 2020 Figure 1 reports that, in the nationally representative Study 1 sample, mean participant estimates were that 47% of other Americans would not vote for a woman for president and that 42% of other Americans would not vote for a black person for president. I was interested in the distribution of responses, so I plotted in the histograms below participant estimates to these items, using the Bateson 2020 data for Study 1.

This first set of histograms is for all participants:

This second set of histograms is for only participants who passed the attention check:

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I was also interested in estimates from participsnts with a graduate degree, given that so many people in political science have a graduate degree. Bateson 2020 Appendix Table 1.33 indicates that, among participants with a graduate degree, estimates were that 58.3% of other Americans would not vote for a woman for president and that 56.6% of other Americans would not vote for a black person for president.

But these estimates differ depending on whether the participant correctly responded to the attention check item: for the item about the percentage of other Americans who would not vote for a woman for president, the mean estimate was 47% [42, 52] for the 84 graduate degree participants who correctly responded to the attention check and was 68% [63, 73] for the 97 graduate degree participants who did not correctly respond to the attention check; for the item about the percentage of other Americans who would not vote for a black person for president, respective estimates were 44% [39, 49] and 67% [62, 73].

Participants who reported having a graduate degree were 20 percentage points more likely to fail the attention check than participants who did not report having a graduate degree, p<0.001.

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These data were collected in May 2019, after Barack Obama had been elected president twice and after Hillary Clinton won the popular vote for president, and each aforementioned mean estimate seems to be a substantial overestimate of discrimination against women presidential candidates and Black presidential candidates, compared to point estimates from relevant list experiments reported in Carmines and Schmidt 2020 and compared to point estimates from list experiments and direct questions cited in Bateson 2020 footnote 8.

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NOTES

1. Stata code for my analysis.

2. R code for the first histogram.