They’re all out to get me! Assessing inter-group competition among multiple populations

ABSTRACT

With the changing demography of the United States, there has been a significant growth in the literature focused on inter-group attitudes. While this has advanced our understanding of how pervasive negative inter-group attitudes are among racial and ethnic populations, little work has been able to explore these attitudes across multiple populations. This is a significant drawback, as it prevents the ability to establish any frame of reference when examining any specific relationship among populations under study. Drawing on the 2008 Collaborative Multiracial Political Study (CMPS), we examine perceptions of both intra- and inter-group competition among Latinos, Blacks, Asian Americans, and Whites. Our research design makes four important contributions to the literature: (1) we examine the correlation between perceptions of competition across multiple racial groups simultaneously; (2) we include a measure of internal-competition to test whether perceptions of competition with one’s own group lead to higher levels of perceived competition with outside groups; (3) we test the relative impact of real and perceived neighborhood diversity on perceptions of competition; and finally, (4) we examine the relationship between perceived competition and other racial attitudes to gain a better understanding of whether perceptions of competition should be interpreted as evidence of inter-group tension or conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial politics
• intergroup conflict
• public opinion
• political psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Within this larger literature, scholars have explored how the attitudes of White’s toward Blacks can influence their political attitudes and evaluation of Black candidates (Sears, Citrin, and Kosterman 1987; Knuckey and Orey 2000; Moskowitz and Stroh 1994; Tate 2003; Gay 2002)

2 This survey has a sample consisting of Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Boston.

3 The Asian American sample includes the six largest national origin groups: Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese.

4 States were identified at the time of the sample frame design as battleground, in September 2008.

5 A cell phone only sample was not conducted, however some registered voters have provided their cell phone number on the voter registration record and those numbers were eligible to be dialed.

6 We rely on Tables 2 and 6 from the 2008 CPS, which can be found here: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/voting/cps2008.html

7 The response rate for all interviews, completed, partial, or of unknown eligibility was 11.4%. This was arrived at by dividing the number of complete interviews by the total of all interviews, including attempted and incomplete. The interview length was 24.8 min.

8 For each group, the top answer was living in a neighborhood of mostly their same racial group, followed by living in a “mixed” neighborhood, followed by living in a White neighborhood. Very few minorities reported living in a neighborhood with a majority of a different minority group. For example, 3% of Blacks reported living in a majority Latino neighborhood, and likewise, 3% of Latinos live in a majority Black neighborhood. For ease of comparison, we considered all those living in such neighborhoods to be in “mixed race” neighborhoods.

9 We run our models without this variable and have the same general findings we present in the article.

10 Overall, across the four racial groups 11–15 percent of survey participants answered don’t know or refused to answer the questions on inter-racial competition.

11 For example, the residuals of the predicted values for the three out-group regressions have an average interitem covariance of 1.33, and scale reliability of .765 for Latino respondents, an interitem covariance of 1.47, and scale reliability of .796 for Asian respondents, an interitem covariance of 1.28, and scale reliability of .739 for Black respondents, and an interitem covariance of 1.45, and scale reliability of .795 for Whites. Pairwise correlations are reported in Appendix 2.

12 Moving each independent variable from its minimum to maximum value, Figure 2 reports the overall change in the unstandardized regression coefficient for a covariate.

13 We chose to omit a variable on church membership from the final models because most respondents reported either attending a same-race church, or one that was “mixed/diverse”. Since social contact theory is premised on interactions with members of other racial groups, we could not interpret what was meant by the “mixed/diverse” option on the CMPS in the context of the four racial groups included in our models. Additionally, unlike the neighborhood variables, for which we have measures of both perceived and actual diversity, the question on church membership does not allow us to assess whether one’s church is actually diverse or simply perceived to be so. We did look at the effect that attending a same-race church had on perceptions of competition, which was significant for Asian respondents, decreasing perceptions of competition with all other groups. This also decreased perceptions of competition with Latinos for Whites. We feel this merits more analysis but is beyond the scope of our paper.

14 As is reflected in the larger size of the coefficients going from some college to being a college graduate.

15 Again, unfortunately we only had two questions on Blacks and Latinos in the study. Future iterations would be improved by including a longer battery of questions along the lines of the Symbolic Racism Scale.