| Popis: |
Empirical studies have shown that white racial attitudes tend to predict racial policy support. It has also been established that the relationship between whites' espoused racial tolerance and their support for ameliorative racial policies is imperfect, due to the principal-policy gap which characterized misalignment between individuals' espoused values for racial equity and their limited support for policies aimed at achieving those ends. Less consideration however, has been given to how the principal-policy gap changes over time. Using data from over 14,000 respondents who participated in the General Social Survey from 1994 through 2018, I show that the principal-policy gap is persistent, and that distances between principal and policy decline and expand over time. Using OLS regression models to analyze a sample of white adults, I find that the link between individuals' expressed liberal racial attitudes and their support for racial policies changed over the 24-year span. A noticeable narrowing of the principal-policy gap is also evident in the latter years of the sample. The reduction in the gap from 2014 through 2018 suggests that the influence of social movements like BLM may have been driving this trend. |
