Center for Research in Society and Politics

Los Angeles has a history of considerable racial and ethnic conflict, ranging from the “zoot suit riots” of 1943 through the Watts riots of 1965 and the so-called “Rodney King” rioting in 1992. Politics in Los Angeles has often reflected this intergroup conflict, from Sam Yorty’s mayoralty campaign against the black Tom Bradley, that many observers felt was laced with quasi-racist appeals, through the high-intensity contentions over busing for school integration in the 1970's and over illegal immigration in the 1990's, to the ethnic rivalries that surfaced in the 2001 mayoralty race between James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa.

At the end of World War II Los Angeles County had an overwhelmingly white population. That has changed over time, most dramatically in the last two decades. Now there is no majority ethnic group in Los Angeles County. The largest consists of Latinos, with about 41% of the total population, according to the 2000 Census. Trailing well behind are non-Hispanic whites, at 32%. True “minority” groups include Asian Americans (12%) and African Americans (10%). This combination of a history of ethnic and racial conflict in the area, and the sharply changing demographics that are bound to alter the social dynamics of ethnic relations in Los Angeles, led us to focus the 2001 Los Angeles County Social Survey on perceptions of and attitudes about ethnic and racial conflict.

Is it possible to explain all political behavior in terms of self-interest? If we interpret self-interest as narrow, direct and short-term, the answer is obviously no. Things that we might call culture, ideology, ideas and moral principles clearly affect individual choices, and, thereby, political outcomes. But inquiries into the the logic behind these other forces often bring us back to interest. Much behavior that appears at odds with self-interest can be “rationalized” by considering long time horizons and the complexities of social interaction. In acting against my short-term self-interest, I may be building a useful reputation, winning and maintaining allies, making credible commitments, or establishing a focal point. Recent game theoretic work has shown how patterns of behavior that we might attribute to culture (Kreps 1990, Fearon and Laitin, 1996), partisanship (Aldrich 1995), ideology (Bawn 1999) or ideas (Garret and Weingast 1993, Weingast 1995, Bates, de Figueiredo and Weingast 1998) can arise endogenously in models with no causal force other than self-interest. The seemingly non-interest based behavior arises as the result of long time horizons, uncertainty and complex social interaction.

The success of the rational choice paradigm in explaining seemingly non-interest-based behavior motivates my initial question. What are the limits of self-interest explanations? While this paper cannot offer a comprehensive answer, it explores a particular alternative to interest, moral principle. I will focus here on a case in which the role played by interest seems to be quite small, and the role played by moral principle seems quite large – the abolitionist movement in the United States. The seemingly straightforward claim that the abolitionist movement was motivated by principle begs many questions. Under what circumstances are people motivated by principle? When does principle override interest? Why is a given principle important to one person and not another? Does the “success” of a principle in motivating behavior depend on the logical force of its content, or simply on the social context in which it is invoked?

The argument developed here is that social context matters a lot. Specifically, in some social contexts, some individuals can benefit by taking modestly costly action in defense of a principle that has no direct link to their self-interest. They benefit because by defending the principle, they give a credible signal of their own trustworthiness. The idea that behavior contrary to one’s short-term self interest can act as an effective signal is not new to game theoretic political science. Nor is it novel to claim that abolitionism sprang from a particular vision of social order held by evangelical communities in the early-to-mid 19th century. This paper’s contribution is to show that this vision of social order created an unusual need for individuals to be able signal good intentions to their fellow community members.

This study argues that even as the American people declares themselves, in countless public opinion surveys, less concerned with foreign affairs in the Post-Cold War era than at any time since the end of World War II, they are nonetheless growing increasingly attentive to foreign policy crises. I develop a theory suggesting that this trend is attributable to a “direct marketing” revolution in television broadcasting, which has for many Americans increased the appeal of information about foreign crises. As evidence, I conduct two statistical investigations. The first examines the relationship between individual media consumption habits and attentiveness to three recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. The second compares public opinion trends during the three major post-World War II American uses of military force -- Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, to determine whether the relationships identified at the individual level can account for aggregate trends in public attentiveness. I find that the public has indeed grown increasingly attentive to foreign crises over the past half century, and that this increase is attributable, at least in part, to changes in the mass media, particularly television.

This paper is a preliminary consideration of slate mail. We provide some basic information about the nature and use of slate mail in California and about the policy debates that have surrounded it in the last decade or two.4 We then briefly describe a program of experimental research into the effects of slate mail and report and analyze in detail the results of one such experiment.

