David Sears, Ph.D. - US grants

Recent increases in ethnic diversity on college campuses have led to increases in intergroup tensions and concomitant shifts toward forms of education that positively embrace multiethnic and multicultural perspectives. Although it is assumed that such multicultural education will foster harmonious relations among different ethnic groups at the university and in the broader society at large, this assumption has yet to be empirically tested in any rigorous manner. This project aims to achieve a process-oriented understanding of the ways in which a multicultural educational environment influences the development of intergroup attitudes and behaviors over the college years. Gaining a satisfactory understanding of the process by which the educational experience influences intergroup attitudes and behaviors would help answer the more general question of whether or not a multicultural educational experience actually increases or decreases intergroup tension. Several university experiences will be explored, including: a) the formal contents of course curricula; b) the informal and university sponsored extra-curricular activities; c) membership in various types of student organizations (e.g., fraternities, sororities, minority student organizations, and support groups); d) experience with conflict resolution programs; and e) dormitory living arrangements. Specific questions to be addressed include whether or not "ethnic studies" courses (e.g., African-American history) and membership in "ethnic" student organizations (e.g., African-American, Chinese-American student clubs) actually exacerbate or attenuate ethnic conflict and students' willingness to interact with people from other ethnic and racial groups.

These issues will be addressed by use of a longitudinal study of the freshman class admitted to UCLA in the fall of 1996 (approximately 2,000 students). The students have been interviewed once a year since their time of entry, and interviews will continue once a year until the students graduate (most of the students are expected to graduate in the spring of 2001). Measures were taken of students' baseline intergroup attitudes, behaviors, and expectations of the university environment before their entry into college (Summer 1996), and three additional waves of data concerning these attitudes, behaviors, and university activities have been collected.

Because of its high degree of ethnic diversity, the UCLA campus offers a unique opportunity to study the institutional factors that both facilitate and undermine the degree to which students engage in positive interactions with members of different ethnic groups. The knowledge gained from this unique panel study is hoped to facilitate the development of programs and structures that will enable our highly multiethnic society to continue to function in a constructive and productive manner in the future.

This project examines whether the polarization of American politics by race and racial attitudes continues or has become irrelevant to citizen's political evaluations. In particular, four specific areas are examined to advance our understanding of racial dyanics in American politics. These include the impact of racial attitudes on evaluations of the president, the potential spillover of racial attitudes on issues seen as related to the president, the possible reorganization of partisan politics around attitudes toward outgroups, and the the president's effect on racial attitudes. Race is probably the most visceral issue in American public life. As such, increased polarization of the electorate along the lines of race and racial attitudes would likely make it more difficult to achieve common ground on public policy. Understaning if and how racial attitudes have changed over time will help with our understanding of how to achieve common ground on public policy.

The research design of re-interviewing at least 3000 respondents from the 2007-2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) in the fall of 2010 and the spring of 2011 is singulary situated to capture these dynamics in American politics. Because the original CCAP contained excellent meausures of racial and ethnocentric attitudes before the 2008 election, this research can determine how these attitudes continute to affect assessments of the president as well as how his presidency may be influencing underlying belifies about outgroups. Similarly, this research can determine how the impact of racial dispositions on issue positions and party identification changed since 2008 without having to worry about the respondents' underlying attitudes changing in order to rationalize their partisanship and policy preferences. Finally the large sample size allows us to separately assess political changes amongst subgroups like African-Americans, Latinos and first-time voters who figure to become increasingly important in the years ahead.

The growing organization of partisan politics by racial attitudes suggested by these results could have important policy ramifications. Race is probably the most visceral issue in American public life. As such, increased polarization of the electorate along the lines of racial attitudes would likely make the contemporary political discourse even more vitriolic than the already rancorous atmospheres under Presidents Clinton and Bush. Such a racialized environment would potentially make it more difficult to achieve common ground on public policy in the Age of Obama. That is a major reason why the last decade has witnessed a proliferation of research demonstrating that implicit racial communications can make racial attitudes more important in subsequent decision making (see Mendelberg 2008 for a review). Multiple studies, in fact, show that mass communications can make racial attitudes a more central ingredient of opinions about ostensibly non-racial policies such as welfare, crime and Social Security (Gilens 1999; Mendelberg 2001; Hurwitz and Peffley 1997; Winter 2008), as well as evaluations of presidential candidates in all-white contests (Mendelberg 2001; Valentino, Hutchings and White 2002). Research from the 2008 campaign significantly builds upon this existing knowledge by showing that merely situating a person or policy in opposition or accordance with Barack Obama made racial attitudes a much more important ingredient of public evaluations of these objects than they were beforehand (Tesler and Sears, forthcoming). This research project attempts to provide further evidence for this Obama-induced racialization by pinpointing the extent that health care opinions are influenced by racial attitudes and determining Obama?s causal role in racializing public opinion about a policy that has no manifest racial content.