Partisanship, White Racial Resentment, and State Support for Higher Education

ABSTRACT

Dominant explanations of state higher education policy tend to emphasize economic models that foreground the business cycle or political approaches that cast ideology as fairly fixed. We instead foreground changing social context to conceptualize state appropriations as predicted not only by these classic explanations, but also by the interplay of racial representation and political party control. Drawing on the racial backlash hypothesis and quantitative analyses, we show that party control of state government and racial representation in higher education jointly explain state appropriations. Unified Republican governments spent more than Democratic or divided governments when White students were overrepresented. Republicans spent less otherwise. These results suggest that partisan attitudes toward racial representation in higher education may shape state government support for colleges and universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of higher education
• political partisanship
• racial representation in higher education
• White racial resentment
• state appropriations for higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Some scholars have disputed whether data from a single election can support such weighty interpretations. It is worth nothing, however, that these critiques have not dismissed the role of race in the Republican Party, but rather have argued that it is difficult to disentangle race from other factors using existing evidence (Morgan, 2018).

2. The most common such technique, a likelihood-ratio text, is unavailable in models such as ours that employ clustered standard errors to address serial correlation. We therefore rely upon a test of joint significance for the three variables included in the interaction term (Brambor et al., 2006).

3. As noted in “robustness checks and limitation,” we limit interpretation to the range of −3 to 3 on the variable of White overrepresentation. This avoids extending our inferences beyond the region that contains the majority of observed data. State-years that fall outside this range are unusual (see Figure 4), and their behavior may not be explained particularly well by our model.