This study tests for long-term continuities in the politics of race. It uses a quasi-experimental method to examine the role of racial issues in presidential voting in the present era. It identifies two earlier historical eras in which it is generally agreed racial issues were a central point of partisan division in national politics: the immediately antebellum and civil rights periods. It uses presidential voting data to demonstrate continuity in the distribution of the vote across states between those two eras, and between both eras and the present. The pattern of the vote has been quite different in eras when race has not been a central national political issue. We argue that these data are consistent with the view that divisions over race continue to underlie partisan preferences to a significant degree in the present era.

This paper revisits the linked questions of attitudinal crystallization and generational formation in an attempt to nudge the understanding of these matters forward. Our goal, put most generally, is to bring ideas about the formation of political generations into an analysis of the long-term dynamics of attitude crystallization. Although scholars have quite often tried to trace the long-term development of political generations, and often employ comparison groups (e.g., Alwin, Cohen, and Newcomb 1991, Cole, Zucker, and Ostrove 1998, Elder 1974, Fendrich and Lovoy 1988, Jennings 1987, Markus 1979, Stewart, Settles, and Winter 1998), less common are analyses of attitudinal crystallization that bring ideas about political generations to bear. We do this in the paper in two ways.

First, our analysis distinguishes within an age-cohort between those who were politically engaged and those who were politically unengaged during their early adult, and presumably politically formative, years. The former resemble the "generational unit" Mannheim (1952) described far better than does the age-cohort as a whole. We explore the importance of this distinction to how attitudinal stability and constraint develop over time.

Second, we compare age cohorts to suggest how the crystallization process produces age-related differences in the response to political events. Age, in this analysis is treated as a marker both of political experience and of political generation. This effort demonstrates how the unfolding of political history can influence the extent to which attitudes crystallize within a political generation.

The party coalitions that emerged from the New Deal realignment were defined by race, nationality and ethnicity, religion, region, and social class. In the last decade, the "religious impulse" has become an increas-ingly important aspect of the party coalitions as Republican and Demo-cratic identifiers have become increasingly distinct in terms of their re-ligiosity and religious practice. The paper traces the increasing impor-tance of religiosity and social class as correlates of party identification and argues that the contemporary GOP has a support base that is highly similar to that of conventional Christian Democratic parties. It further suggests that the pattern of issue politics between the parties today is a result of this new cleavage structure.

The party coalitions that emerged from the New Deal realignment were defined by race, nationality and ethnicity, religion, region, and social class. In the last decade, the "religious impulse" has become an increas-ingly important aspect of the party coalitions as Republican and Demo-cratic identifiers have become increasingly distinct in terms of their re-ligiosity and religious practice. The paper traces the increasing impor-tance of religiosity and social class as correlates of party identification and argues that the contemporary GOP has a support base that is highly similar to that of conventional Christian Democratic parties. It further suggests that the pattern of issue politics between the parties today is a result of this new cleavage structure.

This paper examines two questions. First, how stable is religiosity over time? Second, how does religiosity affect the stability of attitudes over time? I begin by discussing several reasons why religiosity might help to stabilize attitudes. Then, drawing on the 1992-94-96 National Election Study panel, I examine the stability of religious tradition, religious movement identification, church attendance, view of scripture, and the overall importance of religion. For the most part, these indicators are found to be fairly stable, though not uniformly so. I then examine the effect of religiosity on the stability of attitudes towards abortion. Religiosity is found to have no significant impact. I conclude by speculating on reasons why.

We address the role of racial antagonism in whites’ opposition to racially-targeted policies. The data come from four surveys selected for their unusually rich measurement of both policy preferences and other racial attitudes: the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies, the 1994 General Social Survey, and the 1995 Los Angeles County Social Survey. They indicate that such opposition is more strongly rooted in racial antagonism than in non-racial conservatism, that whites tend to respond to quite different racial policies in similar fashion, that racial attitudes affect evaluations of black and ethnocentric white presidential candidates, and that their effects are just as strong among college graduates as among those with no college education. Second, we present evidence that symbolic racism is consistently more powerful than older forms of racial antagonism, and its greater strength does not diminish with controls on non-racial ideology, partisanship, and values. The origins of symbolic racism lie partly in both anti-black antagonism and non-racial conservative attitudes and values, and so mediates their effects on policy preferences, but it explains substantial additional variance by itself, suggesting that it does represent a new form of racism independent of older racial and political attitudes. The findings are each replicated several times with different measures, in different surveys conducted at different times. We also provide new evidence in response to earlier critiques of research on symbolic racism.